This was shot, I assume, in the months following Pearl Harbor, when everyone was in a chauvinistic rapture -- except for the criminals who make shoddy tires. Planktonrules has already given as much of the details of the plot as the film deserves, so I'll skip most of it.
Opening scene: a young man is pointing an early model Thompson sub machine gun at the camera lens, then slowly moves to the side and stitches a row of bullet holes through a post of Mussolini, Hitler, and Tojo. He's shooting at a target in a defense plant while the other workers tand around and grin encouragingly. He remarks with a grin, "Okay, I just gave this Jap exterminator a try out and she's ready to go, so spin her along." I guess that's Bill Henry. He can't act very well but then the movie is not worth much of his effort. He has a cute girl friend waiting for him outside the plant, Barbara Read. Boy, she sure wishes her application for a job at the plant would go through, and Bill would like it too because it would free him to do some of "that front line stuff."
I guess I'll explain the process behind Ricardo Cortez' phony tire racket. It's impossible for anyone to buy new tires because Southeast Asia is now in the hands of the Japanese and Latin America's rubber must go straight to the military. So Cortez takes threadbare old tires, rubs off the brand name, puts on a coating of faux rubber that will last only a few thousand miles, and offers them as brand new. It would be a joke if it ended with "Shorty's Recapping and Vulcanizing Service, Punxatawny, Pennsylvania."
As it is, it was a serious business during the war years. I was a child but can remember the rationing of many consumer goods. Not just rubber but gasoline, meat, and most other stuff we think of as staples today. Butter was next to impossible to buy. Instead, housewives used a greasy white material called "Nucoa" that needed a yellow dye stirred into it to deceive the eye. School kids were sent out to collect milkweed pods that were used in the manufacture of life vests. Of course that was in a period when everyone chipped in to pay for a war. Fortunately, we now have many many little wars but nobody pays for them.
So what this amounts to, in less than an hour, is a kind of training film for civilians. "Reefer Madness" taught us that if you smoke weed you go crazy. "Rubber Racketeers teaches us to watch out for phonies and if you run into them, don't patronize them. Report them. Or -- as here -- shut them down yourself.
The patriotic programmers never really worked because someone always figures out a way to game the system and by 1944 the black market was flourishing, although it's not something you hear about. "All My Sons" did a better job.
In its own shabby way the movie is an interesting example of the vernacular culture of the period -- the cars, the clothes, the lingo, the attitudes. A little like taking a Twilight Zone trip into the past.
Opening scene: a young man is pointing an early model Thompson sub machine gun at the camera lens, then slowly moves to the side and stitches a row of bullet holes through a post of Mussolini, Hitler, and Tojo. He's shooting at a target in a defense plant while the other workers tand around and grin encouragingly. He remarks with a grin, "Okay, I just gave this Jap exterminator a try out and she's ready to go, so spin her along." I guess that's Bill Henry. He can't act very well but then the movie is not worth much of his effort. He has a cute girl friend waiting for him outside the plant, Barbara Read. Boy, she sure wishes her application for a job at the plant would go through, and Bill would like it too because it would free him to do some of "that front line stuff."
I guess I'll explain the process behind Ricardo Cortez' phony tire racket. It's impossible for anyone to buy new tires because Southeast Asia is now in the hands of the Japanese and Latin America's rubber must go straight to the military. So Cortez takes threadbare old tires, rubs off the brand name, puts on a coating of faux rubber that will last only a few thousand miles, and offers them as brand new. It would be a joke if it ended with "Shorty's Recapping and Vulcanizing Service, Punxatawny, Pennsylvania."
As it is, it was a serious business during the war years. I was a child but can remember the rationing of many consumer goods. Not just rubber but gasoline, meat, and most other stuff we think of as staples today. Butter was next to impossible to buy. Instead, housewives used a greasy white material called "Nucoa" that needed a yellow dye stirred into it to deceive the eye. School kids were sent out to collect milkweed pods that were used in the manufacture of life vests. Of course that was in a period when everyone chipped in to pay for a war. Fortunately, we now have many many little wars but nobody pays for them.
So what this amounts to, in less than an hour, is a kind of training film for civilians. "Reefer Madness" taught us that if you smoke weed you go crazy. "Rubber Racketeers teaches us to watch out for phonies and if you run into them, don't patronize them. Report them. Or -- as here -- shut them down yourself.
The patriotic programmers never really worked because someone always figures out a way to game the system and by 1944 the black market was flourishing, although it's not something you hear about. "All My Sons" did a better job.
In its own shabby way the movie is an interesting example of the vernacular culture of the period -- the cars, the clothes, the lingo, the attitudes. A little like taking a Twilight Zone trip into the past.