Programme notes CH 02 — Noir After Dark
The Racketeer
A gentleman racketeer falls for a society girl and pays for the career of the man she loves.
Robert Armstrong plays Mahlon Keane as a crook with a tailor and a conscience, which in 1929 was still a novelty. He meets Rhoda (Carole Lombard, billed as Carol) at a card table, learns she is keeping a drunken violinist on his feet, and sets about buying her happiness the only way he knows: by fixing it. Pathé made it in the first full year of talkies, and the microphones show; the voices are careful, the rooms hushed. That stillness suits a film about a man doing quiet favours with loud money. Watch the society party: the hostess making small talk is Hedda Hopper, a decade before the column.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- Howard Higgin
- Photographed by
- David Abel
- With
- Robert Armstrong · Carole Lombard · Hedda Hopper · John Loder · Paul Hurst · Winter Hall
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
Robert Armstrong as the gentleman crook twice in a year: here he runs the racket himself, in Paid he goes partners with Joan Crawford. The same manners, a different senior partner.