Beast of the City

Mickey Rooney was TCM's Star of the Month in December 2024. As a juvenile actor at MGM, he made a lot of movies, including small roles before he became more of a leading actor with the Andy Hardy movies. One such child role that I haven't done a post on before is in The Beast of the City. Since I like pre-Codes and hadn't seen this movie before, I made a point of recording it to do a post on it. I finally got around to watching it and scheduling a post on it.

Rooney is obviously not the star here, although he plays the young son Mickey of the main character, a man named Jim Fitzpatrick (Walter Huston). Jim is a police detective with a big-city police department (I don't think a specific city is mentioned). He's got a reputation as someone who's so ticked off with the underworld violence that was plaguing America during Prohibition that he does things that step on some people's toes but that other people lionize him for doing. As the movie opens, we see a police dispatcher (uncredited character actor Edward Brophy) sending cops out for a bunch of petty stuff, like a skunk in a basement. But then the dispatcher mentions dead bodies in a place that clearly implies a gangland killing.

Fitzpatrick is the detective given the task of investigating. To Jim, it's obvious that these are two low-level gang members, and that the leader of the rival gang, Sam Belmonte (Jean Hersholt) is responsible even if he didn't actually pull the trigger. So Fitzpatrick goes to the nightclub that Belmonte runs to arrest him. But for a bunch of reasons, Belmonte is able to get off. One is that he didn't actually pull the trigger and has an alibi, but there's also the assumption that Belmonte has a bunch of pull with any number of corrupt members of the police department, which may include the police chief.

Jim has a wife and kids, as well as a brother Ed (Wallace Ford) who is also a policeman, serving on the vice squad. Jim wants to engage Ed's help in trying to bring down Belmonte. At a police lineup, we see Daisy Stevens (Jean Harlow), although eagle-eyed viewers will already have seen her in Belmonte's office. She's a stenographer, and presumably has an in to Belmonte. Ed meets Daisy and begins to fall in love with her, although this is a serious problem as it's a bad idea to have a relationship with gang-related molls. And Daisy is certainly going to try to get Ed into the gang's good graces.

Jim gets sent to a distant precinct in what's clearly political retribution, although he's got friends who are able to help his career by getting him involved with foiling a bank robbery. Combined with public outrage over the political types having demoted him, the old police chief is forced to resign and Jim is given the chief's job. He immediately sets about going after Belmonte. But there's the question of how legal his methods are, combined with the fact that his brother's relationship with the gang is an issue.

The Beast of the City opens with intertitles quoting then-president Herbert Hoover about the nature of the Mob and how what America needs is movies glorifying the police going after the Mob, as opposed to films like The Public Enemy. This is MGM's attempt to make the cops look good, although they didn't quite yet have the gloss that they would after Irving Thalberg died where movies would be technically well made even if that doesn't quite fit what the genres need. The Beast of the City is still clearly more MGM than, say, Warner Bros. which was a lot grittier in dealing with social issues. Walter Huston does well, although Jean Harlow in her supporting role is fabulously sexy. Although TCM ran this for the presence of Mickey Rooney, he understandably doesn't have much to do here (not that that's his fault).

The Beast of the City is a well-made early talkie that definitely deserves to be seen, even if it's not one of the all-time greats.