Fri 24 Apr 2015
Movie Review: THE RACKETEER (1929).
Posted by Steve under Films: Drama/Romance , Reviews[8] Comments
THE RACKETEER. Pathé Exchange, 1929. Robert Armstrong, Carol Lombard (sic), Roland Drew, Paul Hurst, Kit Guard, Al Hill, Hedda Hopper, Jeanette Loff. Story: Paul Gangelin, with dialogue by A. A. Kline. Director: Howard Higgin.
The Racketeer was one of the earliest films of the sound era, and it shows. The players orate rather than speak in normal tones — most of them, that is, not all of them — and use their hands and excessive gestures to make sure the audience knows what their characters are thinking and doing.
And yet the story itself is actually quite good, filled with nuances and little bits of action, if not full scenes, that mesh together in quite a fascinating, if not always satisfying, fashion. One cannot blame the actors. They do what the director wants them to do, and the director…
Well, I’m no expert, but I have to assume that this early in the game he had to rely on two things: his instincts, left over from the silent era, and the limitations of the equipment he was forced by necessity to use.
If you can understand and live with those limitations, this is an enjoyable film. Robert Armstrong is the racketeer of the title, a ruthless fellow when he has to be, but the screenwriter makes sure we know from the beginning that he also has a pragmatic, practical side. He turns one of his underlings who has betrayed him over the police, for example, instead of the usual long ride to nowhere.
And he slips a vagrant violinist on the street fifty dollars rather than let a cop run him in. And this is the incident that begins the story itself. The vagrant has a girl friend (Carol Lombard), and as chance would have it, she needs a helping hand from this very same gangster to keep from being caught after cheating at poker at a charity function.
Which begins a love triangle of sorts, not overtly per se, but a quiet, tacit one, one that (as expected) boils over at the end. Robert Armstrong is his usual professional self, but I’m afraid that at the time I might not have predicted much of a future in talkies for his leading co-star, already a veteran of some 40 or so silent films, but she learned, and how.
April 25th, 2015 at 7:56 am
This is an interesting review.
I’ve never seen any films directed by Howard Higgin. Howard Higgin, like Paul Sloane and Sam Wood, was something of a protege of the much more famous director Cecil B. DeMille. DeMille often had these men doing films with his stars that DeMille himself was too busy to direct. Both Higgin and Wood early on made films with DeMille star Wallace Reid, for example.
DeMille is fairly well-studied. But film historians have paid almost no attention to the School of DeMille, such as Higgin, Sloane and Wood. Critical study of their films is zilch.
One problem for today’s audience: the leading men. DeMille and his followers thought that what American women wanted to see were well-dressed men of WASP descent. Robert Armstrong in this film is an example. These leading males look like Broadway matinee idols of 1899. They look utterly unlike leading men of 1940 or 2015.
April 25th, 2015 at 11:46 am
Howard Higgin is a new name to me. I just looked up his resume as a director on IMDb:
Battle of Greed (1937)
The Line-Up (1934)
Marriage on Approval (1933)
Carnival Lady (1933)
The Last Man (1932)
The Final Edition (1932)
Hell’s House (1932)
… aka “Juvenile Court” – USA (reissue title)
The Painted Desert (1931)
The Racketeer (1929)
High Voltage (1929)
The Leatherneck (1929)
Sal of Singapore (1928)
Power (1928)
Skyscraper (1928)
The Perfect Sap (1927)
The Great Deception (1926)
The Wilderness Woman (1926)
The Reckless Lady (1926)
The New Commandment (1925)
In the Name of Love (1925)
Rent Free (1922)
He died in 1938 at the age of 47. The titles of a couple of these movies sound familiar, but that’s all.
April 25th, 2015 at 6:09 pm
First, and someone has to mention it, the Robert Mitchum/Robert Ryan RACKETEER is a remake of this, at least the basics. If you ever wondered why the Mitchum film felt like it was taking place decades earlier that’s why.
At the time this was made the technology was as crude as the actors grasp of it. I don’t know if this is one, but the boom mike trailed behind the advent of silent film and in many early ones the mike is stationary and the actors can’t move far from it and be heard (hilariously depicted in SINGING IN THE RAIN)so actors bodies are as awkward as their performances as speech since the mikes could not pick up subtleties.
Like Leo McCarey, Sam Wood, at least, suffered a sort of reverse Blacklist. Because both were outspoken anti Red there was a backlash critically when other directors where being labeled auteurs in the era following the Blacklist. By then it was impossible to do that with de Mille regardless of his politics, but Wood’s career and work fell off sharply as did McCary’s, and add that their style was considered old fashioned they were easily shuffled off to one side in critical terms.
Wood had some films though like KINGS ROW and FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS even the critics couldn’t completely ignore, though they almost never credit Wood’s contribution. The cinematographer gets all the credit for the acclaimed scene of the attack on El Sordo’s camp in TOLLS.
I’ve never read anything longer than an article length study of Wood and most of that was filmography, part of a series of paperbacks featuring directors who were often left off auteur lists like Wood, Borzage, Henry King, King Vidor (he at least, has been accepted into the fold), and others.
As for Higgins, long before the Blacklist and politics critics had bemoaned de Mille and his style, and following that style was not likely to win critical reception. De Mille was considered corny, phony, overly sentimental, and his films and skills as a director often ignored. However popular de Mille’s films were at the box office, critical reception in the sound era faded quickly.
