The Secret 6

Another of the movies that's been sitting on my DVR that I didn't get around to watching is The Secret 6. Then I noticed that there was an upcoming recording of it scheduled, thanks to Youtube TV's recording every instance of a movie you add to your library until you remove it from the library. That second airing comes on tomorrow (September 5) at 4:30 PM, so with that in mind I made it a point to watch the copy that's already in the library in order to be able to do a review here.

The first thing I noticed that was interesting was the convention that studios had in those days of having one full screen listing a goodly portion of the cast. Johnny Mack Brown was near the top of that screen, several spots ahead of both Clark Gable and Ralph Bellamy. In fact this was Bellamy's first film. Gable's A Free Soul had not yet been released, which was really the movie that made Gable a star, hence his low billing.

In any case, the two men who get the real top billings are Wallace Beery and Lewis Stone. Stone plays Richard Newton, lawyer to a small-city group of bootleggers led by Johnny Franks (that's Bellamy, who looked familiar, although I was wondering whether I was missing something as why would the gang leader be billed so low). The gang brings in a new member, Louis Scorpio (Wallace Beery), who's amoral enough that you can see he's going to rise through the ranks.

However, Scorpio is also stupidly impulsive, which is a cause for alarm for Newton. Newton understands that you should remain relatively understated so that you can fly under the radar and not attract police attention. Scorpio expects to rise to the top in the small town, and then take on the big city, where the mob is led by Colimo (John Miljan, one of those early 30s actors who probably should have had a better career than he did). Eventually Johnny Franks gets killed in a shootout which enables Scorpio to take over the gang.

But the violence brings the attention not just of the police, but of some reports, including Hank Rogers (Johnny Mack Brown) and Carl Luckner (Clark Gable). Not only them, but a shadowy group of businessmen calling themselves the titular "Secret Six" who work with the police to try to bring Scorpio down.

Scorpio, being as blunt and uncouth as he is, something Wallace Beery could play well, tries to bribe people, either with a cigarette case filled with money or by using love in the form of having his cashier Anne (a young Jean Harlow) trying to seduce Hank. Anne eventually has second thoughts about it when she really falls in love with Hank and realizes how much danger he's in.

One of the many slightly odd things about The Secret 6 is that it's not really about the titular six businessmen. Having a movie be about a shadowy cabal that's on the side of "justice", or at least what the normies' perception of justice is, would have been a really interesting idea. And for some reason I distinctly recall seeing another early talkie with just such a theme, although I can't remember the title. Instead, we get another early crime picture, MGM obviously following in the footsteps of Warner Bros.' Little Caesar. Warner Bros. was better at making crime pictures than MGM, but thanks to the performances of Beery and Stone, the latter being cast against type, The Secret 6 isn't a bad little picture. Sure, it may be a bit creaky, but for anyone who likes early talkies, they'll like The Secret 6 too.

East of the River

I have a bit less that I've watched saved up to do posts on, only because I recorded a few things I planned to do posts on, only to start them and realized not only had I seen the movie, I'd already done a post on it. With that in mind, I looked through the films on my DVR and selected East of the River, which didn't seem familiar to me, at least not in the sense of realizing I'd seen it before. There are other ways in which it is familiar, of course....

The movie starts off in the late 1920s in New York. Mama Lorenzo (Marjorie Rambeau) is an Italian-American in New York who runs a pasta restaurant and has an adolescent son Joe who's always getting into some sort of trouble or another. This time, however, he's gone too far, and is threatened by the judge (Moroni Olsen in one of his many character actor roles) with being sent to reform school. Mama has an impassioned talk with the judge, who decides to give Joe one more chance. However, Joe got in trouble along with an orphan Nick, who is going to be sent not back to the orphanage, but to that reform school since he doesn't have a family to go home to. So Mama offers to adopt Nick and the judge amazingly enough agrees.

A montage shows that the two boys grow up, with Nick being grateful for his second chance in life, getting straight A's, and going on to college. Joe, for his part, continues his bad ways, eventually getting thrown out of school and heading west to California at 18, where he can continue a life of crime without his mother finding out about it. He's using the proceeds of his crime to help pay his brother's way through college, of course. (Warner Bros. had used this plot device in Invisible Stripes only a year before.

The law catches up with Joe (played as an adult by John Garfield), and he spends a fair bit of time in San Quentin. But he lies to Mama and Nick about where he is, instead getting his girlfriend Laurie (Brenda Marshall) to commit forgery for him so that he can keep sending money home. Eventually, Joe gets out, and just in time, as he's learned that Nick (played as an adult by William Lundigan) is about to graduate from college. So he and Laurie head to New York for the graduation.

Not that Joe is able to escape his life of crime. And he's in trouble, because the two guys who framed him are in New York. Joe is able to turn the tables on them, but this means he's a wanted man by them so he has to head back to California to lay low for a while, telling Mama he has to attend to the "honest" business he left behind. Joe makes the mistake of leaving Laurie behind, and as time passes, Laurie begins to fall in love with Nick, and ultimately decides to marry Nick. Joe finds out, and he's jealous. And a vindictive bastard. He threatens to reveal Laurie's criminal past to Mama (who loves Laurie like the daughter Mama never had) and scupper the wedding between Laurie and Nick if Laurie won't do Joe's bidding.

I've mentioned before that going back to the pre-Code days, Warner Bros. was the studio that was best at doing social issue pictures. East of the River isn't quite that, but it certainly fits into the mold of the lower-class urban drama and crime movies that those social issue pictures evolved into by the end of the 1930s. Of course, in James Cagey, then Humphrey Bogart, and now John Garfield, they had the stars to pull it off more than some of the other studios did.

At the same time, however, it feels like there's no new ground being broken in East of the River, and a sort of sense that this is a movie being made because Warner Bros. needed something to go on the lower half of the bill. There's not exactly anything terribly wrong with it, mind you, other than a decided lack of originality. It's the sort of thing that, a generation later, probably would have been pared down from 74 to 44 minutes and turned into a TV episode for some show.

East of the River isn't the best work of any of the cast members, but I don't think it's anything any of them should be ashamed of, either.