The Racketeer

Time has not been kind to this film from the transition days of sound from silent. The plot has a gangster falling for a socialite who wants to help the down on his luck violinist she loves. There are of course complications. The problem with the film for me is that it hasn't aged well. Performances are all over the place with some emotional scenes seeming so over the top as to be laughable. One late exchange where Carol Lombard throws someone out of her room had me howling with its sing song delivery. There are other times when the film becomes static, a sign of the limitations of the microphones. Its not a bad film, its just that the technical limitations of the film get in the way of real enjoyment. Normally I'm forgiving, but this time out I just couldn't go with the flow (Then again the copy I saw was absolutely horrible). Worth a shot in a forgiving mood (and to be reminded that Robert Armstrong actually did more than play Carl Denham in King Kong)

Well mounted, interesting story about suave racketeer Armstrong falling for impoverished deb Lombard, hampered a bit by the declamatory style of speaking any speech longer than three words and apparent immobility of microphones.

Stiff early talkie shows its age and some of the growing pains of the transition from silent to sound. Like many early films it packs a lot of story in its brief running time, sometimes too much. The story is run of the mill but moves at a breakneck pace so it never drags.

You can see some of the difficulties encountered in the switch over to sound in the setup of scenes, often people are right on top of each other when they speak and the lack of natural movement of some players. Even the usually loose and animated Lombard seems constrained. A small piece of trivia: this was the last time she was billed as Carol rather than Carole. When the film opened she saw her name misspelled on a marquee liked the look of the alternate spelling feeling it made it more distinctive and adopted it from that point on.

The film is an ordinary programmer but it you're a fan of Lombard it's worth seeking out once.

This is one of those early talkies, so the filmmakers had not yet learned that a good film is in delivery of lines, motivation, and screenplay, not just the fact that the characters talk. I'm sure someday people will look at today's CGI movies and make equivalent criticisms. Robert Armstrong plays "the racketeer" here, but he is a kinder gentler gangster. At the beginning of the film he doesn't even "rub out" a member of his gang that has jumped bail on him - he just hands him over to the police so he can get his money back. James Cagney's Tom Powers would have never handled it this way.

This sets up the story so that the racketeer seems quite human and likable. At a charity Monte Carlo night he catches a fallen woman Rhoda Philbrooke (Carole Lombard) cheating at cards and helps her cover up her crime. It turns out Rhoda is broke and really needs the money since she has left her husband and taken up with drunken musician Tony Vaughan (Roland Drew). Racketeer Mahlon Keane then goes to Rhoda's apartment and offers to help her. Mainly, he helps her "dry out" her drunken boyfriend and get him back on his feet. He even arranges for Tony to perform at a big concert. He also asks Rhoda to marry him. He doesn't do this as a condition of his good works, but Rhoda accepts his proposal because she feels beholden to him and she does genuinely like him. In the end, Rhoda realizes that she still really loves Tony but doesn't want to hurt racketeer Keane.

The one thing that is never sufficiently conveyed to the viewer is why Rhoda loves Tony. He comes across as a drunken weakling that quite frankly seems very indifferent to Rhoda until the end of the film and doesn't seem to mind the fact that he is being helped by someone who is courting her. Probably the worst thing about this film is the unrestored condition it is in. I've seen prints from several companies and they are all in pretty bad shape. The audio is surprisingly good for an early talkie, but the video has lots of scratches in it and is somewhat washed out. The most interesting thing about this film is that it is one of Carole Lombard's very earliest film performances.

"The Racketeer" stars Carol (deprived of the "e" that usually appeared at the end of her first name) Lombard as a woman thrown out of society because she left her husband for a concert violinist (Roland Drew) who has since become a down-and-out alcoholic, and torn between her love for him and the interest of New York crime kingpin Robert Armstrong (top-billed). It's virtually a compendium of what was wrong with the earliest talkies: stiff direction, immobile cameras, stagy acting and ridiculously slow-paced delivery of lines. At the time the sound crews were telling the directors to have their actors speak every line s-l-o-w-l-y and not to start speaking their own line until after the previous actor had finished theirs. Done about five years later, this could have been an interesting movie, but director Howard Higgin faithfully follows his sound recorder's dictates and systematically undercuts the talents we know Lombard and Armstrong had from watching their later movies. "The Racketeer" was made in 1929, a year that despite the transition problems from silent to sound nonetheless gave us some legitimate masterpieces — Vidor's "Hallelujah!," Mamoulian's "Applause," Wyler's "Hell's Heroes," Capra's "Ladies of Leisure" — all from directors with strong enough wills to tell the soundboard dictators to get stuffed and let their actors talk and act naturalistically. Too bad Howard Higgin wasn't that strong; as it is, watching a naturally rapid-paced actor like Armstrong slog through the part in the ridiculous way he's been told to speak, one can't help but wonder where that 50-foot gorilla is when Armstrong needs him.