The Racketeer

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 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.

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.

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)