This movie starts off quite excitingly with arresting camera movement, atmospheric photography, intriguing situations, odd characters and elliptical dialogue. Mind you, the dialogue doesn't always work. The attempts to be flippant and yet at the same time stress an underlying menace and tension, don't always work, but it's a game attempt to do something a bit out of the ordinary. One of the chief problems lies in the acting: Edward Ellis and Harold Huber are magnificent but the stooges provided for them cannot come up to their level. This is particularly true of Joseph Crehan who is most unconvincing as a corrupt newspaper editor. The way Crehan plays him makes you wonder how an idiot like that could land a job running a hot dog stall, let alone a newspaper. Due to the dictates of budget and speed, director John H. Auer is forced to work with second-rate character actors unwilling or unable to bring out the depths in their lines. Admittedly, nothing could rescue the later stages of the movie when the script delivers a disappointing climax so that Wayne can get the girl. Still, Huber's death is arrestingly staged. Wayne plays with a light romantic charm that is reasonably appealing, despite the fact that it is often at odds with the atmosphere. If Wayne meant it as a contrast, his efforts don't quite come off. However, Miss Dee makes a fetching heroine, though Ward Bond seems a little out of character as the lunatic brother. All told, some good direction by Auer helps this often otherwise routine town-in-the-grip-of-the-crime-syndicate melodrama. U.K. release title: Citadel of Crime. Also known by its USA reissue title: Wheel of Fortune.

Lynn Hollister, a small-town lawyer, travels to the nearby big city on business connected with the death of his friend Johnny. (Yes, Lynn is a man despite the feminine-sounding Christian name. Were the scriptwriters trying to make a snide reference to the fact that John Wayne's birth name was "Marion"?) Hollister at first believes Johnny's death to have been an accident, but soon realises that Johnny was murdered. Further investigations reveal a web of corruption, criminality and election rigging connected to Boss Cameron, the leading light in city 's political machine.That sounds like the plot of a gritty crime thriller, possibly made in the film noir style which was starting to become popular in 1941. It isn't. "A Man Betrayed", despite its theme, is more like a light romantic comedy than a crime drama. Hollister falls in love with Cameron's attractive daughter Sabra, and the film then concentrates as much on their resulting romance as on the suspense elements.This film might just have worked if it had been made as a straightforward serious drama. One reviewer states that John Wayne is not at all believable as a lawyer, but he couldn't play a cowboy in every movie, and a tough crusading lawyer taking on the forces of organised crime would probably have been well within his compass. Where I do agree with that reviewer is when he says that Wayne was no Cary Grant impersonator. Romantic comedy just wasn't up his street. One of the weaknesses of the studio system is that actors could be required to play any part their bosses demanded of them, regardless of whether it was up their street or not, and as Wayne was one of the few major stars working for Republic Pictures they doubtless wanted to get as much mileage out of him as they could.That said, not even Cary Grant himself could have made "A Man Betrayed" work as a comedy. That's not a reflection on his comic talents; it's a reflection on the total lack of amusing material in this film. I doubt if anyone, no matter how well developed their sense of humour might be, could find anything to laugh at in it. The film's light-hearted tone doesn't make it a successful comedy; it just prevents it from being taken seriously as anything else. This is one of those films that are neither fish nor flesh nor fowl nor good red herring. 3/10

