Dangerous to Know

For me, this not a real, genuine, authentic film noir. A noir drama, yes, involving gangsters yes, but not a rough, tough crime drama as Robert Florey and Louis King used us to in the late thirties and early forties, starring Anthony Quinn, Lloyd Nolan, J Caroll Naish and Akim Tamiroff. Fast paced gangsters yarns for Paramount Pictures or Warner Bros. This one is excellent, but it is a romance, well acted and not long at all. Akim Tamiroff is awesome in a predictable scheme and character, and Tony Quinn as the stupid goon too. This is not my favourite, among the batch of those B movies directed by Bob Florey and Louis King, but it is good, saving a terrific twist, ironic ending.

Well, this film has a cast that is alright but it is not clear where the focus of the story is and you eventually realize it is about gang boss Akim Tamiroff (Recka) fancying Gail Patrick (Margaret). It takes a long time for this to develop into the film's main thrust. There are some gangster things going on and you just wait for the next seemingly random thing to happen. The ending makes no sense at all.

Tamiroff is a gangster musician who gets transported into his happy place whenever he hears certain classical pieces by famous composers. He even likes Procol Harum's "Whiter Shade of Pale" which he obsessively listens to at the beginning of the film. His lady assistant Anna May Wong (Lan Ying) has a strange role and because she looks Chinese, she is given some peculiar Chinese/Japanese sense of honour and code of behaviour that she follows through with. Why and why? She is wasted in this film.

I kept seeing ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair's face in Harvey Stephens (Easton) who plays the eager goody-goody bond salesman who is Patrick's boyfriend. This may have tainted my assessment of him as a grinning idiot.

I had high expectations for Dangerous To Know (released 11 March 1938). With a screenplay co-written by Horace McCoy, based on an Edgar Wallace play, and directed by the usually reliable Robert Florey, I anticipated a real treat. Unfortunately, the writers have obviously built up the central role, here played by hammily over-accented Akim Tamiroff. Worse still, Florey has chosen to set this "B" movie up as a TV drama, persistently using a staggering number of close-ups to little effect. A close-up is even squandered on Hedda Hopper, would you believe? This procedure would be more tolerable if Ted Sparkuhl's photography shone with velvety noir lighting. Alas, Sparkuhl supplies little atmosphere and doesn't flatter the players at all. Villainous Akim Tamiroff doesn't look like a ruthless gangster so much as a comically dwarfish little man with an expensive but highly incompetent tailor, while the normally super-exotic Miss Wong appears as neither a sinuous nor beautiful siren, but is presented rather as if she were portraying a bland, moderately articulate, but disinterested dress-shop manageress in a second-class neighborhood. The only player to emerge with any real credit from this premature TV drama is Tamiroff's chief henchman, Anthony Quinn (whose part is fortunately much larger than his bottom-of-the-bill credit might indicate). Quinn at least bristles with a reasonable amount of charisma, but still manages the difficult feat of portraying a savvy lieutenant whom the script requires to be both cunningly useful yet on the dumb side of bright.

This is an old movie so if you don't like old black and white gangster movies you obviously won't get much out of this, especially since it is pretty much forgotten and not one of the famous or even better known ones of that genre. It's about a racketeer who tries to manipulate things so he can marry a wealthy family's daughter. It's a decent story with nice acting and enough twists and turns to keep things moving and interesting.

I don't know if this title refers to the Tamiroff character or to Anna May Wong. My vote would be for Wong, for we do not know what she will do after being dumped by Tamiroff. Tamiroff is surprising good in his role, and Wong is very good as well. Director Florey knows what he is doing in every scene, and gets the most out of his actors. The cinematography is atmospheric, and captures the feeling of the time period. A good film to catch late at night.