The Last Ride

It's wartime and rubber is in short supply. A tire bootlegger ring steals tires from cars on the streets and resells them. Teenagers find their tires stolen. They call up the tire bootleggers. With the newly installed tires, the reckless teenagers go street racing. One of the tires fail and two are killed in the crash. Police Detective Lt. Pat Harrigan is tasked with taking down the ring. It turns out that his brother Mike is the leader of such a ring and both brothers are in love with Kitty Kelly.

I've never considered tires as black market material. That is a plus on its side. On the minus side, it starts with annoying teenagers and has no name actors throughout. First, the kids garnered no sympathy. I couldn't care less that they're dead. If they're played as normal, it would be a public benefit to get the criminals. As it stands, this is a no-humans-involved situation. The crime investigation is less than compelling. The most interesting aspect is the subject matter and this is an almost passable B-movie.

Some rather stupid kids get themselves killed in an accident while using some really bald and bad tires. That sends Detective Richard Travis on an investigation into the rubber racket and how racketeers are profiting thereby from the wartime shortage.

The racket has some solid protection in the town so Travis has to proceed with caution.

Eleanor Parker has a small role in this B film as she was moving up the Warner Brothers ladder. We all pay our dues.

One thing is certain, Americans are still obsessed with their cars now as in World War II. Didn't anybody tell these kids there's a war on.

The Last Ride (1944)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Bizarre but entertaining "B" movie from Warner deals with the classic tale of a good brother going up against the bad one. In this film, the good guy (Richard Travis) happens to be a detective trying to crack of the case of some bootleg tires being sold around the town and which has caused the death of a couple kids. The bad brother (Charles Lang) works for the underground operation and clashes with his brother over the rights to do so. THE LAST RIDE is a pretty entertaining gem that works for a number of reasons but one of the biggest is its story. I've seen quite a few crime pictures were all sorts of things were being stolen or illegally sold but this is the first one where those items were tires. This actually made for a pretty interesting set up early on and I really liked the racket these guys were running of stealing tires, then making those victims order new tires from them. I think things get a bit watered down towards the end when we start to get into more of the bad vs. good brother subplot, which is one we've seen countless times. Director D. Ross Lederman does a pretty good job at keeping the film moving at a very fast pace and it should be noted that it clocks in at just 58-minutes so there's certainly no down time. Both Travis and Lang fit into their roles very nicely and we get some nice support from Eleanor Parker, Jack LaRue and the always dependable Cy Kendall. THE LAST RIDE certainly isn't going to be found on lists containing the greatest movies ever made but it's certainly unique enough to where it's worth viewing.

This excellent thriller, very short thriller, proves that director D Ross Lederman offered his best years at Warner Bros studios, during the thirties and forties. After this period, for Columbia Pictures and the Lone Wolf series, he showed very bland movies, very ambitionless features. But, I repeat, for the Warner Bros company, he made really tremendous fast paced and exciting crime - ESCAPE FROM CRIME, BULLET SCARS -, action, war, adventures movies. Such as this one, which deserves to be seen at all costs. The climax is a pure Warner Bros trademark. I was so astonished by this film I did not know at all. I know there must be many of such stuff still under the radars.

With the Federal government rationing rubber for the duration, the racketeers have a new racket. They slash your tires. Then they sell you retreads that look as good as new. For a while. The local police department doesn't like it. Police Chief Wade Boteler orders incorruptible lieutenant Richard Travis to take a bribe and infiltrate the bad guys.

Travis is surprisingly good in a role which calls for him to be a man of action. At 57 minutes there isn't much time to develop subtlety, but he's got a fun-loving brother in Charles Lang who thinks he's a sap for risking his life, a doting Oirish mother in Mary Gordon, and Eleanor Parker as a potential sister-in-law. Poverty Row had been running this sort of plot for a couple of years, but D. Ross Lederman directs with his usual anonymous competence to allow the Warner Brothers staff to offer the offer the banging guns and crashing cars that they excelled in for more than a decade.