OVP: The Racket (1928)

Film: The Racket (1928)
Stars: Thomas Meighan, Marie Prevost, Louis Wolheim
Director: Lewis Milestone
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Picture)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

For those of you who are not fans of the Olympics (judging from the traffic, that may not be a lot of you), you may have been wondering what has become of the Oscar Viewing Project.  Never fear, while I did take a slight break to watch the world's greatest athletes and discuss the Republicans' nominee for Vice President, we are going to be returning hot and heavy into the films that Oscar deemed worthy.  I have a lot of fun stuff planned for September as well-more Oscar films, theatrical releases, September TV show premieres, the U.S. Open, the Democratic National Convention (I will be recapping all of the televised nights), and possibly more-so hang onto your hats and pray that I don't get distracted by shiny objects.

To welcome both you and I back to Oscar Viewing, I thought it would be great fun to go with not only our first Silent Era film, but also one of the first three films to be nominated for Best Picture.  At the first Academy Awards, Best Picture was broken out into two categories-Outstanding Production and Unique and Artistic Production.  Unique and Artistic Production got canned, though considering that the masterworks Sunrise and The Crowd were amongst the films in that category, it sort of makes you wonder what sort of course the Academy Awards would have taken had they stuck with the category.  This is my first of the three films in the Outstanding Production that I've seen, and while Seventh Heaven (the other losing nominee) could pop up at any time, I've decided to save the ultimate winner of this category, Wings, for my final OVP movie.  So it may take a bit of time, as I've got 2249 films to go!

But let's start that countdown with this film, directed by Lewis Milestone, who scored two Oscars in the first three years of the Oscars, and is noted for his big pictures, as well as his massive ego.  Considering the film was produced by Howard Hughes, also famously sure of himself, I would have loved to be a fly on the wall on this set.  Milestone's epic masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front relied largely on the naivety of some of his characters, as they slowly became world-weary men.  He's less sturdy here, where all of the characters have long-established relationships, and while it's hard to call them cliches since it was 1928 and film hadn't been around long enough to deal in cliches, the wise-cracking mob moll (Prevost), a justice-defying crime boss (Louis Wolheim, who would also memorably work with Milestone in the aforementioned AQOTWF), and the unflappable cop with a solid moral compass (Meighan) are such standard and overused tropes that you feel like you've already seen the film halfway through it.  This isn't necessarily Milestone's or Hughes's faults, but what is their fault is the way it treats Meighan in particular-it seems unbelievable that someone with the experience he has would, for example (SPOILER ALERT) leave his star witness meandering around the police station where Wolheim's mob boss is able to shoot him, rather than locking him up.  The best part of the film has to be Prevost, all Mae West spunk and able to seduce any man in her path, except oddly our two stars.  Prevost would be one of the more tragic stars of the 1930's, purportedly having an affair with Hughes (though really, what starlet didn't sleep with Hughes at some point during the 30's?), and becoming an alcoholic after this film.  She died of heart failure at the age of 38 (Joan Crawford, a longtime friend, paid for the funeral as Prevost was broke).

Overall, the film was a bit of a disappointment considering the heights that Hughes and Milestone were able to reach later in their respective careers, but I'll turn it over to you now.  Have you seen The Racket, and does it rank alongside of Wings or Seventh Heaven (or Sunrise and The Crowd, for that matter), in your opinion?  Do you have a favorite Marie Prevost performance?  And have you been doing any Oscar-viewing while I've been slacking off?  Do tell!