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.

"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.

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.

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.

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.