As directed by Warner’s prolific craftsman Lloyd Bacon, Invisible Stripes is a talky, if fast-moving, B-crime picture, starring tough man George Raft as a gangster unable to go straight after returning home from prison.
Reliable contract director Lloyd Bacon helmed Invisible Stripes, a typical Warner crime film, starring George Raft as a gangster unable to go straight after returning home from prison.
The movie also features the young William Holden, Jane Bryan and Humphrey Bogart (before he became a star).
The screenplay by Warren Duff was based on the novel of the same title by Warden Lewis E. Lawes, a fervent crusader for prison reform.
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Bogart’s Chuck Martin represents the lure of perverse criminality in Invisible Stripes, a struggling ex-con who falls back into a life of crime.
The movie aims to explore the lives of men released from prison, but the plot wraps up suddenly and violently.
Intertextuality
Invisible Stripes features a scene where the gangsters are seen leaving a movie theater, which is playing Bogart’s previous work, You Can’t Get Away with Murder.
The movie is best known today for featuring the young William Holden in his second dramatic role (after “Golden Boy”), and Humphrey Bogart just a year before becoming a major star (in Huston’s “The Maltese Falcon”).
Warren Duff’s script was based on the novel of the same name by Warden Lewis E. Lawes, a crusader for prison reform.
Raft plays Cliff Taylor an ex-con who wants to go straight, but after being released from prison on parole, he finds it hard to hold onto a job due to his criminal past.
Holden is Cliff’s younger brother, Tim, an honest guy who cannot afford to marry girlfriend Peggy (Jane Bryan) and thus disillusioned about his prospects in life.
Afraid that Tim might end up a criminal just like himself, Cliff decides to help him get the money to settle down. Lying to his family that he works as a salesman, he in fact contacts ex-fellow convict Charles Martin (Bogart) in organizing some robberies. Cliff then invests the money in buying a garage for his brother.
After a failed robbery, Martin hides in Tim’s garage, and the police arrests him. Cliff manages to exonerate his brother from charges, forcing Tim to identify and testify against the robbers. In the last scene Cliff tells Martin to escape before getting caught, but Martin’s pals realize their plan and kill both of them.
George Raft and Bogart made another film together the following year, Raoul Walsh’s They Drive By Night, again starring Raft with Bogart in a secondary role and billed fourth, after Raft, Ann Sheridan, and Ida Lupino.
Bogart and Holden worked together again 15 years later in Billy Wilder’s romantic melodrama, Sabrina, except that this time Holden was billed under Bogart and Audrey Hepburn.
This tale of an ex-con’s tribulations in the outside world is said to inspire Ulu Grosbard’s 1978 film, Straight Time, starring Dustin Hoffman.
Credits:
Directed by Lloyd Bacon
Written by Jonathan Finn, screenplay by Warren Duff, based on Invisible Stripes, 1938 novel by Lewis E. Lawes
Produced by Hal B. Wallis, Jack L. Warner
Humphrey Bogart
Cinematography Ernest Haller
Edited by James Gibbon
Music by Heinz Roemheld
Production company: First National Pictures
Distributed by Warner Bros.
Release date: December 30, 1939
Running time: 81 minutes
Budget $500,000
