From Headquarters

As a mystery, From Headquarters isn't very challenging, but it might hold your interest as a behind-the-scenes glimpse of police procedure. The film is at its best when showing the details of a typical murder investigation, including two scenes that prove how little ballistic testing has changed in more than five decades. Another plus is the photography, which generally rises above other programmers of its ilk. [In one set-up, the camera establishes a shot of an autopsy in progress and then takes the vantage of the corpse looking up at the doctors.] There is also a pre-code reference to drug addiction, personified by a murder suspect (Dorothy Burgess) who is a riot of facial ticks, jitters and hysterical laughter. The cast is competant, if largely uninspired, with leads Brent and Lindsay their usual drab selves. Some of the supporting players--Hobart Cavanaugh's non-comic safe cracker, Hugh Herbert's pesky bail bondsman, Edward Ellis's enthusiastic forensics man and Robert Barrat's eccentric rug importer--are decidedly better. Not one of director Dieterle's best, but an interesting curio all the same.

GEORGE BRENT doesn't display much enthusiasm for his role as a police detective who finds that his ex-sweetheart (MARGARET LINDSAY) is the chief suspect in the murder of a wealthy playboy. There are several suspects under police grilling and all of them tell their stories in brisk flashback technique that keeps the plot spinning in all directions so that all options are on the table in guessing "who done it." It's a ploy that doesn't work well here. A more straight-forward approach would have worked better in keeping the plot from getting too cluttered. By the time we reach a conclusion, the viewer is left hoping the story is over once and for all. What does work is showing the behind-the-scenes methods the crime labs perform in solving a case.

It's a programmer given what little life it has by a capable cast of Warner supporting players including Ken Murray, Hobart Cavanaugh, Dorothy Burgess, Eugene Palette, Theodore Newton and others and benefits from brisk direction by William Dieterle.

Summing up: A more polished script would have helped and George Brent seems too detached on this occasion to make much of his detective role.

In the 1930s, detective and crime stories were a dime a dozen. Very few of them were about realism but about entertaining the audiences. Because of this, there were a lot of clichés you could expect in a film about murder....such as the cops being idiots, the bad guy confessing to everything at the end of the film even though the good guys could not prove they did it and police procedures were practically non-existent...they just kept arresting the wrong people until they got the right one!! The films don't age well because of all this and there is a serious sameness to them. Fortunately, among these many cliché-ridden stories is one like "From Headquarters"!

The film begins with a murder. Non-stupid detectives begin investigating and you follow the case from start to finish. You see them taking fingerprints, searching files and early computer systems and questioning various witnesses. While the guy played by Eugene Palette is a bit like the dopey detectives (in fact, this same actor played dopey detectives in several films), he's not over the top and is competent. His boss (George Brent) is quite competent and clever...like you'd hope a detective would be.

The bottom line is that this film is extremely well written, has much better than usual acting and has aged very well. The actors seem more realistic and less like archetypes in this one. Plus, it is fascinating seeing how thing have and haven't changed over the last 80 or so years. Well worth seeing.

There are the various going-ons in and around the police headquarters. Suddenly, a big case comes in. Police detectives Stevens and Boggs pick up the case. They interview various people. The techs look at the various evidences. There are various twists and turns.

This would be a modern TV police procedural, but less flashy and more stationary. I know that this is the gimmick, but I would still like to leave the building. I like the techs doing their techie investigations. They do have some action inside the building. At the end of the day, this is an interesting police procedural from another time.

When a Broadway playboy is found dead, it's first thought to be a suicide, then a murder. Police Lt. Jim Stevens (George Brent) is on the case.

Lou Winton (Margaret Lindsay), a Broadway performer with whom he's in love, is one suspect, but he's sure she didn't do it. It's obvious from her first questioning that she's protecting someone. It turns out to be her brother.

Then there's a coke addict, Dolly White (Dorothy Burgess). And what about Anderzian (Robert Barrat)?

This mystery moves right along, and is more interesting than many of these films due to the use of actual police techniques from those days - examining a bullet, getting fingerprints, and my favorite, the use of IBM punch cards and a sorting machine to search a database. This may be the first display of that technology in film.

Not only interesting, but fun to see, and also to note that those techniques in one form or another continue to be used.

George Brent is handsomer, I think, without his mustache, and does a good job here as an intelligent inspector.

Hugh Herbert is on hand as a bail bondsman, and Frank McHugh is on very quickly at the beginning.

This is an old one!

See if it is on TCM - you'll enjoy it.