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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.

In 1929, in New York, the powerful mobster Mahlon Keane (Robert Armstrong) meets the bankrupted former socialite Rhoda Philbrooke (Carol Lombard) in a poker game of a benefit fund-raiser party and helps her to cheat the game. Rhoda had divorced from her wealthy husband to stay with her alcoholic lover, the violinist Tony Vaughan (Roland Drew), and is financially broken. Mahlon feels attracted by Rhoda and helps her to recover the health of Tony and promotes his career. Later Mahlon proposes Rhoda, who accepts to marry him, but a couple of hours before their marriage in a yacht, Tony tells Rhoda that he loves her. While Rhoda thinks how to tell Mahlon about her love for Tony, a tragedy happens in Tony's dressing room.

"The Racketeer" is one of the first American features in the sound age, and has a dated melodramatic story of a triangle of love composed by a gangster, a musician and an ex-socialite. This film is only reasonable, having silly dialogs, average theatrical performances, terrible quality of sound with a terrible voice intonation of the cast and the images have not been restored, therefore is full of problems. The Brazilian DVD released by London Distributor, has an additional problem, with the bad quality of subtitle in Portuguese, full of mistakes, without synchronization and using capital letters in the first letter of every sentence. "The Racketeer" is only recommended as a curiosity of the transition between silent and sound features. My vote is five.

Title (Brazil): "O Gangster" ("The Gangster")

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.

"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.

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.

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 was destined to be one of Carole Lombard's earliest sound films, it was done for Pathe Pictures with whom she was with in 1929. With the title it has, you might be thinking its a gangster flick, the kind Warner Brothers would soon be making.

If that's what you think forget it. This is one dull and plodding melodrama involving a love triangle between alcoholic violinist Roland Drew, gangster Robert Armstrong, and former society débutante Carole Lombard who left her husband and all his money for Drew before the film began and is now tied to a drunk.

If you think you will see the bright comedienne of My Man Godfrey and so many films with Fred MacMurray, forget that also. Like just about everyone else at this time, Lombard and the rest of the cast overact dreadfully. I'm surprised and she might have been also that she had a career and survived this film.

Best in the cast is Paul Hurst who plays a beat cop, but is determined to bring in Armstrong and displays some initiative and ruthlessness in trying to do just that.

Like what the Abbe Sieyes said about the French Revolution, Carole Lombard can state her major accomplishment from The Racketeer is that she survived it.

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.

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 prime example of the difficulties some directors and actors experienced during the transition from silent to sound. Everyone in The Racketeer stands around po-faced while their fellow actor delivers their lines with a draggy emphasis on every... single... word. To make matters worse, the plot unfolds with all the speed and energy of a blindfolded sloth walking through treacle.

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.

Hey, I get it. Its an early talkie and possesses historical significance, and not just entertainment value. I appreciate that, and can enjoy it on that level a little. But ultimately I rate films on whether I was entertained or not. In this case, I wasn't very much. It's not a terrible film or story, but the biggest problem is that it lacks propulsion or good forward movement. In other words its a bit dull. Lombard is alluring and seems like a fine actor, and the other performances are pretty good. But even for a short movie, it seemed to not end quick enough.

After two of four straight interminably labored scenes that open this early sound primitive it becomes apparent the filmmakers are content just to capture the turgid dialog in flower potted mikes. The Racketeer is one numb clunker of poor pacing and bad acting.

Sartorial resplendent racket chief Mahlon Keane ( Robert Armstrong ) is living the good life by way of prohibition and other illegal activities. Upbeat, good natured and generous he thinks nothing of putting a fifty dollar bill in a vagrant/street musician's pocket to prevent him from being nailed for vagrancy. In this particular case it will come back to haunt him both personally and professionally when he gets mixed up with the violinist's former wife Rhoda (Carole Lombard) who is struggling to get Tony Vaughn back on his feet and back onto the concert stage. With a big assist from Keane he gets his chance but shows his gratitude by trying to wrest his ex back from him.

As the dapper racketeer Armstrong looks and carries himself convincingly but sometimes is left with nothing to say from one sluggish scene to the next. Lombard rotates between strident and flat while Roland Drew's Tony serves up thick slices of ham.

Howard Higgins direction does seem to be relegated to making sure the microphone is on but given the pedestrian audio should nevertheless be commended for trying to capture it on actual city streets, albeit poorly and unimaginatively.

