The Racket-1951-Robert Mitchum-Robert Ryan

At first glance, John Cromwell's 1951 version of Bartlett Cormack's Broadway play The Racket is just another instance of that most archetypal of crime stories: a tough-as-nails, incorruptible police captain (His Kind of Woman's Robert Mitchum) comes into town with an agenda to clean up the streets, as well as his own increasingly corrupt force.



But the twist which Cromwell brings to the old scenario is a pretty brilliant one. In The Racket, we have a second protagonist (On Dangerous Ground's Robert Ryan), a tough-as-nails, old-fashioned local ganglord who's just as frustrated by the national syndicate's looming transition from crime to "business" as Mitchum is by the forces of law and order's eagerness to accept bribes. It's a nostalgic love letter to the days when cops were cops and robbers were robbers, a rare story in which the men on both sides of the law have a single common enemy: progress.



The Racket was based on a play by Bartlett Cormack, first filmed as a silent in 1928. The storyline was updated to include references to Estes Kefauver's Senate Crime Investigating Committee: otherwise, the plot (and much of the dialogue) was lifted bodily from the Cormack play. Racketeer Robert Ryan has managed to get several government and law-enforcement higher-ups in his pocket. But Ryan can't touch the incorruptible police officer Robert Mitchum, who refuses all attempts at bribery. Ryan pulls strings to get Mitchum transferred to a series of undesirable precincts, but Mitchum will not be dissuaded. The battle of wills between cop and criminal comes to a head when mob-connected nightclub singer Lizabeth Scott turns on her former protector Ryan. The Broadway version of The Racket starred Edward G. Robinson as the racketeer; the 1928 film version featured Louis Wolheim in the Robinson role and Thomas Meighan as the upright cop. Both the silent and sound versions of the property were personally produced by Howard R. Hughes.



Cast:



Robert Mitchum - Capt. Thomas McQuigg

Lizabeth Scott - Irene Hayes

Robert Ryan - Nick Scanlon

William Talman - Johnson

Ray Collins - Welch

Joyce MacKenzie - Mary McQuigg

Robert Hutton - Ames

Virginia Huston - Lucy Johnson

William Conrad - Turck

Walter Sande - Delaney

Les Tremayne - Harry Craig

Walter S. Baldwin - Sullivan

Brett King - Joe Scanlon

Tito Vuolo - Tony







This is a remake of last weeks upload of The Racket from 1928