Bullets or Ballots

One of the 1930s Warner Bros. movies TCM ran in honor of the studio's 100th anniversary this month that I had surprisingly not seen before was Bullets or Ballots, so I recorded it and recently sat down to watch it in and among the more recent that seem to dominate the streaming services.

Prohibition has ended, and the gangsters that were bootlegging liquor need new rackets to go into. One of those rackets in New York is run by Al Kruger (Barton MacLane) and his second-in-command "Bugs" Fenner (Humphrey Bogart; the movie having been released in 1936, Bogart was not yet a star). Kruger is the sensible one and the only person in this part of the gang who knows the identities of the real money men. Fenner, for his part, is much more hot-headed and willing to use violence to get what he wants for the gang, or really himself. Kruger knows that this is only goin to bring the government down much harder on the gangs, so opposes violence.

Fenner gets his way, sort of. Ward Bryant is the local politician crusading against crime and presumably angling for higher office. Kruger figures they can lay low and weather the storm, perhaps by bribing some jurors. After all, he's been on trial multiple times, but always gotten off. Fenner, however, doesn't believe any of this guff, so takes it into his own hands to kill Bryant! As you can probably guess, he should have listened to Kruger.

Neither Bogart nor MacLane is the star of the proceedings, however. That honor goes to Edward G. Robinson. He plays Johnny Blake, an all-American police officer who happens to be just familiar enough with the gangs. This causes the new police commissioner to fire him suddenly, although one can guess that this is a ruse to free up Blake so that he can go undercover and go after the Kruger gang. Blake's familiarity with the gangs is in part because of an old flame in the form of Lee Morgan (Joan Blondell), who runs small-time rackets up in the Bronx. Working with Lee is Nellie LaFleur (Louise Beavers), getting a role about as respectable and equal to whites as you can expect from a 1930s movie. She's come up with the idea of setting up a numbers game in Harlem, and has been successful enogh to earn her and Lee a tidy sum of money.

As you can guess, Kruger and Fennel learn about this and would like the money, too. Krugr by this time has made the mistake of bringing on Blake, thinking that Blake can tell them how to get around the cops when in fact Blake is still working for the cops as an undercover plant. Thanks to the Production Code, none of this is too difficult to figure out. Fenner is no dummy, and keeps having Blake tailed and bugged, looking for proof that Johnny is still in cahoots with the cops. Fenner is also much more forceful in his desire to get that numbers money from Lee and Nellie.

Bullets or Ballots is all predictable, but this being Warner Bros., you know they're going to be good at making programmers and especially programmers in the crime/gangster area. Sure enough, the movie never stops entertaining, all the way to its conclusion. Robinson is good if not quite rightly cast, while Blondell and Bogart are the two standouts. MacLane's is a bit of a lesser figure, but in some ways the material really calls for that since the higher-ups -- especially those masterminds whose identities only he knows -- have a tendency to stick to the shadows. Think Louis Calhern in The Asphalt Jungle or Alexander Scourby in The Big Heat.

If you want to watch a good example of the sort of programmer Warner Bros. was churning out in the mid-30s, Bullets or Ballots is just as good as any of the others.