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Wednesday, May 27, 2020

THE BEAST OF THE CITY (1932)

Misguided attempt by M-G-M to go topsy-turvy on those celebrated early ‘30s gangster pics (LITTLE CAESAR; PUBLIC ENEMY; SCARFACE), focusing our sympathies on cops rather than robbers. But this try at fair play goes nowhere. (Though a fierce, if ridiculous, gun battle at the very end makes you feel you haven’t totally wasted 86 minutes.) Fast-fading director Charles Brabin* tries for dynamism, but the fancy tech work lags behind other studios while his multi-plane ‘action’ staging is stiff and looks over-planned/under-rehearsed. There’s just no swing to the thing, even with LITTLE CAESAR and SCARFACE’s W.R. Burnett on a story not without promise as Walter Huston’s kick-ass police chief goes after top mob man Jean Hersholt while kid brother Wallace Ford gets involved with mob floozy Jean Harlow unaware he’s being double-crossed. Harlow was the big draw here (note the tie-in book cover) in her first M-G-M feature. (And look for Mickey Rooney, also in a feature debut). Harlow’s acting is already vastly improved from earlier work, but she’d really find her sweet-and-sour self on her next pic, thanks to Anita Loos' naughty script for RED-HEADED WOMAN/’32.

WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: *Brabin never fully recovered after being canned in the wake of the aborted Italian shoot of BEN-HUR/’25, but stayed on at M-G-M as a utility man. His best sound film was probably STAGE MOTHER/’33 (with its proto-GYPSY storyline), but he was thru by 1934, a mere 52 yrs-old.

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