Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day Fourteen: Silence! Don't Make Such a Racket

After days of living in the decadence of the Screwball Comedies of the late 1930s we journey right back to the first ceremony in 1929, won by the already watched Wings, there were two another nominees one being the gangster film - The Racket. The general jist of the film is the citywide battle between an upstanding Police Captain and a local gangster. Thomas Meighnan's McQuigg keeps trying to bring Nick Scarsi's crime empire down but because Scarsi owns most of the town, McQuigg's efforts are fruitless and he ends up getting transferred to a small country police station where nothing ever happens. He eventually gets one up on Scarsi, when Scarsi's brother is arrested in conjuction with a hit and run and thanks to a manipulative nightclub singer he is able to bring Scarsi down. Compared to that year's winner Wings, I found that The Racket was very generic and a lot of the shootout sequences in particular were very poor.

Although the film is very much a masculine affair the best performance in my opinion came from Marie Prevost as the club singer Helen Hayes. She was able to wrap her finger round most of the men in the film by pretending to be vulnerable while in actuality she was after money and fame. As a leading man Meighan was very wooden and didn't give me anything to particularly care about his fate. One thing that I did note about this film is that it played very much on the power of the press, a theme that has been seen in a couple of other films I've watched so far. McQuigg's war with Scarsi is played out through the papers, especially when he is transported to his outpost in the sticks. I just didn't really connect with The Racket, and wonder why it was nomianted for Best Picture. In my opnion there was a lack of a decent story, decent actors and the music was way over the top. I think Wings surpassed The Racket by a mile and am glad that it won that year however I am yet to see the third nominee - Seventh Heaven.