Radio Patrol (Edward L. Cahn, 1932)
A young group of recruits, in an unnamed mid-western city, graduate from the academy to the city beat. But it’s the end of Prohibition, and violence is high, bribery rampant, and the force understaffed. Despite loving the same girl, two best friends (Robert Armstrong, Russell Hopton) get assigned as partners to crime-fighting’s latest high-tech division – squad cars with two-way radios!
Afraid to Talk and
Law and Order both got attention, from me and others, during the last 1930s project. This film, which I tracked down during the last project, has quickly emerged as my favorite of Cahn’s early films, just an unrestrained wallop of a Pre-coder, unassuming enough until it sneaks up on you with its vision of endemic urban corruption. HerrSchreck once praised the way
Afraid to Talk’s maintained an atmosphere of brutality, despite almost no onscreen violence. This film has the same sense of menace AND plenty of bloodshed.
It also has a much greater sense of camera fluidity than the stilted/austere
Law and Order and the stage-derived
Afraid to Talk. There’s an interesting sense of invention that belies this film’s status as an early sound quickie. The film’s opening, a De-Palma-esque fake-out - which drops us in the middle of what could be a combat zone or prison riot, only to pull the rug out from under us – immediately demands attention. It’s an episodic film, which allows the melodrama of its central conceit – mostly a mix of morality play and love triangle – to never get old, as the hard-boiled stuff gets mixed in with plenty of docudrama novelty, concerning the reality of the radio cars, the police beat and general Prohibition-era living. The film’s also punctuated with plenty of Vorkapic-esque montages, combining reused silent-film footage and new Expressionistic second-unit stuff into explosions of gangland violence that take on a monumental stature against the meager, blue-collar vision of the police force. Despite it’s focus on the hard-work and sacrifice of the police, this film never succumbs to glorification. It’s as pitiless and cynical as any gangster film of the era; the film starts almost light-hearted, which makes the matter-of-factness that personal compromise and death slowly enters the picture that much more effective. The film’s finale could be three-hankie melodrama in another film; here, it’s played with enough distance and voyeuristic discomfort that it comes off perverse and genuinely sorrowful. Our hero may have joined the force with the ideal of staying honest and saving people, not killing them… but the film ultimately leaves us wondering if him and other like him are just babes in the woods.
Blood Money (Rowland S. Brown, 1933)
"What I need is a man to give me a good thrashing, I'd follow him around like a dog on a leash." - Frances Dee
Bill Bailey (George Bancroft) looks like a successful bail bondsman, but in reality he’s the L.A. mob’s fixer #1, well connected to both the underworld and the establishment alike, riding the zeitgeist of corruption to wealth and success. When a rich, crazy dame (Frances Dee) falls in his lap, he finds a path into respectable society and nearly brings about his own doom. More of a fascinating curio than a truly great film,
Blood Money deserves a look for anyone needing a fix of pre-code kinkiness. Like Edward Cahn, Rowland West or Arthur Ripley, Rowland S. Brown is one of those interesting what-could-have-beens who had an interesting burst of productivity that mysteriously stopped dead in its track. He was a confrontational director, and an assault on a studio exec supposedly had him blackballed. No worries: despite being a full-blown Communist, he married into opulent wealth and was glad to leave the industry. In his earlier days, he was reportedly a gangster, and it was a pursuit of authenticity which supposedly brought about his directorial squabbles.
No one will confuse this film for a docudrama, but there’s enough oddball and offbeat details here to keep the film interesting. First of all is it’s choice of protagonist: most gangster films took their cue from the Capone-inspired gunman. This film, however, is interested in the Frank Costello-type: the businessman and nearly-respectable conduit between the straight world and the criminal, eschewing violence for diplomacy, slightly embarassed by his own criminality. In fact, I don’t believe there’s a single gun fired throughout the whole film, and nary an act of serious violence. Light on bloodshed, but heavy on sauciness, this film seems almost ready to become a comedy at any moment; it’s the
expectation of violence that we associate with the genre and milieu that keep it grounded as a gangster film. The film instead is focused on character and color: the backroom speakeasies, where cross-dressing lesbians lounge at the bar and vaudeville legend Blossom Seeley commands the floor; at the dog-races, where bell-boys parade the contestant like a 1930s Westminster, and a young Lucille Balls hooks for $5 a pop; the Hawaiian luaua, where the early rumblings of Tiki express themselves in gyrating island girls.
Really, however, the main reason to see this film is the oddball casting. Dame Judith Anderson actually is allowed an unusual role of glamour and sex appeal as a speakeasy madame/crime boss and long-suffering romantic partner to Bancroft. There’s a sobering quality and restraint to her performance that really sells the romantic disappointment, and if her posh accent goes unexplained, it ties into the film’s focus on the mutability between straight and criminal society. The whole film’s a reversal of the usual madonna/whore conflict: the gang moll is the reasonable and grown-up romantic option that’s foolishly eschewed; the rich heiress is the wild and dangerous one. Which brings us to the real star of the show: Frances Dee. Mrs. Joel McCrea’s reputation later became that of the goody two-shoes; here she doesn’t soil those shoes so much as toss them in a mudpit. Her character is a nymphoniac, kleptomaniac, sadomasochistic, bisexual. She craves only excitement and the more criminal the better. Her last scene is a howler of a pre-code punchline, and if it’s incorrect to say the film is non-judgmental towards her, it’s surprisingly un-punitive. In fact, there’s a refreshing affection for all these characters and pre-Prohibition vice which really papers over the film’s obvious shortcomings. The least of Brown’s three films, but intriguing nonetheless.