Love Is a Racket

I've said on a lot of occasions how I like Warner Bros.' B movies. They also had a lot of good programmers in the 1930s, with a good example of this being a movie I recently watched off my DVR, Love Is a Racket.

Jimmy Russell (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) is a reporter stereotyp, as we see when he gets a call waking him up at 5:00 -- PM, not AM. He writes the Broadway gossip column for one of the New York newspapers, and has a roommate in the form of Stanley Fiske (Lee Tracy), whose purpose in being there is never really quite mentioned. Also showing up at the apartment is Sally Condon (Ann Dvorak), who really holds a torch for Jimmy. But he's got a bit more of a torch for young Mary Wodehouse (Frances Dee), an up-and-coming actress.

Mary, for her part, has a couple of other guys interested in her, notably Broadway producer Max Boncour (Andre Luguet), as well as gangster Eddie Shaw (Lyle Talbot). One of Eddie's current rackets involves the dairy business, and in fact Jimmy has heard some gossip that might help blow the racket wide open. But Jimmy doesn't want to report it, in part because that's not his beat, and in part because it's not confirmed enough. One of Jimmy's colleagues, however, does try to report it, and Jimmy has to do some fast work to spike the story.

But the dairy racket is not the real thrust of the movie. That thrust involves Mary, who lives with her aunt and has been living beyond her means. She's written a couple of checks that are going to bounce, so somebody decides to be a good Samaritan and cover the checks for her. Of course, it's not all altruism. As you might be able to guess, it's Eddie who bought the checks, and he wants something back for having done so, which is specifically Mary as his girlfriend.

Jimmy isn't about to let that happen, so Eddie, who has decamped to Atlantic City, sends Mary a telegram threatening her, and Jimmy, being chivalrous, tells Mary he'll try to help her. But it's a ruse, and Jimmy is detained in Atlantic City by one of Eddie's underlings. He is able to escape and get back to New York, but when he goes to see Eddie, he finds that Eddie has just been killed!

As you can see, there's a lot going on in Love Is a Racket. To be honest, it's doesn't all quite mesh. But director William Wellman and his cast approach the material with such verve that they make this little pre-Code an eminently interesting watch. Objectively, it's not the world's greatest movie by any stretch of the imagination, but you could do a lot worse than Love Is a Racket.