Want to know the best George Raft movies? How about the worst George Raft movies? Curious about George Raft box office grosses or which George Raft movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which George Raft movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.
George Raft (1901-1980) was an American actor. Raft was well known for his portrayals of gangsters in crime melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s. Raft’s IMDb page shows 86 acting credits from 1929 to 1980. This page will rank 61 George Raft movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Television shows, shorts, cameos, movies that were not released in North American and a handful of his movies that we could not find box office on, were not included in the rankings. This was requested by Søren, Bob and Dee….sorry it took so long to complete.
George Raft Movies Ranked In Chronological Order With Ultimate Movie Rankings Score (1 to 5 UMR Tickets) *Best combo of box office, reviews and awards.
George Raft Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table
The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.
- Sort George Raft movies by his co-stars
- Sort George Raft movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost.
- Sort George Raft movies by yearly domestic box office rank
- Sort George Raft movies how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and how many Oscar® wins each George Raft movie received.
- SortGeorge Raft movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score. UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
Possibly Interesting Facts About George Raft
1. George Ranft was born in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City in 1901…though there are some reports that he was born in 1895.
2. George Raft’s mother taught him how to dance as a child. Winning a Charleston dance competition was his big break. Raft toured with his dancing and helped popularise the tango in Paris, Vienna, Rome, London and New York
3. Fred Astaire on George Raft’s dancing…..”Raft was a lightning-fast dancer and did the fastest Charleston I ever saw.”
4. George Raft’s dancing skills took him to Broadway and then to movies. His first screen role was playing a dancer in 1929’s Queen of the Nightclubs (lost film).
5. 1932’s Scarface made George Raft a star. Paul Muni was the star but George Raft’s coin tossing Guino Rinaldo caught the public’s eye.
6. George Raft was a close friend of notorious gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel since their childhood in New York. Siegel actually lived at Raft’s home in Hollywood for a time while trying to make inroads for organized crime within the movie colony.
7. George Raft turned down the roles of Roy “Mad Dog” Earle in High Sierra (1941) and Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (1941) These parts were picked up by Humphrey Bogart, and each one was essential in making Bogart a superstar.
8. George Raft played himself in ten films: Broadway (1942), Stage Door Canteen (1943), We Will All Go to Paris (1950), The Ladies Man (1961), The Patsy (1964), Casino Royale (1967), Silent Treatment (1968), The Great Sex War (1969), Deadhead Miles (1972) and Sextette (1977).
9. George Raft married Grace Mulrooney in 1923. The pair separated soon thereafter, but the devoutly Catholic Mulrooney refused to grant a divorce, and Raft remained married to her, and continued to support her, until her death in 1970. A romantic figure in Hollywood, Raft had love affairs with Betty Grable, Marlene Dietrich, Tallulah Bankhead, Carole Lombard, and Mae West. He stated publicly that he wanted to marry Norma Shearer, with whom he had a long romance, but his wife’s refusal to allow a divorce eventually caused Shearer to end the affair.
10. Check out George Raft ‘s career compared to current and classic actors. Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.
If you do a comment….please ignore the email address and website section.
George Raft, Hollywood gangster, good subject.
It looks like he would have preferred dancing to shooting people on screen but he was so effective as a gangster he was quickly typecast.
I’ve seen just 8 of the 62 films on the screen, less than I thought. My favorites – Some Like it Hot, Scarface and Ocean’s Eleven.
Joe : “We won’t breathe a word!”
Spats Colombo : “You won’t breathe nothin’ – not even air.”
Some like it Hot had to be no.1, still one of my all time favorite comedies. And a box office hit too!
Good stuff Bruce. Vote Up!
Hey Steve….thanks for the tally, comment and feedback on George Raft. I agree…seems dancing was in his blood, while acting was merely a way to make money. That is low compared to Flora….but pretty good when looking at everybody else’s tallies. I have seen all of your favorites…..I do not like Some Like It Hot nearly as much as you….I just do not find “the greatest comedy ever made” very funny. Granted Raft is really good in the movie. Good stuff as always.
In 1946/7 George had a lot of bad publicity because of his friendship with the gangster Bugsy Siegel and film historians chart the decline in Raft’s career as starting in the late forties with for example the 1949 Outpost in Morocco disappointing at the box office [54% rating from IMDB] and being the harbinger of a string of Raft stand-alone outright flops.
Bruce’s stats reflect that: WH couldn’t even pick up the dismal Outpost in Morocco, and 4 other films between 1949 and 52 have derisory adjusted domestic grosses ranging from about $11.5 million to 51 million – Red Light, Johnny Allegro, A Dangerous Profession and Loan Shark, after which it was largely all supporting roles for Raft, 1953’s The Man from Cairo [not covered above] being the last flick in which he got top billing. In the 1960s Britain’s then Home Secretary James Callaghan threw Raft out of the United Kingdom because of his alleged gangster and underworld links.
George’s net worth on death in 1980 is reported as $1 million, equal to about $3.2 million in today’s money according to US Bureau of Lab Stats. Ironically given how he had once lorded it over Bogie in terms of stardom George’s last role was a small part in a 1980 film called The Man with Bogart’s Face, not covered above. It stars Robert Sacchi and Yvonne DeCarlo and is about a guy with a Bogie obsession who gets plastic surgery to make himself look like Humph.
I have often thought -and this is serious and not one of my usual lame jokes – that in at least the photos which I’ve seen on this site The Work Horse and Joel Hirschhorn look a bit like each other, but I’m not alleging anything! Anyway this most welcome Raft profile is “Voted Up” – and very highly! Thanks Bruce for at last apparently squaring the classic ear mega star circle for me.
