Gambling With Souls (aka Vice Racket) (DVD)

A surprise midnight raid on an illegal casino/bordello sends wealthy married men and underage girls in their scanties scurrying to avoid a battalion of coppers cracking down on big city vice. After the chaos has been abated and moral order restored, Mae Miller (Martha Chapin) is arrested for shooting Lucky Wilder (Wheeler Oakman). She confesses to the crime, spinning a sad tale of a beautiful but unsuspecting wife lured into overwhelming debt and then forced into prostitution to repay the heartless gangster, Lucky. Forced to abort the unborn child of one her many johns in a back-alley operation and seeing her younger sister fall into the same fool's paradise that caused her so much pain, Mae takes the law - and a gun - into her own hands.

Earnestly produced by J.D. Kendis as a warning to those who are tempted by the cheap thrills of easy money, casual sex and deadly dope, Gambling With Souls is an especially prurient 30's "educational" exploitation film as frank and as coarse as the characters it gleefully depicts.

• exploitation