Rubber Racketeers (1942) On DVD

Racketeer Gillin is paroled from prison and immediately goes to work trying to make an illegal buck from America's war effort. With rationing in effect the black market tire business is booming. Gillen's mob sets up car lots around town where they peddle stolen tires and "new" tires milled in the gangster's factories from cheap faulty materials. People begin to die in crashes as the defective tires fail. Bill Barry leads his fellow defense plant workers on a crusade to uncover the source of the black market rubber and bring the guilty to justice.

Although clearly intended to warn the public about black market tire smuggling, Rubber Racketeers holds it own as a saga of mobsters versus an irate public. Wishing to cash in on the Valentino craze then sweeping Hollywood, studio heads transformed Jacob Krantz into Ricardo Cortez. He appeared in a number of films most notably Pony Express (1924), Torrent (1926), The Maltese Falcon (1931) and The Case Of The Black Cat (1936) before leaving Tinseltown for a successful career on Wall Street.

The fourth production from the enterprising King Brothers, RUBBER RACKETEERS drew its inspiration from late-breaking headlines. When wartime rationing kicks in, rubber suddenly is at a premium, resulting in a brisk black market in bootlegged rubber tires. Patriotic defense plant worker Bill Barry (Bill Henry) rounds up his fellow workers to help stem the activities of hot-tire racketeer Gilin (Ricardo Cortez). In his American film debut, John Abbott plays a mute secondary hoodlum named Dumbo, who inability to speak neatly hides his cultured British dialect. Partially designed as a warning to "You, the Public" to avoid shady entrepreneurs like Gilin, RUBBER RACKETEERS also succeeds as a purely as a rip-roaring actioner.