Jack Pot

This short starts out with something quite innocuous - slot machines - being installed in businesses around an unnamed city where a pro reform candidate has just won election. They are placed there by the head of a gambling syndicate afraid that his big gambling rackets will all be raided and taken down and he'll be left with nothing. So customers wander into a drug store and put a few nickels in the machine. Each machine will only make maybe a couple of dollars a day for the syndicate. But multiply that by 4000 machines and you have quite a haul in 1940 dollars.

The head of the gambling syndicate uses that cash to get into more violent rackets such as protection, paying expensive attorneys to defend his henchmen in court and get them out on bail. To personalize all of this, a young couple planning to marry and the young woman's father wind up as victims in the middle of this criminal activity.

The message is that even participating in small possibly quasi legal activities such as slot machines helps feed the organized crime machine. With Tom Neal as one of the good guys in one of several MGM shorts he made at the beginning of his career, and also an interesting example of mobile recording technology of the time helping crack the case.

Efficiently and spartanly made as all of the Crime Does Not Pay shorts were, there is lots of action in this one.

Just watched this Crime Does Not Pay short from M-G-M on the I Love You Again DVD. This one concerns the illegal profit of slot machines displayed in various places where unsuspecting customers don't know how they're getting ripped off. An owner of a dry cleaning business, however, doesn't want one and gets in trouble as a result. I'll stop there and just say this was quite an interesting short, if not a very exciting one. Since there's no music score, silence is effectively used in some scenes. So on that note, Jack Pot is worth a look. P.S. Among the players is future Ward Cleaver from the TV show "Leave It To Beaver", Hugh Beaumont. He plays a mechanic.

This episode of MGM's long-running crime series takes on the slot machine, informing us they're crooked, support racketeers and lead to no good, because CRIME DOES NOT PAY.

It's the third and last episode to feature Edwin Maxwell. He's a hefty, older actor, that seemed to be cast on those roles for which the producers couldn't afford Edward Arnold. Usually cast as a businessman, often a crooked one, or an authority figure, he appeared in one film in 1915, then back onto the stage until 1929. From then, he showed up in about 150 features and shorts. Although he occasionally received no credit after 1940, he worked steadily until his death in 1948.

Jack Pot (1940)

*** (out of 4)

Part of MGM's "Crime Does Not Pay" series with this one looking at illegal gambling in the form of slot machines. This is yet another pretty good entry in the series, although this one here isn't among the best out there. There isn't as much drama this time out but the way the story is told keeps it interesting throughout.

Turner Classic Movies is the best place to catch these Crime Does Not Pay series as they usually show at least one a month. Some have been released to various Warner box sets as well.

It is ironic how the film opens with a formal fake message besmirching illegal gambling in the 1940's and how one storekeeper takes it upon himself to break up the crime syndicate and yet today there is not one stand alone state that does not fully support their state owned and operated lotteries that encourage tax payers to gamble on their state run lotteries.

I guess that is why we now have states such as Colorado and Illinois that have now legalized recreational marijuana. So instead of a movie called Jack Pot the government may soon be releasing a new short film praising the recreational use of their own Party Pot.

I give this outdated short film a 3 out of 10 IMDB rating mainly for the hypocrisy of the time which still holds true today some eighty (80) years later.