The Racketeer

I enjoyed this 66 minute film despite the overly theatrical delivery of almost every line. One gets the impression that this film was directed by an eighth grade home economics teacher. Despite this annoying drawback, the story is sweet and there is a genuine chemistry between the leading lady, Carole Lombard, and the head gangster played by Robert Armstrong.

Carole Lombard is attractively photographed and has a large amount of quality screen time here. She is pulled in two directions by two men who genuinely care for her. One is a concert violinist who we are introduced to early on in the picture as a man who has been reduced to nothing more than a bum in the gutter. The other is the suave gangster who for the first time has found something in this life greater than himself. The question is: who needs her most and who truly loves her? And in what direction will fate allow her to go.

The dramatic ending will tug at your heart-strings. This was Carole's last picture for Pathe studios.

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)

A beautiful, down and out former social débutante named Rhoda Philbrooke (Carol Lombard), who fell out of favor when she left her wealthy husband for a musician, is helped by a racketeer/mob boss named Mahlon Keane (Robert Armstrong), a man who seems to find his only real happiness in helping others with his ill gotten gain. Rhoda needs help to cure her musician Tony Vaughan (Roland Drew)'s alcohol addiction.

Not surprisingly the story soon turns into something of a romantic triangle cliché as Keane falls in love with Rhoda too. As early talkies go, this movie is better done than most. It moves pretty briskly and is an interesting curio in that it shows so much sympathy to the plight of a divorced débutante and an unhappy, unsatisfied gangster boss. Overall though, it's never credible enough to be fully satisfying but still its story makes for some good melodrama.

The good story and Carole Lombard's performance make "The Racketeer" one of the movies of the very early sound era that still holds up all right. It does have the flaws common to the earliest sound movies, with some shaky dialogue delivery, an erratic pace, and weak sound quality. But these do not keep it from being worth seeing, and in any case even the better movies of 1929 usually had some of these same problems.

Lombard has a very good role as a somewhat mysterious divorcée caught between two very different men. Robert Armstrong plays the gangster who helps both her and her other boyfriend. The third member of the triangle is a drunken violinist played by Roland Drew. Drew gives a rather nondescript performance, but at least the character is interesting. More than that, the setup does a good job in varying the usual formula so as to set up some good drama.

The atmosphere holds up well, and although some individual sequences have oddly chosen pacing, as a whole the story moves along pretty well. It easily holds your interest for the whole running time. It compares favorably with many of the movies of its day, and it is still a solid feature worth seeing for those who enjoy the movies of the era.

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.