Hey Bob….Part 2
His relationship with Bugsy probably made lots of people nervous. I did not read that about Home Secretary James Callaghan throwing him out of England….good information.
His early 1930s movies rely on the Harrison Reports for many of his movies….as most of those movies came from Paramount…which is horrible when researching their movies from the classic….I went and got my massive Paramount book….and it offered no information what so ever….not even sure why I bothered dragging it downstairs.
I wanted to include The Man With Bogart’s Face….but I struck out on that movie too when it comes to box office. Hmm…me and Joel looking alike…I don’t see that at all….but it would be cool to be related to a 2 time Oscar winner mega star….lol.
HI BRUCE: Thanks for the feedback. I gather that Raft was under constant scrutiny by the FBI and IRS for the likes of illegal gambling connections and personal tax evasion. George was actually with Bugsy when the latter was arrested for bookmaking. In 1938 Raft was interviewed by the FBI about his knowledge of Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro and Louis “Lepke” Buchalter who in their partnership established the Mafia hit squad Murder Inc.
There is a montage of Master photos on IMDB and of course I’ve seen some of you on this site and I do truly detect a likeness between you and the younger Hirsch.
Including real film stars names in the titles of movies is often seen as too gimmicky for a film to be truly popular. A drama about Sinatra’s life was released as a TV movie; “Always Brando” barely got a distribution on release; and the full-length documentary “Listen to Me Marlon” had limited art house circulation. Burt Lancaster once quipped about the relatively low attendances at one of his faves among his own movies, Atlantic City “The only ones who went to see it were myself and Kirk Douglas’ family!” I think that the only ones who went to see Listen to Me Marlon were maybe me and the surviving relatives of Joel Hirschhorn!
Certainly though if they made The Man with Brando’s Face and someone then told me that I looked like him I would (1) thank the person for astute observation (2) immediately write to you and make you aware of the situation on your Next Brando page.
However I have of course seen on the net your escapades on the Philly Steps, so perhaps you want me to tell you that you look like Sly. The younger Joel though seems to have been a real good-looking guy and in the IMDB montage he gave the impression butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth [you know: the Iron fist in the velvet glove] and I don’t make up resemblances just to flatter someone. Indeed when I first saw you charging up those steps I shouted out “Hey W o Bob – C’mere to you see this! There’s a guy here who thinks he’s Randy Scott or Joel McCrea!”
Hey Bob…glad you liked the feedback…I showed WoC some of Joel’s photos (there are actually not many of them out there) and she does not see it all either. We were actually near those Rocky steps today….but did not get the chance to take on the steps…..but we did see Benjamin Franklin’s grave site….and a landmark celebrating W.C. Fields. Good stuff as always.
HI BRUCE It’s perfectly understandable: W o C is in denial about seeing the likeness between Master and Pupil – and who can blame her? As Walter Huston said at the end of 1936’s Dodsworth “Love has to stop somewhere short of madness!”
Interesting stuff about Benji and W.C. I’ve mentioned before the true story of how when he died, supporting actor Wallace Ford had arranged to be inscribed on his own tombstone “Here lies Wallace Ford. Top billing at last.” However one middle of the night vandals broke into the graveyard and ghoulishly defaced the stone with in larger letters the inscription above Wallace’s name – CLARK GABLE!
Hey Bob…eventually…I have photos that go with the trip….some are movie related of cours. Good info on Wallace Ford…..funny tombstones seem like the way to go…I am trying to figure out what I want on mine. Good stuff.
Warner Bros was known in the 30s for its stable of gangster stars the, leading exponents of the genre including Cagney, Robinson, Raft and Bogie. Though up until 1941 Bogie was “just another guy around here” always in support of those other three. The pop song My Baby in the 1950s summed up Bogie’s pre-1941 plight “My Baby’s a Brando fan. Rock Hudson’s an Also Ran.”
However in the 1960s Bob Dylan wrote and sang “The slow one now will later be fast. Cause the time they are a changing,” and so it was that Bogie became not just a greater star than Raft but also than Robinson and Cagney, though Raft is the only one of the quartet who did not get a placing in AFI’s 25 Greatest Male Legends of All Time.
Nonetheless despite it all being a great mystery to The Master in his 1983 book Raft was still one of the biggest legends of the classic era of movies and for example in 1932’s Night after Night was billed above even Mae West who in turn was billed above Archibald Alexander Leach in the 2 films she made with HIM. I therefore welcome this Cogerson new page [especially as I informally requested it on a couple of occasions!].
In the way that Sherlock Holmes’ “dog that DIDN’T bark in the night” bothered Holmes the absence of a Raft page has always irritated me because by my reckoning Raft was the only classic era megastar that hadn’t been given a Cogerson page, a situation which WH has now rectified. He should be congratulated on that because Raft was a Paramount star and box office stats for their old movies can be hard to come by, particularly as in George’s case some 40 of his movies in the above tables were not mega hits but were so routine that they didn’t even crash the Magical Cogerson 100 Million barrier. “—-he made more mediocre pictures than any other actor of his stature.” [The Master]
Hey Bob…thanks for the comments on George Raft. This is for part 1.
I had never heard of My Baby’s a Brando fan. Rock Hudson’s an Also Ran……sounds interesting…your knowledge of trivia in all media is truly impressive.
I agree with you and Bob Dylan….it was a slow start for Bogie….but in the end….he stands tall among the greatest legends of all-time.
Well…I am glad I was finally able to get a George Raft page completed per your request….I have added your name to the text of the page with Dee and Soren.
Joel did not rate George’s career very high…..his average star rating per movie is pretty low…even Wayne and Brando top him….lol.
Thanks for sharing Joel’s words on the website…always good to see you reading that duct taped book….which makes me wonder how it is holding up for you…..it was close to being kindling when I sent it to you. Good feedback as always.