Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #52510 in DVD
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Formats: NTSC, Black & White
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 89 minutes

Features

• Film Noir

Customer Reviews

Good, Cynical Cop Movie!
It would be difficult to conjure a more cynical big city police story than "The Racket". One could argue that R is not truly "noir". It does possess a great background and atmosphere, though the Midwest location is never identified. R features two solid performances by the leads and an excellent supporting cast of both hard working cops and those on the other side of the law. Some add to the brew by playing "both sides". Robert Mitchum stands tall as a tough uncompromising Police Captain, standing for no nonsense on his watch. His phlegmatic persona is just right for the role. RM's polar opposite is the main bad guy (at least the most obvious one), Robert Ryan. RR tears up his scenes as a tough veteran hood, who thinks he can talk, bully or buy his way over or around the Law. Does he meet his match in Mitchum? Folks will just have to watch the movie but sparks will fly. Ray Collins is excellent as the venal DA, intent only on becoming a hand-picked judge. Robert Conrad plays an achingly dirty cop. Viewers-and Mitchum-wait for justice to awake and pinch these guys. A nice sub plot is provided by a romance twixt Lizabeth Scott and Ryan's brother. Liz is back to the good girl/bad girl role which best suits her. Another fine performance is that of Don Porter, Ryan's buttoned up, semi- Ivy League, boss. (Didn't he play Ann Sothern's boss on the old "Private Secretary" show?). According to Silver and Ward's "Film Noir", R had production problems thanks to interference from RKO boss Howard Hughes, with several rewrites and re-shootings. Those were not obvious to this reviewer. Cop movies don't get much better than "The Racket". Corruption, cynicism and all, most police officers are favorably portrayed here. This is a rare black and white release that would not suffer from colorization. Recommended!

Half-hearted, Disjointed Tale of Organized Crime and Political Corruption.
For this 1951 version of "The Racket", executive producer Howard Hughes reworked the 1928 film "The Racket", which he had also produced. Both films are based on the popular Bartlett Cormack play that was a thinly disguised dramatization of Al Capone's organized crime operation in Prohibition-era Chicago. In stereotypical Howard Hughes fashion, this version of "The Racket" suffered from endless rewrites, reshoots, and multiple directors. John Cromwell got the directing credit, but Nicholas Ray did a lot of the reshoots, and there were several one-day directors in there too. If you notice discontinuities in the film, they are most likely due to reshoots. Sam Fuller wrote a script that Hughes rejected. William Wister Haines' script was accepted, but Hughes called on W.R. Burnett to do rewrites. Some of Howard Hughes' messy productions turned out great, but "The Racket" isn't one of them.

As the Congressional Crime Commission solicits cooperation from state politicians in fighting organized crime, the officials in this unnamed city have always thought it best to cooperate with the syndicate. An election is coming up, and city prosecutor Mortimer Welsh (Ray Collins) has been promised a county judgeship by the local racket. Police Captain Tom McQuigg (Robert Mitchum), an honest, stubborn anti-crime crusader, has just been transferred to the election district when a corrupt city official who was fingered by the Crime Commission is gunned down. McQuigg knows just where to look for the culprit. He pays a visit to crime boss Nick Scanlon (Robert Ryan), an old-school gangster who has little patience for the mob's new methods of using legitimate fronts and less conspicuous violence. McQuigg vows to see Nick pay for his crimes, but modernization of the syndicate may get him first.

Robert Ryan's performance is the reason to see "The Racket". It doesn't have much depth, but Ryan's commitment to his character steals the show. Robert Mitchum is phoning this one in. He seems bored and can't even manage a believable reaction shot. A lot of little stuff in this film doesn't make sense or seem to have a purpose. "The Racket" suffers from convolution in place and time. The play upon which it is based took place in 1920s Chicago. The bureaucratizing and legitimizing of the mob that are prominent in this version refer to the 1930s. And allusions to the Congressional Crime Commission place the film in the 1950s. It feels like a patchwork -and its editors would probably agree that it is. There is an interesting subplot about an ambitious cop (William Talman) who risks his family and his life for self-promotion. This is an awfully talented cast with a bad script -or, rather, scripts. It's too bad that Hughes didn't go with Sam Fuller's approach to the material instead.

The DVD (Warner Brothers 2006): The single bonus feature is a good audio commentary by film historian Eddie Muller. Muller discusses the history of both films and the play and compares them, the 3 different scripts for the film, the multiple directors and reshoots, Hughes relationships with the actors and directors, themes, cinematography, and shares some astute observations about what is good and what is bad in "The Racket". Subtitles are available for the film in English, French, and Spanish.

A slow starter, but a fine crime drama
I'd never been able to get past the first couple of reels of The Racket on TV and it certainly looked like being the makeweight of Warner's new Film Noir collection, but once you get past the lunking Howard Hughes-imposed Nicholas Ray-directed prologue turns into a surprisingly engaging and gripping crime drama. Structurally it's certainly unusual, probably as a result of Hughes' typical interference - it's more than 17 minutes before Mitchum makes his entrance, and there are some sporadically awkward crosscuts to inserts shot by Ray and others after John Cromwell (who starred in the play the film was based on in the 1920s) had left.

Robert Ryan is surprisingly not quite there onscreen for once: not exactly bad, but somewhere between phoning it in and, in his early scenes at least, possibly drunk on set - his timing is slightly askew, his usual excellent instincts abandoned along with his sense of proportion in moments that are just a little over the top. But there's so much to admire that even the unlikely escalation of the feud between the two protagonists is carried along. There's a fine shootout in a garage, a neat car chase that sees the cops plow through a billboard for a mob-backed political candidate and a terrific death scene at the end. The supporting cast are intriguing too, with William Conrad's cop and Ray Collin's DA both corrupt but not so entirely that they're lost causes: they exist in a gray area that throws the leads into sharper relief.

Eddie Mueller's audio commentary is the only extra, but it's quite excellent and well worth listening to.