THE LAST RIDE. Warner Brothers, 1944. Richard Travis, Charles Lang, Eleanor Parker, Jack La Rue, Cy Kendall, Wade Boteler, Mary Gordon. Director: D. Ross Lederman.

   One of the players in this film was later nominated for three Oscars, and it wasn’t either the leading player, Richard Travis, whose career never got out of first gear, nor was it Cy Kendall, even though he was always, as he is in this film, the best villain around, and always worth watching — the oiliest, the most conniving, and in a good old-fashioned way, a wonderful toad of a fellow with a eye always on whatever money he can make in whatever scheme seems the most profitable at the time.

   And in The Last Ride, made in 1944 — war time, in other words, when rubber was scarce — that’s where the money is. In spite of the patriotic message this movie was intended to send, supporting the war effort, Mr Kendall is not only a captain in the police department, but he’s also the secret head of a gang of black marketeers in the tire business.

   Problem is, the tires are shoddy, and as a result a couple of kids on a joy ride end up dead in a ditch. Travis plays Pat Harrigan, a detective on one side of the law, while his brother Mike is on the other and one of the members of the gang. They both have their eye on a girl named Kitty Kelly (Eleanor Parker), but her part in the story all but disappears after 30 minutes into the story, not much over the halfway point.

   Travis tries to pull of the oldest gambits in the books, from the police department’s point of view, and the tale peters out from there. The beginning’s not bad, and some money was put into the production, but when a key point in the tale is covered in a letter to the police captain, one that has to read by the audience on the screen, instead of a short two minute scene that could have shown the same thing, you have to know that corners had to be cut somewhere, and it shows.