Hollywood was always willing to serve as a propaganda tool for the US government. Cooperation between those entities was sometimes mutually beneficial and on rare occasions both entities were solving each other's PR issues. One of the most notable examples can be found in G Men, a 1935 crime film directed by William Keighley.
The protagonist is James "Brick" Davis (played by James Cagney), a young lawyer in New York City who, despite growing up in the "gutter" and having his education provided by a kind-hearted gangster "Mac" McKay (played by William Harrigan), strives to do the right thing and stay clear of crime and criminals. He is visited by his former law school classmate and friend Edward "Eddie" Buchanan (played by Regis Toomey) who works for the Bureau of Investigation within the Justice Department. He asks Davis to join him there, but Davis applies only after Buchanan is killed while investigating a gang of criminals led by Danny Leggett (played by Edward Pawley). Davis, motivated by the desire to avenge his friend, is initially at odds with his instructor and superior Jeffrey "Jeff" McCord (played by Robert Armstrong), but the two men gradually learn to respect each other. McCord appreciates Davis' physical skills and street smarts, while Davis becomes attracted to McCord's sister Kay (played by Margaret Lindsay).
G Men was made during the Great Depression, when large swaths of impoverished American masses viewed John Dillinger and other criminals robbing despised banks as folk heroes. Those who saw Dillinger and his ilk as "public enemies", on the other hand, were prone to attack Hollywood gangster films for alleged glamorising of criminal lifestyles and thus contributing to crime sprees. At the same time, the Division of Investigation within the Justice Department, the institution that would in 1935 become the FBI, had barely won its campaign against Dillinger and although its director J. Edgar Hoover had secured its status as a national police force, his position still looked precarious. At the same time Warner Bros., the studio that, thanks to classics like Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, had become associated with the gangster genre, had to do something to erase the general impression of inspiring future criminals. The way to do it was to make a spectacular new crime action film in which, instead of gangsters, the protagonist would be a dedicated crime fighter of Hoover's Bureau (or "G Man" as the press began to call them at the time) played by James Cagney, the very same actor who became a star by playing a charismatic larger-than-life criminal in The Public Enemy.
G Men is, from a strictly technical standpoint, a solid film, a prime example of Hollywood craftsmanship in the Classic era. Director William Keighley directs it confidently and maintains a good tempo, making the film, despite its many characters and subplots, play out in a comprehensive and efficient way, ending in less than an hour and a half. The script provides a good balance between drama and action, the latter represented in spectacular shootouts. Two of those scenes were inspired by recent real-life events during the FBI's campaign against Dillinger and his associates – the 1933 Kansas City Massacre and the 1934 raid on Little Bohemia (which, unlike the raid portrayed in the film, actually ended as an embarrassing fiasco for Hoover's agents). Cagney, who finally plays a morally unquestionable protagonist, brings just enough intensity to his role to make it believable. He has good chemistry with character actor Robert Armstrong (best known for the role of Carl Denham in King Kong) and the relationship between the two men naturally evolves from initial hostility to respect and friendship.
G Men is good but hardly a classic. Most of its flaws come from commercial considerations. The relatively simple story is burdened by a clichéd romantic subplot involving the character of Kay as the "good girl" and even more burdened by the character of Davis' old friend, a night club singer Jean Morgan Collins (played by Ann Dvorak), who is supposed to be the "bad girl" and, despite doing the right thing at the end, suffers a very clichéd fate. Her "badness" is, like many details in the film, compromised by the brutal enforcement of the Hays Code which forced the scriptwriter to have her character, who would have been a "woman of loose morals" only a few years earlier, married to one of the gangsters. The Hays Code also affected action in the film, because gangsters were suddenly forbidden from using their iconic weapon – the Tommy Gun, which was now available only to the forces of law and order. Despite those limitations, G Men performed well at the box office and J. Edgar Hoover, who was becoming the most powerful man in the country, was delighted. In 1949, at the 25th anniversary of his takeover of the FBI, a short prologue was added to the film featuring David Brian as a senior agent describing the Bureau's early years and mentioning Davis as a hero of the era.
RATING: 6/10 (++)
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