New York City racketeer Robert Armstrong (as Mahlon "Mahl" Keane) helps beautiful divorcée Carole Lombard (as Rhoda Philbrooke) reform boozing Roland Drew (as Anthony "Tony" Vaughan), then wants her hand in marriage. She feels loyalty toward Mr. Armstrong, but Ms. Lombard apparently left her millionaire husband for Mr. Drew, who can play the violin beautifully when he's not drinking. This early sound film features some poor line delivery and a few good camera angles. Unfortunately, there is too much of the former and not enough of the latter.

**** The Racketeer (11/9/29) Howard Higgin ~ Robert Armstrong, Carole Lombard, Roland Drew, Paul Hurst

THE RACKETEER (Pathe, 1929), directed by Howard Higgin, stars Robert Armstrong (best known as Carl Denham in the 1933 classic of KING KONG) in the title role of a New York City crime boss. Not the typical rise and fall gangster drama made famous in later years by Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, George Raft or Humphrey Bogart, but more focus on a mob boss's love for an ex-debutante than gangster activities.

Starting off with an aerial view of New York City landmarks as the Brooklyn Bridge, the story opens with a drunken panhandler (Roland Drew) violin playing on the streets for money. Mehaffey (Paul Hurst), a policeman on the beat attempts arresting the man for vagrancy until Mahlon Keane (Robert Armstrong) comes over to give the panhandler $50 and a taxi ride over to "the Ritz." Inside the passing taxi happens to be Rhoda Philbrooke (Carol Lombard) who claims not only to know the vagrant but takes him to her cab back to her apartment. It is later learned that Rhoda is the ex-wife of the famed violinist Anthony "Tony" Vaughan. Still in love with him, she struggles in helping Tony recover from his alcoholic binges. Attending a benefit for St. James Orphanage on East 92nd Street sponsored by Keane and hosted by Karen Lee (Hedda Hopper) using Monte Carlo settings for gambling guests, Rhoda is soon greeted and invited Jack Oakhurst (John Loder) to join him and the other guests including Millie Chapman (Jeanette Loff), Sam Chapman (Winter Hall), Margaret Simpson (Winifred Harris) and Mahlon Keane for a game of poker. After noticing Rhoda cheating at cards to win extra money for her winnings, Mahlon speaks on her behalf making it appear she won the game honestly. Unable to forget this attractive woman, Mahlon comes to Rhoda's Hayward Apartment residence on West 68th Street to tell her how he feels. Realizing Rhoda in desperate need assisting for Tony's medical expenses, Mahlon finances her with enough money and treatment. Completely cured, Tony resumes his career in violin recitals at concert halls. Learning Tony has no further use for Rhoda, Mahlon considers asking Rhoda for her hand in marriage but wonders if she will accept him for his notorious reputation. Other members of the cast include Kit Guard (Gus); Buddy Fine (Bernie Weber); Al Hill (Squid, the Chauffeur); and Bobbie Dunn (The Rat).

With the exception of opening credits, THE RACKETEER is virtually scoreless and leisurely paced for much of its 65 minutes. The story in itself is not bad though for a crime movie sounding title one would expect a handful of visual gangland killings for added interest. Robert Armstrong is fine but doesn't seem believable as the crime boss in the manner of Louis Wolheim had he been chosen for the title role. Though not great nor an important part in cinema history, its sole reason for viewing this early talkie is the presence of Carol (minus the "e" added to her first name in credits) Lombard early in her career.

Fortunate to have survived intact after all these years, THE RACKETEER didn't start circulating until 1998 when first broadcast on public television followed by availability on DVD and cable television's Turner Classic Movies (TCM premiere: August 17, 2006) and on demand from MGM Plus. (**)

Probably the main reason today to watch this undistinguished early talkie is as the first significant role of Carole Lombard. She plays quite adequately a part which is not bad, but in the end lacks real substance and originality - therefore only in hindsight can one perceive early signs of a potentially great actress. The real star here is Robert Armstrong, but the two sides of his personality, wealthy socialite behaving gallantly with a fallen lady in distress and behind the scenes ruthless crime boss, are too disjointed to make his story gripping. Unfortunately these two sides only collide extremely late in the film. Before that, it's on one side - the main one - vintage melodrama, on another one a standard criminal story. Not bad, though.