The Man From Cairo (1953)

Just before the Nazis invaded France, it’s government secreted their billions in gold reserves to North Africa and divided it up into shipments to keep it safe. One such shipment - worth some $100,000,000 went missing and despite years of searching, nobody has ever found it. Well now it’s the turn of “Canelli” (George Raft) to turn his hand at detective work. That’s not by choice, though. He’s just a tourist having an holiday, but when he is the victim of a mistaken identity that puts him square in the middle of an internecine international plot, he’s in it up to his neck and the only way he can stay safe it to find the loot himself. Raft is in his element here, and there are plenty of crooked characters and espionage elements to the plot, but there’s still something just a bit too join-the-dots and repetitive about the whole thing and Gianna Maria Canale lacks any fizz as the glamorous “Lorraine” whom he meets and shares his adventure with. The denouement finds us on a train and that and the last five minutes do enliven the film a little, but it’s still a fairly mundane meander lacking in much menace that gets us there. It’s watchable, and Raft does enough, but you’ll never recall it.