The Woman Racket (1930)

The Woman Racket (later retitled Lights and Shadows) is a 1930 MGM pre-code romantic/crime melodrama. I have heard that it was originally shot as a silent film but that only the talkie version survives. It’s one of MGM’s early attempts at a hardboiled feel, which works fairly well.

It begins with a police raid on the Blue Moon speakeasy. Patrolman Tom Hayes (Tom Moore) takes pity on one of the hostesses, Julia Barnes (Blanche Sweet) and allows her to escape. They go out together, they fall in love and they get married.

The problem is that Julia likes glamour excitement and pretty things and you don’t get much of that married to a cop, on a cop’s salary. Tom is decent enough and he’s crazy about her but he’s a cop through and through.

She succumbs to the temptation to pay a visit to the Blue Moon.

And she’s tempted to fall back into her old wicked ways. The marriage is on the rocks.

Pretty soon she’s the mistress of the owner of the Blue Moon, Chris Miller (John Miljan). But her old life doesn’t appeal to her so much any more and she’s riddled with guilt.

There’s also the matter of her friend Buddy (Sally Starr). Buddy is a sweet kid and a promising chanteuse but Julia is worried that the wicked Chris Miller will corrupt her. And Chris has every intention of doing just that. Julia wants to save her Buddy from making he mistakes she made.

The other problem is that Chris isn’t just a nightclub owner but also a bit of a gangster, in a modest way. So Julia and Buddy could get mixed up in some very shady goings-on if they’re not careful.

The Wall Street Crash happened in late October 1929. The Woman Racket was released in January 1930 which means that production would have been well underway or perhaps even completed) before the Crash hit. Which means this is a Jazz Age movie rather than (like so many pre-code films) a Depression movie. And it does have a Jazz Age feel.

Blanche Sweet had been a major star in silent films but failed to make a successful transition to talkies. In this film she’s trying to achieve a mixture of mildly hardboiled with sweet and good-natured and she does a fairly decent job but by this time new time new stars were starting to emerge, who did this sort of thing better. But there’s really nothing wrong at all with her performance here.

John Miljan was one of the great slimy oily villains of the early sound era. Maybe he wasn’t quite in the Warren William class but he was very nearly as good. He’s in deliciously sinister manipulative form here.

The plot is serviceable enough. There are moments that betray its stage origins (it was based on a successful play).

The ending is slightly contrived but the final confrontation in total darkness is quite well done.

Is it really pre-code? Not overly, although it is fairly obvious that Julia really is Chris’s mistress and she is of course a married woman. She was a hostess as well as a singer and the title of the movie suggests that perhaps we’re intended to assume that the hostesses at the Blue Moon are part-time prostitutes. It’s possible that that element was more evident in the original script but was seriously downplayed in the final cut.

I enjoyed The Woman Racket and I’m happy to recommend it.

The Warner Archive DVD is fine.