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Gambling with Souls (released in 1937 as "The Vice Racket"; see below), the 1936 Elmer Clifton gambling murder prostitution crime thriller ("It rips the lid off the problem of how innocent women go wrong"; "The most talked about attraction in the world today"; "How young girls are lured into a life of SHAME"; "BOLD! FRANK! REVEALING!"; "Women of today sold into bondage"; "Actually adapted from authentic police records"; "It blasts the truth before your eyes!"; "Scarlet girls chained to the vultures of vice"; "The price of ignorance - dollars in exchange for virtue!"; "Exposing New York City's $20,000,000 traffic in SOULS!"; "Save - the womanhood of America!"; "Adults Only!"; about the wife of a medical student who begins gambling at an illegal casino run by a gangster, and ends up owing $9,000, and becomes a prostitute for the gangster to pay her debts, and her younger sister becomes involved as well, and gets pregnant and has a botched abortion during which she dies, which causes the lead actress to shoot the gangster who had been the cause of her troubles, and she is put on trial, which is how the movie opens, and she tells her sordid story in flashbacks) starring Martha Chapin, Wheeler Oakman, Bryant Washburn, Gaston Glass, Ed Keane, Florence Dudley, Gay Sheridan, Robert Fraser, Vera Steadman, and Janet Eastman. Note that this movie was banned in New York in 1936, and was released there a year later under a new title "The Vice Racket"! Dating movie paper from this title is incredibly difficult, unless it is a window card that gives the date in the play date area at the top. We have seen a window card with the "Gambling With Souls" title that is surely from 1937 and a window card with the "Vice Racket" title that is surely from 1938. The non-window card items that exist have no studio on them, and have a clear "roadshow" look to them, as though they were printed when the movie was being shown in specific towns, which may well be the case. If anyone has ever seen any poster that appears to surely be the first release, and has any producer or distributor credit, please e-mail us and we will post that information here.
NOTE: Click on linked names to see a biography.

If you know who did the art (if any), please let us know.

Important Added Info: Note that there are several window cards and a one-sheet from the "Gambling With Souls" release of this movie that have surfaced, but posters from the following year with this alternate title are incredibly rare! 11 years ago, we auctioned a jumbo window card, and now we have this regular window card, and these are the only two posters from "The Vice Racket" that we have ever auctioned. Note that this window card is wonderful because of its incredible image and because it is from one of the great early exploitation movies, but the printing in the top play dates area has a wonderful extra dimension to it! First off, the "TUE. JUL. 13" guarantees that it is from 1937, which was from the continuous release of this 1936 movie, when it was given a new title the following year (because movies like these played for years, so it is great to have an exact date for the card; see above). However, what is even better is that this card is from the "Cozy Theatre" in Wymore, Nebraska. That theater was owned by a man named Ray Small, who had owned a theater called the "Lyric Theatre" in the same city, which burned down in November 1936. He reopened a new theater, which was this Cozy Theatre, on May 22, 1937. Six weeks later, he showed this movie there, so that tells you a lot about what kind of theater the "Cozy" was! Two years later, on August 15, 1939, the Cozy Theatre showed the movie "Marihuana", and their showing it may have been influenced by the fact that 11 days before, a man in Lincoln, Nebraska, had been arrested for sending 30 pounds of marijuana through the mail, and that story had been on the front pages of the newspapers. Sadly, the Cozy had trouble getting a projectionist during World War II (because of the shortage of men, with most of them away at war), and first it went to only being open on weekends, and on March 31, 1944, the theater closed completely. But this window card is a wonderful historic relic of that theater and this wild early sexploitation movie!

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