The Racket
89 min. / B&W / 1.37:1 / DTS HD MA 2.0 Mono / SDH
Warner Archive Blu-ray $24.99
Available from Movie Zyng
The city is rotten with graft and villainy; the crooked D.A. and cops don't even TRY to hide what they're doin'. Tough police cap'n Robert Mitchum keeps getting sent to worse and worse precincts because he’s ungraftable, and he's tired of it, so he gets in the face of hot-headed mobster Robert Ryan and tells him to keep himself and his tough but stupid flunkies out of the precinct or else, but that warning doesn't bode well for anybody.
Hard to talk about the film without spoilers, mainly because the darn thing is so goofy, drama-wise, that I simply want to list all the astonishing things you'll witness when you see it. Let's just say that you could fill up a book with the sense this movie doesn't make, starting with the salient fact that the "honest cops" seem to go out of their way to kill (or stand back and let others kill) their best witnesses, simply because their best witnesses are bad guys. In fact, if you're waiting to find out who the "Old Man" - the mysterious head of the rackets - is at film's end, well, the people who saw this back in 1951 are still waiting, too.
That said, it's enormously entertaining, beautifully shot, offers some of our favorite RKO stars of the period, including a nice chunk of the future cast of Perry Mason - Ray Collins as the crooked D.A. with his eye on a judgeship and William Talman as a too-honest beat cop - and a beautifully exciting gun battle through a dark parking deck and up over the rooftops
Million-dollar Dialog:
Crooked cop William Conrad, on sensational journalism: "Newspaper readers forget fast. It goes in one eye and out the other."
The Racket is based on a play that was adapted in 1928 for the screen and produced by Howard Hughes, as was this remake, which, according to commentator Eddie Mueller, was the problem: Hughes kept ordering reshoots and this 'n' that, including a prologue that has nothing much to do with the rest of the film, to make 1951 play more like 1928. Well-known actors like Milburn Stone, Richard Reeves, Herb Vigran, and Les Tremayne pop up for a line or two, it’s impossible to tell whether their parts were cut out or spliced in. I haven't seen the '28 version but I can believe that this one seems to be set in in an alternate universe where gangsters can walk into police stations and shoot cops, or Bob Mitchum is believable as a "police captain." Robert Ryan’s tough non-Italian mobster “Nick” comes off the best, always looking as though he’d cut you with a razor for breathing wrong. There are females in the cast, but cop wives Virginia Huston and Joyce MacKenzie have little to do; the big dramatic scene one gets is behind a closed door. The female lead, such as it is, goes to Lizabeth Scott, who is simply awful in this picture, as Robert Ryan’s future sister-in-law. She plays a tough saloon singer who expresses anger at her mistreatment and flirts with eager reporter Tim Hutton, despite the fact that toughness, anger, and flirtiness are all way, way, WAY beyond Miss Scott’s range.
It's a good picture, though, and frightfully entertaining. The old DVD was fine, but the new Blu-ray shines and maintains the high, high quality we’ve come to expect from the Warner Archive. Eddie Mueller commentary is always affable, informative, and welcome; does he only do noir commentaries? Wouldn’t you love to hear him talk about Pardon My Sarong or It! The Terror from Beyond Space?
Okay, maybe not.