Most film critics are looking to make a name or to have a dissertation accepted and try to find obscure directors or minor ones to tie their careers to and they aren’t looking to challenge the accepted wisdom of their field.
Going against an established prejudice and writing seriously about McCary, de Mille, Wood, or the de Mille school would have been bad judgment, even if they had thought them worthy.
Time passed and the politics are gone if the prejudices are not, but it will take an established critic with nothing to lose to redeem Higgins or Wood today. Still, someone ought to be able to get a book out of either of them, or the directors of the de Mille school now the political nonsense on either side is silenced.
April 25th, 2015 at 7:28 pm
I do not believe even a cursory look at Sam Wood’s career supports the blacklist contention. In the final years of his life he directed Command Decision (1948) and The Stratton Story (1049) and Ambush (1950). All significant films, especially the first two. Ambush was released posthumously. Now, if you want to argue that he has been snubbed critically because of his politics, fine, but sorry to say critics don’t mean squat. The product and paid admissions are the thing. The product was great and the money not so bad. At lest the guys who did the hiring thought so.
April 25th, 2015 at 9:23 pm
I remember how much Groucho hated Sam Wood who directed a couple of the Marx Brothers Paramount films. I suspect Groucho’s view won over many a critic especially during the 70s when Groucho reached icon status. I admit as a critic myself during the 70s I never sought out any Wood films to sample.
Yet Hollywood did give Wood a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
April 25th, 2015 at 10:24 pm
Barry
What critics mean is whether or not later generations discover your work as easily as other directors who have been critical darlings. It doesn’t decide whether the work is good or not, but it certainly determines whether cineaste discover them, and cineaste and critics write the books and articles on a directors work which in turn fuels film festivals, revivals, film history, and eventually play on television and appearance on DVD.
None of the films you mention of Wood’s work are ever shown as retrospectives of his work. They are good films shown because of their stars. I’m not sure if even TCM ever did a Wood retrospective. He obviously was a good director, but many better liked lesser directors get more credit. Whenever his work is discussed the first and most impressive thing said is how disliked he was. That and politics (not on screen politics in Wood’s case) are what I hear most often in relation to he and McCarey.
The critics of the sixties who set the auteur theory into high gear and made directors stars were hard on Wood and McCarey inpart because of their politics during the Blacklist, they were not well liked personally in the business so they had no defenders there either. Their best work tends to get credited to stars and others involved but not them. That is long gone now, but the lack of literature about their work lingers because of it.
Writing about and praising Wood or McCarey or even de Mille was not going to get you a by line at a major paper as a film critic or tenure at a good school teaching film well into the eighties, and because of that little was written of them in the heyday of the popularity of film criticism.
Film critics write film history. If they don’t write about a director’s work then the work is marginalized. Film and film criticism have always been political to some extent from the continuing debate if the film camera was an American or British invention. It should be just about the work, but it never has and never will be.
It effects us as viewers because the work of critically popular directors from the past is more likely to be available to see, and because the majority of people watch what they are told is good and not what they themselves discover.
Look at some of Higgins talkie films, some notable films of the era, and often written about, but no one mentions Higgins role most likely because he came from the de Mille school and critics dismissed de Mille and that school. It seems strange you could have a film written about as often as THE LAST MAN and not anything about the film’s director.
It matters, as it does in literature because the work is kept alive by people who write about it and lead new readers to it. Most readers don’t read the critics, and shouldn’t, but they matter because the publishers who sell the books read them and they determine what is available as much as the marketplace, every publisher has books they reprint regardless of sales for personal reasons as part of their imprint.
People who don’t read the critics of books or movies do read and watch the films that become available because of them. The critics only matter because they matter in the industry. One curious side effect of the auteur theory was that the critics writing about them became celebrities too.
It’s fine to say that you like what you like and the critics don’t matter. But with the increasing competition in media you may not see what you might like if not for critics and historians who wrote about them and brought them to someone’s attention which then meant they eventually reached a mass audience.
Critics do effect the mass market, even when its like Mickey Spillane’s case where being hated by them helped boost his sales and presence with some of his audience. They have a disproportionate hand in what is available for us to read and see in terms of what is remembered if not what is initially sold.
I’ll give a good example in our own field. Raymond Chandler’s work came under attack in the eighties by supporters of Ross Macdonald, and while there was no chance of Chandler being marginalized or forgotten his work was taking a hit. Then suddenly there was the McShane bio, the collected letters and writings, several studies of his work, and finally the Library of America Chandler volume and now Macdonald’s supporters are either no longer with us or not as outspoken and Chandler is unassailable while Macdonald is neglected.
Those volumes, that may not have sold that well individually, gave Chandler new exposure, kept his work available, kept interest in his work. Little has been written about Macdonald or John D. MacDonald and both are less known now because of it. It’s the same with film criticism. Without it the entire noir genre would now be nothing but fondly remembered black and white crime films most people never see and never wanted to.
April 25th, 2015 at 11:08 pm
David —
A fine and informed response, but I am in the loop on all of that, long ago having dismissed the concepts as nothing other than conversation that fluctuates with fashion. The moral equivalent of standing on a street corner, or in the park, shaking your fist as injustice, real and imagined.
April 25th, 2015 at 11:26 pm
Should have mentioned this earlier, The Racket (1951) directed by Nick Ray with Mitchum and Ryan in the leads is a remake, but not of The Racketeer, but of Lewis Milestone’s film that had Thomas Meighan in Mitchum’s part and also called The Racket.