Rubber Racketeers (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.

• drama