MGM weren’t known for their gangster films but occasionally they churned one out. This was from the husband and wife team of director George Hill and writer Frances Marion, reuniting them with Wallace Beery, star of The Big House. He’s a slaughterhouse worker who enters the world of bootlegging at the behest of gangster (Ralph Bellamy – and really good).
It features an early performance from Jean Harlow, on loan-out from Howard Hughes, as a (surprise) gangster’s moll. She looks terrific, very beautiful and young, but her voice is awkward and her performance mostly self conscious.
Another newcomer in the cast is Clark Gable who plays a reporter – I really like the scene where he’s on the phone mucking around with her; she seems more relaxed in this moment than she does elsewhere in the film. Yet she falls in love with another reporter (played by Johnny Mack Brown - who MGM put in As for a few years before changing their mind seemingly overnight and sentencing him to a career in B Westerns).
This starts out really well, with Beery being easily seduced to the dark side of crime, and Lewis Stone effective as a boozy lawyer (I had fun imagining this was Judge Hardy in his lawyer days, keeping gangsters out of gaol and avoiding going home) – but it soon loses momentum. Beery becomes powerful very quickly and we never really get much of an insight to his character – no family, or love interest. (We get some glimpses at the very beginning but not later). The Secret Six, an organisation of crime fighters who wears masks, looks as ridiculous (and fascist) as it sounds.
Fortunately once they’re introduced they’re not seen again. The handling is creaky on the whole (acting as well as direction) although there are a ew visual flourishes, such as extreme close ups and tracking shots.
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