The Last Ride

It's wartime and rubber is in short supply. A tire bootlegger ring steals tires from cars on the streets and resells them. Teenagers find their tires stolen. They call up the tire bootleggers. With the newly installed tires, the reckless teenagers go street racing. One of the tires fail and two are killed in the crash. Police Detective Lt. Pat Harrigan is tasked with taking down the ring. It turns out that his brother Mike is the leader of such a ring and both brothers are in love with Kitty Kelly.

I've never considered tires as black market material. That is a plus on its side. On the minus side, it starts with annoying teenagers and has no name actors throughout. First, the kids garnered no sympathy. I couldn't care less that they're dead. If they're played as normal, it would be a public benefit to get the criminals. As it stands, this is a no-humans-involved situation. The crime investigation is less than compelling. The most interesting aspect is the subject matter and this is an almost passable B-movie.

With the Federal government rationing rubber for the duration, the racketeers have a new racket. They slash your tires. Then they sell you retreads that look as good as new. For a while. The local police department doesn't like it. Police Chief Wade Boteler orders incorruptible lieutenant Richard Travis to take a bribe and infiltrate the bad guys.

Travis is surprisingly good in a role which calls for him to be a man of action. At 57 minutes there isn't much time to develop subtlety, but he's got a fun-loving brother in Charles Lang who thinks he's a sap for risking his life, a doting Oirish mother in Mary Gordon, and Eleanor Parker as a potential sister-in-law. Poverty Row had been running this sort of plot for a couple of years, but D. Ross Lederman directs with his usual anonymous competence to allow the Warner Brothers staff to offer the offer the banging guns and crashing cars that they excelled in for more than a decade.

This crime programmer from the end of the Second World War holds interest as a period piece, since it's based on the wartime scarcity of rubber and the consequent thriving of bootleg-tire rings. When a wealthy young man, all set for a night of boozing and dining at a roadhouse called The Plantation, finds his roadster stripped of his tires, his buddy hands him a card. Within minutes, a dealer shows up, but instead of Ecstasy or crystal meth, `brand-new' tires are the contraband. But when the drunken young daredevil takes a curve at 100 miles an hour, a blowout sends him and his date to kingdom come. He bought not only the plantation but lethal knockoffs - the equivalent of what a quarter-century later would be bad acid.

The bulk of the story revolves around police attempts to crack the ruthless ring, and it devolves into Irish-American stereotypes that might be offensive if they weren't so quaint. A couple of brothers named Harrigan (Richard Travis and Charles Lang) are at loggerheads; one's an honest cop, the other a hooligan mixed up in the phony-rubber ring. To make matters worse, one's named Pat and the other Mike (and to make them worse still, the girl they're both sweet on is named Kitty Kelly - Eleanor Parker, in a sliver of a role). Good cop Pat pretends to go bad to infiltrate the gang, but there's already a bad cop on the force, one who's head man in the racket. The Last Ride is all pretty routine, barely saved by its glimpse into a vanished style of petty crime.

This excellent thriller, very short thriller, proves that director D Ross Lederman offered his best years at Warner Bros studios, during the thirties and forties. After this period, for Columbia Pictures and the Lone Wolf series, he showed very bland movies, very ambitionless features. But, I repeat, for the Warner Bros company, he made really tremendous fast paced and exciting crime - ESCAPE FROM CRIME, BULLET SCARS -, action, war, adventures movies. Such as this one, which deserves to be seen at all costs. The climax is a pure Warner Bros trademark. I was so astonished by this film I did not know at all. I know there must be many of such stuff still under the radars.

Some rather stupid kids get themselves killed in an accident while using some really bald and bad tires. That sends Detective Richard Travis on an investigation into the rubber racket and how racketeers are profiting thereby from the wartime shortage.

The racket has some solid protection in the town so Travis has to proceed with caution.

Eleanor Parker has a small role in this B film as she was moving up the Warner Brothers ladder. We all pay our dues.

One thing is certain, Americans are still obsessed with their cars now as in World War II. Didn't anybody tell these kids there's a war on.