Good concept, poorly executed.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Smashing The Rackets casts Chester Morris as a square jawed hero who is a combination of Thomas E. Dewey and Melvin Purvis. An FBI agent like Purvis who reaped a lot of publicity by taking down public enemies like John Dillinger and BabyFace Nelson, Morris decides to leave the FBI and practice law as he was trained to do. He takes a job with District Attorney George Irving who believes that Morris's presence on his staff is worth a lot of votes.Not that he's looking for real work out of Morris because Irving is in the pocket of the crime syndicate. Nevertheless Morris proves to be quite resourceful and brings down several racketeers.The most elusive of these is Bruce Cabot who is a smooth talking white shoe type lawyer, but who in reality is Mister Kingpin in that city of all the rackets. Cabot is a cunning and resourceful foe and Morris's job is made complicated by the fact that Morris is courting Frances Mercer of the society set, her sister Rita Johnson is running around with Cabot for kicks. Cabot has the best role by far in the film. In fact it's one of the best performances I ever saw him give.Dewey and Purvis were role models for a slew of films in the Thirties though Smashing The Rackets is the first I ever saw that combined their characters. This is a well constructed film with a good story line that gives a bit of a twist in the ending.