D: Lloyd Bacon. P:
Sam Bischoff. W: Robert Rossen, Leonardo Bercovici. Ph: Arthur Edeson. M:
Adolph Deutsch. St: George Brent (Denny Jordon), Humphrey Bogart (John ‘Czar’
Martin), Gloria Dickson (Nora Jordon), Allen Jenkins (Skeets Wilson), Walter
Abel (Hugh Allison)
Flaunting approval
by the Commercial Crime Commission and with a principal character closely modelled
on the legendary Thomas E Dewey, this lower-rung Warners crime picture demonstrates
the evolution of the genre in the late Thirties. The gangster biopics, the bane
of the Hollywood Production Code, had been largely displaced by stories of law
enforcers (G-Men, Bullets or Ballots, Man of the People, I Am
the Law) and, here, the civilians caught in the underworld crossfire.
Walter Abel, cast
as special prosecutor Allison, Dewey’s surrogate, looks much like his
inspiration; when the script refers to Allison’s earlier triumph against a
certain ‘Lucky Lugano’, nobody could have missed the allusion to Dewey’s most celebrated
victim. (Abel’s resemblance to Dewey was exploited in the same year’s similarly
themed Law of the Underworld.) Allison’s
target in this case is the ambitious John Martin – “I’m going to make this
whole town pay off to me, from bootblacks to bankers” – who sets his rapacious
sights on New York’s fresh-produce market (another target for Dewey’s zeal) and
the truckers it relies on for distribution.
One of those
truckers is Denny Jordan, a maverick reluctantly thrust into the front line of
the fightback. In financial straits, he steals from the racketeers’ coffers to
pay for private healthcare for his pregnant wife. Martin lets him keep the
dough – so long as he joins the Manhattan Trucking Association set up by Martin
to supplant the legitimate union. Even his wife looks at him as a hypocrite. When
his two best friends fall foul of the mobsters, Denny finally rallies the
truckers against the mobsters.
The scant running
time is divided between Denny’s efforts to remain independent – badgered to
take a proactive role by the truckers’ union on one side, and to name names by
Allison on the other – and the intimidation tactics of Martin’s organisation. There
is more than a whiff of Depression-era anxiety in scenes of men frozen out of
employment, or the prospect of the city’s food supplies throttled by an
Association-ordered truckers’ strike. Labour debates and pleas for collective
action, meanwhile, probably reflect the communist principles of screenwriters
Rossen and Bercovici.
Allison advocates
collaborative action of a different nature. Sounding a note of defiance, in tones
that veer towards didactic, his role is to reassure Thirties filmgoers that organised
crime can be defeated, so long as citizens cooperate with the criminal justice
system. Of course, when they do so, they pay a heavy price.
Equally
perfunctory as social document and urban melodrama, Racket Busters needed a sharper script and a punchier lead
performance. Brent is personable enough, but one can’t help wondering what
James Cagney or Paul Muni would have brought to the role, as thinly written as
it is. Brent’s best moments involve blue-collar badinage with the fine comic
actor Allen Jenkins, whose character, Denny’s sometime partner, steals the
latter’s heroic laurels with a barnstorming speech late in the film that helps
galvanise the merchants and the truckers against their oppressors.
Bogart has
relatively little screen time. This was the kind of one-dimensional role he was
tiring of playing. He exaggerates his famous sneer, referring contemptuously to
the citizens as “suckers”, but is most successful in moments of unsmiling
menace – his unemotional manner when he confronts Denny about the robbery,
knowing he has him in his clutches, is quietly sinister.
Bacon, a Warners
workhorse, directs with the economy that comes from production-line experience,
making effective use of montage to expedite the narrative. He had trodden this ground
before. The previous year he made one of his best crime films, Marked Woman, with a sparkling Bette
Davis as a ‘hostess’ persuaded to testify against a mob boss – a stand-in for
Lucky Luciano – by another special prosecutor – a thinly veiled Thomas E Dewey
– played by none other than Humphrey Bogart. (Bacon directed Bogie on seven
occasions in six years.)
A formulaic example of the kind of topical, clangorous drama that rehabilitated the gangster film in the Thirties, this is nonetheless interesting for the way it moderates the demands on its “every man for himself” hero. There is scope for individual endeavour – Denny metes out physical punishment to Martin – but it was important for the film’s agenda that the law be seen to deliver the coup de grâce. Kevin Grant
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