Set Up! or Framed! might be better titles than Railroaded! While it's true that the police pursue their suspect (Ed Kelly) with undue alacrity, it's also true that they're only following a trail of maliciously planted evidence. And an odd feature of the movie is that Kelly remains almost an incidental character (not even appearing in the credits); the focus stays on the police and the real behind-the-scenes villain.
Brash blonde Jane Randolph operates a little beauty salon that's really a front for a back-room book. One night a couple of masked robbers knock it over, but things go wrong: A beat cop is killed, and one of the gunmen (Keefe Brasselle) takes a bullet. Soon detective Hugh Beaumont knocks on Kelly's door, led there by the boy's monogrammed navy scarf, a sighting of his van at the scene, and a description provided by Randolph. Even Brasselle, bandaged up like the Invisible Man, names Kelly in deathbed testimony.
The only one who believes his innocence is his sister (Sheila Ryan). Luckily, Beaumont knows her from the old neighborhood and still is a bit sweet on her. Unluckily, so is the man who set up her brother (John Ireland) as part of a coverup to swindle the head of the syndicate both he and Randolph work for. Little by little, the craftily stitched-together ruse starts to pull apart at the seams, and the hotheaded Ireland grows more reckless and violent...
Directed by Anthony Mann just before his collaboration with cinematographer John Alton took his work to a new plateau, Railroaded! displays some of his trademark tricks (a taut story line; swift and unexpected burst of violence; shadows used not merely as mood but visual metaphors).
And Ireland gets not only top billing but one of his best roles. When he's not slapping around Randolph for her sloppy drinking (in the grand tradition of alcoholic molls like Claire Trevor in Key Largo and Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat), he's fetishistically perfuming his bullets. He's quite the sex-equals-violence kind of guy; when Randolph and Ryan get into a hair-pulling tussle, he watches from an alcove with a nasty smirk on his face, and his gun barrel unconsciously traces the action. It's as if it's deciding who will be the lucky recipient of its payload.
