The Last Ride

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 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.

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.

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.

The Last Ride (1944)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Bizarre but entertaining "B" movie from Warner deals with the classic tale of a good brother going up against the bad one. In this film, the good guy (Richard Travis) happens to be a detective trying to crack of the case of some bootleg tires being sold around the town and which has caused the death of a couple kids. The bad brother (Charles Lang) works for the underground operation and clashes with his brother over the rights to do so. THE LAST RIDE is a pretty entertaining gem that works for a number of reasons but one of the biggest is its story. I've seen quite a few crime pictures were all sorts of things were being stolen or illegally sold but this is the first one where those items were tires. This actually made for a pretty interesting set up early on and I really liked the racket these guys were running of stealing tires, then making those victims order new tires from them. I think things get a bit watered down towards the end when we start to get into more of the bad vs. good brother subplot, which is one we've seen countless times. Director D. Ross Lederman does a pretty good job at keeping the film moving at a very fast pace and it should be noted that it clocks in at just 58-minutes so there's certainly no down time. Both Travis and Lang fit into their roles very nicely and we get some nice support from Eleanor Parker, Jack LaRue and the always dependable Cy Kendall. THE LAST RIDE certainly isn't going to be found on lists containing the greatest movies ever made but it's certainly unique enough to where it's worth viewing.