Special Agent Flm Review

Warner Brothers was still making gangster films in 1935, but public pressure, Decency Leagues and the Production Code had forced the studio to switch things around. In the earlier ones that put Warner's on the map with Cagney, Bogart and Robinson, the gangsters were portrayed as social rebels, products of the Depression - and though they usually got it by the end, they were the heroes of the film - the kids wanted to be them - sociopaths or not. But now it is the law that have become the heroes. Even the best of them all, Cagney was the hero as an FBI Agent in G-Men. In this one the gangster is played by Ricardo Cortez who portrays him as a calm business-like crook who doesn't get his own hands dirty and has a good lawyer to keep him out of jail. No rough stuff on his part. He has men for that.

Not that the lawman is much more exciting as played by George Brent. But then Brent is never very exciting on the screen. Very popular back in the 1930s, he comes across now as a lump of affable clay. Not all that good or interesting looking. You would take him as a middle manager in an insurance company. His co-star in this one and in over ten films is Bette Davis who said his energy in real life never was transferred to the screen. She had a crush on him in one of her earliest films, The Rich are Always With Us (1932), but it was the leading lady Ruth Chatterton who got him. She divorced her husband and married Brent the very next day. And divorced him two years later. So, he had something going for himself. He later married actress Constance Worth and that one lasted less than a year and after that the wonderful Ann Sheridan and that marriage lasted exactly one year. And somewhere in there he had an affair with Davis for two years. Sounds like a man who had trouble keeping his zipper up.

With the Production Code taking the zip out of gangster films, this is a dull affair. It is all talk and courtrooms. There is not a lot of action. With Elliot Ness getting Al Capone on tax fraud, a Federal agency has been set up to go after gangsters on tax evasion. One of the agents is Brent who has a cover as a newsman and that seems to allow him to get into the offices of the top gangster Carston (Cortez). His bookkeeper is Davis, the only person he trusts. But she and Brent have something going on. Like love. The film tries to put a soft excuse on the fact that Davis works for a killer by saying, those were tough times and once you are in, there is no getting out except feet first. Ya, ok. Weak beer.