This is a Thomas Meighan movie. Depending on your age, he was the Clark Gable or George Clooney of the Twenties in America. He plays an honest police captain (McQuigg) against the excellent Louis Wolheim's Nick Scarsi, a mobster bootlegger during Prohibition. Marie Prevost plays Helen Hayes, which caused me confusion when I was trying to read the credits. Hayes is a gold digger with a heart of gold.
The gist of the movie is that Scarsi has bought off all the politicians in Chicago; you can't get elected unless Scarsi has all his wards vote for you. So all his men get sprung the night they're arrested by the honest Captain McQuigg. His lawyer has pre-printed writs signed by a judge; the hoodlum gets arrested, the lawyer drops by the jail in a few minutes, and the hood walks. And with the judges and district attorneys in on the corruption, nobody ever gets charged and tried.
This is not a great movie, but its treatment of the corruption is remarkably unheroic. McQuigg knows what's going on, and he takes it in good humor. Scarsi and he know each other fairly well on a professional basis and enjoy a humorous scene or two without any acrimony. Scarsi invites McQuigg to his kid brother's birthday party at a speakeasy. McQuigg not only comes but enjoys a champagne toast to the kid. When a thug he's arrested that night shows up at the party when he should be in jail, our captain of police makes a joke at his own expense.
All of the actors are competent, the script is good, and the ensemble acting is very good. The casting is excellent - the bad guys are the smaller hoods in the mob, and those roles are filled by smarmy-looking actors who play the parts of men who think they're good looking and almost are but who fall into sneering loutishness. The Hayes character gives some good chuckles with her treatment of the various men trying to put the make on her.
Meighan and Wolheim play fully developed characters both of whom are good and bad, with self-deprecation and wit. It's quite different from the talkies gangster movies where it's all black and white, so to speak. In "The Racket," the shades of gray are more pronounced, with our honest cop stepping over the line occasionally to make a bust and make it stick. Although Scarsi is definitely a bad guy, the movie works much better when there are some redeeming features in the villain that make his downfall just but also bittersweet.
Marie Prevost was a successful silent actress. She was cast by Ernst Lubitsch in several of his films, earning his praise and the attention of Howard Hughes, who cast her in "The Racket." Her Canadian accent was deemed too unattractive to American audiences for her to succeed in talkies, and she died at the age of 38 from a multitude of ills, including a poor diet and alcohol
The gist of the movie is that Scarsi has bought off all the politicians in Chicago; you can't get elected unless Scarsi has all his wards vote for you. So all his men get sprung the night they're arrested by the honest Captain McQuigg. His lawyer has pre-printed writs signed by a judge; the hoodlum gets arrested, the lawyer drops by the jail in a few minutes, and the hood walks. And with the judges and district attorneys in on the corruption, nobody ever gets charged and tried.
This is not a great movie, but its treatment of the corruption is remarkably unheroic. McQuigg knows what's going on, and he takes it in good humor. Scarsi and he know each other fairly well on a professional basis and enjoy a humorous scene or two without any acrimony. Scarsi invites McQuigg to his kid brother's birthday party at a speakeasy. McQuigg not only comes but enjoys a champagne toast to the kid. When a thug he's arrested that night shows up at the party when he should be in jail, our captain of police makes a joke at his own expense.
All of the actors are competent, the script is good, and the ensemble acting is very good. The casting is excellent - the bad guys are the smaller hoods in the mob, and those roles are filled by smarmy-looking actors who play the parts of men who think they're good looking and almost are but who fall into sneering loutishness. The Hayes character gives some good chuckles with her treatment of the various men trying to put the make on her.
Meighan and Wolheim play fully developed characters both of whom are good and bad, with self-deprecation and wit. It's quite different from the talkies gangster movies where it's all black and white, so to speak. In "The Racket," the shades of gray are more pronounced, with our honest cop stepping over the line occasionally to make a bust and make it stick. Although Scarsi is definitely a bad guy, the movie works much better when there are some redeeming features in the villain that make his downfall just but also bittersweet.
Marie Prevost was a successful silent actress. She was cast by Ernst Lubitsch in several of his films, earning his praise and the attention of Howard Hughes, who cast her in "The Racket." Her Canadian accent was deemed too unattractive to American audiences for her to succeed in talkies, and she died at the age of 38 from a multitude of ills, including a poor diet and alcohol