**SPOILERS** Small-time country boy lawyer Lynn Hollister takes on the big city political machine and ends up hitched to the corrupt city boss' daughter in this really weird combination of a screw-ball comedy and murder/suspense movie. Johnny Smith who had just help his Spring Valley college basketball team win the big game staggers out of the red-light district Club Inferno, in a driving rainstorm. Johnny almost gets hit by a car leans against a lamppost which then gets hit by a bolt of lighting and plops to the ground dead. At the hospital it's found out that Johnny was actually shot in the Inferno Club, which caused him to stagger around the streets like a drunk, and that was the real reason for his death, in short he was murdered. In no time at all Johnny's friend, who he was more like a brother to, Lynn Hollister's in town trying to get to the bottom of what happened to Johnny and who killed him. The coroner for some strange reason had declared Johnny's death to be suicide which was obviously done to cover up the real reason for his murder. He had a fight with the Club Inferno's manager Amato over him being cheated in cards and was gunned down, with the loud music causing nobody to hear the shot, by one of Amato's henchmen the bird-brained and not too bright Floyd.Lynn is directed to Big Boss Tom Cameron's mansion to get the low-down to what happened to Johnny but, after belting the butler, falls for Tom's pretty daughter Sabra. It's then the film that at first look like a murder/suspense/mystery turns into a light romantic screwball comedy. Lynn and Sabra hit it off right away and for almost half of the film you, as well as the cast, completely forgot that Lynn was here to find out what really happened to Johnny? We get as far as learning that Johnny and Sabra were in love with each other but it wasn't until late in the movie that it's found out that it was Sabra's dad the Big Boss who was in some way, if not all the way, responsible for her boyfriends murder. Boss Cameron himself gets royally screwed by his under, as well as upper, links when after rigging the election for them to get into office they drop him like a hot potato and leave him out in the cold as they celebrate the stolen political victory that he engineered for them; now that's what I call gratitude. In he meantime Lynn, between smooching sessions with Sabra, got the goods on both Boss Cameron and his crew by first attempting to beat the truth out of Flyod who was shot by one of Amato's gunmen before he could finish telling it. Then Lynn going and finding in a law library textbook that rigging elections is illegal, lawyer Lynn didn't know this on his own? With this amazing revelation discovered by Lynn the election results are thrown out and those who rigged it, the Cameron/Amoto Mob,arrested and held without bail. Big Boss Tom Cameron disgusted at what he did, and what was done to him in return by his boys, comes clean after a tender heart-to-heart talk with Sabra and then spills the beans, to the D.A's office, with the entire crooked bunch of politicians and mobsters thrown behind bars together with him; I hope for his sake he asked to be put into protective custody.Lynn with his job in town now over, in solving Johnny Smith's murder and putting those responsible behind bars, rides off in a limousine into the sunset together with Sabra to sleepy quiet and friendly Spring Valley with a squad of local police motorcycle men as escorts. The movie is just too silly to take seriously and John Wayne as Lynn Hollister is not at all believable as a lawyer or a lawman or even a Cary Grant impersonator. Frances Dee as Boss Cameron's pretty daughter Sabra is both naive and unfeeling. Sabra at first doesn't have a clue to what her father is, the city's big machine boss, and later doesn't as much as shed a tear as he's put behind bars for what may well be the rest of his life! I don't even think that she even planned to visit him as she happily took off with Lynn together with a half dozen motorized policemen provided by her disgraced and imprisoned dad! Even behind bars he could pull all this off? Alexande Granach as the sleazy Club Inferno manager Amato played it a bit too much for laughs and Ward Bond as the nimble brained Floyd did his best to act punch-drunk even when he didn't take one, or two or three, to the head. In fact the only time Floyd acted as if he were in full control of his mental faculties was after he was punched out by Lynn only to get shot and killed for his new found intelligence.

In New York, a small-town basketball player stumbles out of kingpin Cameron's club, Inferno, gets struck by lightening and dies. Investigation reveals he was shot but the papers are put under pressure to report it as a suicide. Lawyer Lynn Hollister arrives the next day from Spring Valley to investigate the death, firm in his belief that his friend would not have taken his own life.From the plot summary, this film sounded like Wayne would be in a tough-talking crime thriller where he uncovers a political web of corruption. However, despite the dramatic (rather supernatural) opening, for over an hour it simply isn't that at all. It actually seems to aim for some sort of light comedy where Lynn is very much the small-town hick who greets everything with a smile and an `ahh-schucks'. This is not a bad thing but it doesn't really sit with the dramatic intensions.After an hour, Lynn turns on those he has been feeling out for a while, but even then it keeps the gently comic tone in spits and spats. However the arrival of tough talking (even with comic interludes) is welcome and it helps the film a great deal in the final 30 minutes. The lack of tension and excitement is not so much due to the comic stuff as it is to the lack of a really tight, coherent script. The film is about the powerful Cameron who has his hands everywhere - controlling the media and the politicians just enough to put the squeeze on them. However the film doesn't deliver this well enough and I was left unconvinced by the size of the web - and therefore rather uninvolved in the whole film.Wayne is OK at the comic stuff and the tough talking stuff but it's like he's flicking a switch in this film - tough one minute, completely different the next; it spoils his character a bit. Why his character is called Lynn is beyond me as I've never heard it for a boy before - although Wayne's no stranger to unusual names. Dee is dark and sexy in a good role, but she isn't given enough time. Ellis is OK but fails to come across as the master that the plot requires him to be. A small role for noir favourite Ward Bond adds to the interest.Overall this is an OK film but it's mix of comedy and drama just doesn't work and it gives the film an uneven feel. It turns it around a bit in the final 25 minutes but by then it is too late to build tension. The power of Cameron never really comes through and, for the majority of the film, you could be forgiven for thinking it was a whimsical romantic comedy rather than a murder mystery film.