Rackety Rax (Fox) is a brilliant travesty on college football and racketeering. It starts when a gangster, Knucks McGloin (Victor McLaglen) is escorted to his first football game by his publicity agent. Speed Bennett (Arthur Pierson).
Speed: Now listen, chief, you can't fool with football. It's the only serious thing left any more. . . .
Knucks: I've made up my mind. We gotta get a college.
Speed: How are you going to do it?
Knucks: That's easy. We'll capture a college. I'll pick one out and surround it with gorillas.
Persuaded to choose a more temperate course, McGloin first tries to buy out Fordham, then West Point and Annapolis. Finally he founds a Carnarsie University, acquires competent coaches, converts his stable of plug-uglies and wrestlers into a terrifying football team. After a season of phenomenal success. McGloin accepts a post-season game against an obscure team called Lake Shore University. Soon after the contest starts, McGloin realizes what has happened: Lake Shore University is backed by a Chicago gang as shameless as his own. The game becomes an armageddon in which machine guns rattle, bombs are thrown, punts shot down. Presently no one much is left except the appalled press agent and a pretty girl sportswriter (Nell O'Day). Rackety Rax was adapted from Joel Sayre's brief novel first published in the American Mercury last January. It uses a simpler technique than recent pictures in the same vein (Once in a Lifetime, The Phantom President) to attain hilarious absurdity. It simply allows the behavior of its characters, who are presented in straightforward fashion, to reach a logical extreme. Good shot: McGloin using a "lie detector" on a speakeasy proprietor.
Smilin' Through (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is an old-fashioned cinema, gentle, lachrymose and romantic, calculated to make the throat of any susceptible cinemaddict like that of a giraffe swallowing oranges. The first lump occurs when John Carteret (Leslie Howard) is found moping, at the turn of the century, in his handsome English garden. Disconsolate about a dead fiancee, he is reluctant to console himself by becoming foster-father to her orphaned niece Kathleen. The niece grows up into Norma Shearer and falls in love with a young American (Fredric March) who has come to England to enlist in the War. When Kathleen tells her foster-father the name of her admirer—Kenneth Wayne—the whole story comes out. Kenneth Wayne's father is the man who jealously murdered John Carteret's fiancee on her wedding day. As though this were not enough of a handicap for the romance between Kenneth and Kathleen, Wayne comes home from the War on crutches. With misplaced gallantry, he tells Kathleen he does not love her any more. Finally, John Carteret dies. In the vague habiliments of an apparition, in company with the apparition of his dead fiancee, Moonyeen, he watches his foster-daughter and Kenneth Wayne walk up the garden path together.