User Reviews

****SPOILERS**** Just released from prison after a 14 year stretch for bootlegging mobster "Gil" Glin, Ricardo "Ricky" Cortez, plans to corner the rubber tire racket or market by him and his goons, who stood by him his entire time he was incarcerated, stealing genuine rubber tires that are desperately needed for the war effort. Glin plans to dumb the tires down by mixing them with cheap and tawdry synthetic rubber and selling them at top prices to an unsuspecting public. It's when Freddy, Sam Edwards, the brother of Mary Dale, Barbara Reed, was killed due to a defected tire he brought from a car lot run by Glin that Mary's boyfriend defense worker Bill Barry, Bill Henry, and his fellow defense workers went into action.

Checking out all the car lots and tire joints that are run by Glin has him send his goons out to put a stop to Barry's efforts to put him out of business as well as back behind bars for subverting, with his cheap rubber tires, the US war effort against world fascism. At first trying to get on Barry's good side by just leaning on him a little in having his goons mildly working him over Glin finally decides to rub him out and use his moll Nikki, Rochelle Hudson, as bait. Even Nikki sees what a low life jerk as well as traitor to his country Glin is and refuses, at the possible cost of her life, to go along with his evil plan.

****SPOILERS**** The last straw for Glin is when his Chinese butler Tom, Kam Tong, who just enlisted into the US Army finds out what he's up to and threatens to turn him into the FBI. With Barry bloody and unconscious from the beating he took from Glin's hood locked in the closet Glin guns Tom, an American soldier on his way to fight fascism overseas, down as he heads to his secret tire factory to lay low from the police and FBI. With Barry breaking out of the closet and heading for the tire factory to confront Glin and his gang Barry's fellow patriotic defense workers join him in a wild mêlée where Glin's whole criminal operation falls apart. It in fact was one of Glin's most loyal followers the not too bright Dumbo, John Abbott, who finally saw the light and helped Barry put him away together with his entire criminal enterprise.

I enjoyed this little propaganda film made in America in 1942. It's a thriller about a criminal organisation making and selling low-quality car tyres from re-used rubber, hence the title. The situation arose due to the strict rationing in place in America during the war years and has plenty of propaganda elements, particularly in a lengthy moralistic conversation at the outset.

Otherwise this is a strict B-movie made on a low budget, albeit one with plenty of action and incident to sustain the hour-long running time. The main character is a low key criminal just released from prison who decides to get involved in the racket himself, only to realise the danger to life it poses. He then goes up against the bad guys with the help of his girlfriend. It all ends in one of those delightfully ferocious brawls that usually ended these productions.

This was shot, I assume, in the months following Pearl Harbor, when everyone was in a chauvinistic rapture -- except for the criminals who make shoddy tires. Planktonrules has already given as much of the details of the plot as the film deserves, so I'll skip most of it.

Opening scene: a young man is pointing an early model Thompson sub machine gun at the camera lens, then slowly moves to the side and stitches a row of bullet holes through a post of Mussolini, Hitler, and Tojo. He's shooting at a target in a defense plant while the other workers tand around and grin encouragingly. He remarks with a grin, "Okay, I just gave this Jap exterminator a try out and she's ready to go, so spin her along." I guess that's Bill Henry. He can't act very well but then the movie is not worth much of his effort. He has a cute girl friend waiting for him outside the plant, Barbara Read. Boy, she sure wishes her application for a job at the plant would go through, and Bill would like it too because it would free him to do some of "that front line stuff."

I guess I'll explain the process behind Ricardo Cortez' phony tire racket. It's impossible for anyone to buy new tires because Southeast Asia is now in the hands of the Japanese and Latin America's rubber must go straight to the military. So Cortez takes threadbare old tires, rubs off the brand name, puts on a coating of faux rubber that will last only a few thousand miles, and offers them as brand new. It would be a joke if it ended with "Shorty's Recapping and Vulcanizing Service, Punxatawny, Pennsylvania."

As it is, it was a serious business during the war years. I was a child but can remember the rationing of many consumer goods. Not just rubber but gasoline, meat, and most other stuff we think of as staples today. Butter was next to impossible to buy. Instead, housewives used a greasy white material called "Nucoa" that needed a yellow dye stirred into it to deceive the eye. School kids were sent out to collect milkweed pods that were used in the manufacture of life vests. Of course that was in a period when everyone chipped in to pay for a war. Fortunately, we now have many many little wars but nobody pays for them.

So what this amounts to, in less than an hour, is a kind of training film for civilians. "Reefer Madness" taught us that if you smoke weed you go crazy. "Rubber Racketeers teaches us to watch out for phonies and if you run into them, don't patronize them. Report them. Or -- as here -- shut them down yourself.

The patriotic programmers never really worked because someone always figures out a way to game the system and by 1944 the black market was flourishing, although it's not something you hear about. "All My Sons" did a better job.

In its own shabby way the movie is an interesting example of the vernacular culture of the period -- the cars, the clothes, the lingo, the attitudes. A little like taking a Twilight Zone trip into the past.

Fast paced little crime programmer, with an unusual topic, involving gangsters who manufacture bad quality tyres. And that makes people's life in jeopardy, especially drivers, as you can guess. The plot line has already been told in detail, just above. The story itself remains after all very classic, not so many surprises. Harry Young, the director, made a batch of films in the thirties and forties very hard to catch. Obscure features, I can guarantee. So, I did not miss this opportunity to watch it.

The copy in DVD I saw came from a 16mm print very pleased to play. Good quality. Maybe you will find it on TCM, one of these days. Who knows?