Smashing the Rackets

Smashing The Rackets casts Chester Morris as a square jawed hero who is a combination of Thomas E. Dewey and Melvin Purvis. An FBI agent like Purvis who reaped a lot of publicity by taking down public enemies like John Dillinger and BabyFace Nelson, Morris decides to leave the FBI and practice law as he was trained to do. He takes a job with District Attorney George Irving who believes that Morris's presence on his staff is worth a lot of votes.

Not that he's looking for real work out of Morris because Irving is in the pocket of the crime syndicate. Nevertheless Morris proves to be quite resourceful and brings down several racketeers.

The most elusive of these is Bruce Cabot who is a smooth talking white shoe type lawyer, but who in reality is Mister Kingpin in that city of all the rackets. Cabot is a cunning and resourceful foe and Morris's job is made complicated by the fact that Morris is courting Frances Mercer of the society set, her sister Rita Johnson is running around with Cabot for kicks. Cabot has the best role by far in the film. In fact it's one of the best performances I ever saw him give.

Dewey and Purvis were role models for a slew of films in the Thirties though Smashing The Rackets is the first I ever saw that combined their characters. This is a well constructed film with a good story line that gives a bit of a twist in the ending.

Jim 'Sock' Conway (Chester Morris) is a hard hitting G-man. District Attorney Edward Greer hires him as a lawyer but only for his vote-getting publicity. Conway is frustrated at first but he decides to wait for his opportunity. He is told to deliver entitled socialite Letty Lane from jail. He falls for her sweeter sister Susan. His shopkeeper friends get attacked by the criminal racket. A corrupt system prevents him from getting convictions for the crime.

This is a Post-Code crime drama from RKO Pictures. The violence is not as explicit but it still maintains some brutality. I don't think I recognize Chester Morris. He seems to be a Hollywood veteran but I wouldn't call him leading man material. He's got evil eyebrows and a droopy nose. Quite frankly, Bruce Cabot looks more chisel. With the pencil moustache, he has good villainy. This is fine but it's not anything iconic.

FBI agent Jim Conway (Chester Morris) dreams of opening a law firm. He finally retires from the FBI, but finds himself in a dead-end job at the District Attorney's office. However, when his friend Franz is brutally beaten and Franz's son murdered by racketeers, Conway decides to take action.

Smashing the Rackets is a pretty standard crime film, rather reminiscent of Chester Morris' previous (and superior) 1935 crime film Public Hero #1. Morris is a competent leading man, while Frances Mercer and Rita Johnson are fine. Bruce Cabot is appropriately slimy as the villain. Cabot is not an actor I'm overly fond of, but he gave easily the best performance I've seen from him.

The film is surpassingly violent for 1938; for example, a child is killed by the gangsters. It was apparently banned in Sweden. Overall, it's all pretty routine.

Chester Morris is a gun-toting G-Man who gets a chance to be a straight lawyer for the D.A.'s office. He's bored and wasted, bailing out playgirls for his boss and handed no-win cases. When the father watches his son's murderers walk, Morris calls some of his old friends and beat a guy until one of the racketeers confesses. This convinces the powers-that-be that he's the man to run a special investigation.

It's an astonishingly brutal movie for 1938, not just for the violence. That was standard for the issue, and the standard lampshading applied. You never saw the gun being fired and the victim crumpling in the same shot. No, the brutality, and the thing that makes me wonder how it got past the censors under Joe Breen, is the disrespect it shows to the authorities, stating plainly that legal investigation won't get the job done, with the shoot-out that kills the villains and sets the world a-right inevitable. There's signs of brutalizing hoods and so forth. It's clear to me that the Hays Office let this one slide past The Swedish censors were not so accommodating. They turned down a license for its exhibition.

Otherwise, a standard affair, with Chester Morris looking like Dick Tracy.