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Granger then dupes strait-laced Artist Pier (Teresa) Angeli into making the first copy. Sanders plays along with the scheme while wisely acting on the theory that Granger plans to sell the real painting himself. Ultimately, after each double-cross has been doubled and redoubled, Scoundrel Granger is regenerated by the love of a good woman—the kind of feat that angelic Actress Angeli may be forever destined by Hollywood to perform. Ironically, Scripter-Director Richard Brooks is the author of a current novel (The Producer) in which a moviemaker grapples with a front-office demand for an ending that wrenches the hero out of character. Brooks's own movie is a stock item too artificial to pose this issue as a problem of integrity, but by wrenching Granger out of character for a happy ending, he burdens The Light Touch with its heaviest going.
The Racket (RKO Radio) is Hollywood's answer to the Kefauver crime hearings, which showed millions of TV fans that the truth is often stranger than Hollywood fiction. Not to be outdone by the truth, Producer Edmund Grainger now strikes a blow for the moviemakers by offering a big-city crime fable as outlandish as oversimplification and exaggeration can make it.
The film's mythical city (misleadingly introduced with a shot of Manhattan's Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street) is run by an old-fashioned mobster (Robert Ryan), now quasi-respectable, in alliance with a mysterious mastermind of U.S. crime and corruption. The only honest public official in town is Police Captain Robert Mitchum, and though the crooks have had him shifted to a "quiet" district, all the picture's five killings take place in his bailiwick.
Mitchum, who owes Ryan a grudge from boyhood, finally gets his man, but not before the racketeer blows up his home, bumps off a talkative political candidate, twists the assistant state's attorney into cringing obedience and, swaggering into the police station, shoots a cop and walks away. Also present: a hard-looking nightclub thrush (Lizabeth Scott) with a heart of gold, and a reporter (Robert Hutton) who loves her at first sight.
The big brain of U.S. crime, who makes and breaks judges, prosecutors and gangland Gauleiters from a real-estate office in the middle of town, is known to the cast of The Racket only as "the Old Man." If anyone knows his name, no one mentions it, and nobody, including the audience, ever gets a look at him. The invisible Old Man gives the best performance in the trashiest major production of the year.