after seeing 'souls at sea' (1937)...
it's a shame *not* to see george raft's great acting chops on display -- again; it's a night and day difference.
(i guess once he hit it big, he phoned it in?)
I don't think he phoned it in so much as he wasn't a very good actor outside a very limited type of role. I just watched this on TCM and liked it a lot, Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation brought up a good point afterwards: Raft turned down the roles of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon (because he didn't trust first-time director John Huston, D'oh!), Rick in Casablanca and Walter Neff in Double Indemnity. Raft knew what worked for his very limited skills and he managed to carve out a nice career.
sharebut this is my point.
in "souls at sea" (1937) his acting range was not from "A to A-minus", as muller put it -- it was from "A to Z... and back!" -- then again "souls at sea" is not noir, and probably well out of muller's wheelhouse.
no matter -- muller nailed it with, "by this point, raft was becoming a caricature of himself."