***Yeah, Once Again Crime Does Not Pay-Robert Mitchum’s The Racket

 

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

The Racket, starring Robert Mitchum, Robert Ryan. Lizabeth Scott, 1951  

No question I started life as nothing by a po’ boy corner boy with all the wanting habits that are available in this wicked old world, wanting habits that only were magnified once the heavy burden of girlfriend-dom came hurdling my way. Wanting habits that moreover I “knew” were not going to be satisfied through some rich guy’s largesse, being a proper nice boy or by some unfathomed merit being appreciated. Hey, that is way I thought, a lot of guys thought, a lot of guys I knew back in the day who taught me a thing or two about wanting habits and the satisfaction of those wants. For a while, for a while until I began to think, after a few close calls, that it took infinitely more energy to plan some illegal capers than the payoff warranted and that maybe being a nice boy, well not nice boy but not a corner boy, and finding some way to get in on that merit thing was a better bet that I would survive past twenty-one on the outside. And you can ask my old time corner boys, who taught me a trick or two and who did various stretches in various local, county, state and in one case federal prison if maybe I chose the wiser course. So of course, although maybe with a little tongue in cheek playing with the title of this sketch I am a firm believer that crime does not pay. That is more than I can say for our boy Nick (played by Robert Ryan) in the film under review, The Racket, who learned that lesson the hard way, the very hardest way, the big knock-off way.      

Here is what happened. Nick, right after the war (that war giving the time of the film being World War II for the unknowing), was king of the hill, king of the rackets in Edge City (not the name of the town but that can fill in for every town of any size where dough can be made by gambling, extortion, dope, transporting woman, and any local variations which guys like Nick can think up). Of course Nick didn’t get where he got by being a chump, by being soft or by being anything but a hard guy to protect his interests, up to and including murder. Of course when a guy, a rackets guy, runs a town there is no question that he is wired in with the cops, the pols and the courts and as we get a feel for the town in the film everybody can see, everybody with eyes anyway can see, that the town is sewed up tight with everybody on the graft.

Well everybody but Captain McQuigg (played by Robert Mitchum, a guy who knows about crime not paying from his days taking the fall for femme Katie in Out Of The Past, so maybe he had smartened up since it sure looks like it at least in 1951) can be bought but McQuigg is that odd breed the honest cop. So naturally there is going to be a test of wills, these guys who knew each back on the block are going to go mano y mano before the film is through. But see Nick is a dinosaur even in the rackets, the new breed illegal/legal guys are tired unto death of the murders, the beatings and all that stuff that was okay back in the 1920s (when the original version of this film was done) but in the boom-boom days of the 1950s that rough stuff was strictly for amateurs, for guys who were heading somewhere, feet first.            

But Nick remember is nothing but old school, knows that in the end for him anyway it is either survival of the fittest or nothing.  And McQuigg makes sure that it is nothing, the big zero. But along the way he has to deal with state officials who are as crooked as Nick, maybe more so. Has to deal with a torch singer (played by husky-voiced Lizabeth Scott) who has seen it all, brother, seen it all, and it takes a lot of arm-twisting by McQuigg before she tumbles to the side of the angels all because he had her mitts into Nick’s brother and knew plenty but was not squawking knowing the wrath of Nick. And has to deal with avenging a murder of a good cop by stupid Nick. But good cops must prevail in these noir bust-ups and so we knew beforehand that Nick was doomed. Hell I knew that when I was nothing but a wet-behind-the-ears corner boy.