Framed

This is a solid gangster film. It's interesting as it is precode and it's very sinister on multiple levels.

The plot does take twists and turns and it keeps you interested. The performances are solid, sufficient, believable, but seeing once is enough....

It's yet another revenge drama, and like "Paid", the woman marries the son of the man she holds responsible for killing her father (as opposed to the guy who sent Crawford up the river). The opening is cops surrounding Brent interrogating her about a cop killing. She refuses to talk, including when she's presented with a police lineup that includes the killer.

Five years later, Brent works as a "hostess" at the casino run by Ralf Harolde. She's his mistress, but every night Toomey comes and grins blandly as she works the crowd. Seriously, there is way more chemistry between Brent and Harolde. Once Brent discovers Toomey is the son of the man who killed her father, she marries him. Do you know, I saw this movie a week ago and I can't remember the rest? Only that Harolde has men assassinated in front of the SAME drugstore at the SAME time every time! You'd think the cops would at least stake it out.

Side note: Evelyn Brent made a hit in Josef von Sternberg's "Underworld" (1927) as "Feathers", a tough gangster's moll. Humorist S. J. Perelman wrote in the New Yorker piece"Smugglers In The Dust": FEATHERS: (eyes smoldering) Hello, you two-timing bastard.

TYRONE: What's the matter, Feathers?

FEATHERS: Nothing. I always say that when I enter a room.

... with some Hitchcockian irony thrown in. This was certainly a good vehicle for Evelyn Brent who plays Rose Manning. The first scene is her surrounded by cops acting like a football team. Maybe if they confuse her with enough questions she'll confess? In this case they are looking for the killer of her father. Two of his associates are shown to her in a lineup and she says she does not know them.

Meanwhile she is sure that Police Inspector "Butch" McArthur (William Holden...no not THAT William Holden) is responsible for her beloved dad's murder, and years later she still wants revenge.. She goes to work for gangster Chuck Gaines (Raf Harolde) as a hostess at his nightclub. At least I THINK that's her job. She doesn't sing or dance, just goes from table to table. The front story to keep the customers off of her is that she is Gaines' girl. Problem is, the story is apparently so convincing even Gaines believes it. A young guy is at the club night after night (Regis Toomey as Jimmy) who is head over heels for Rose and wants to marry her, taking up all of Rose's time. She thinks he is just a sweet kid until she finds out Jimmy is actually the inspector's son, the son of the man she think killed her dad. What worse revenge could she send upon him than to have a gun moll as his daughter in law? Meanwhile Chuck Gaines is a dumb gangster or the police are even more dumb. First off, Raf Harolde portrays his gangster more as cowardly weasel than brains of a syndicate. Jimmy Cagney he is not. But then WB in its prime RKO is not either, so what can I say? Gaines never does the killing himself, he always sends his doorman out to do the job, dressed up in a costume as obvious as an organ grinder, and uses the same corner drugstore and the same time (midnight) for all of his hits. The owner of the all night drugstore, the police, and the fact that it is all of Gaines' old friends that are being bumped off should make somebody wise to this guy's ways.

How does this all work out? Very ironically in a way you'd never guess. Yes some of the scenes are laughable, but overall it is one of the better early talkie films I've seen from that year.

I am really shocked that "Framed" is not a more famous film. I am also surprised that it's somehow lapsed into the public domain--an inglorious ending to a terrific gangster film.

Evelyn Brent plays Rose Manning--one of the hardest dames you could ever see in Pre-Code gangster films. Shortly after the film begins, Rose learns that the one person in life she cared about, her father, has been killed in a shootout with the cops. She blames Inspector McArthur (William Holden--NOT the one you're thinking about, but an older actor of the same name) and wants her revenge. However, she's a smart cookie and her revenge will be slow in coming. In the meantime, she becomes pals with a hood named Bing (the aptly named Maurice Black) and they open a classy gambling hall named after her.

Time passes and finally you learn of Rose's plan. She has seduced Inspector McArthur's very naive son, Jimmy (Regis Toomey) and she knows this will drive the Inspector nuts! How did she do it? She convinced the young dummy that she is an innocent lady who truly loves him! Not surprisingly, when Jimmy tells his father, there is a HUGE blowup between them and Jimmy won't believe that his fiancée is a criminal. However, Bing is NOT a subtle sort of guy. Despite Rose's plan, he decides the best thing to do is just kill Jimmy. But when Rose learns of this, you see that this hard-hearted dame MIGHT just have fallen for the squirt. What's next? See this film.

This film has so much going for it. Most importantly, at the time this film was made, Radio Pictures was doing a great job with sound pictures. I have seen several of their films from 1929-1930 and the sound is VERY clear and the actors don't tend to stand around hidden microphones--a serious problem with many of the early talkies. Additionally, the film, while a tad sentimental at the end, is great because the bad people really are awful and the film avoids pulling its punches. I'd stack this crime film up along side the best of the genre of the day ("Little Caesar", "Scarface" and "The Public Enemy")--due to wonderful writing, acting and a professional production all around. Well worth seeing--and available for free download at archive.org.

Police Inspector William Holden tells Evelyn Brent that his men have killed her father during an arrest. She decides she will have her vengeance. It takes five years before it becomes a possibility, when she's singing at her lover's night club. Ralf Harolde is a gangster himself, but neither he nor Miss Brent know that Regis Toomey is Holden's son until he tells her, and she sees his love for her a path to revenge.

There's a lovely ur-noir sequence that opens the movie with Miss Brent being interrogated by the police, and the darkness in the cinematic world persists for the first ten or fifteen minutes, until the somewhat soap-opera-like plot takes over, with Toomey improbably naive.

That's not the William Holden who was a major star from about 1940 through his death in the early 1980s. This was an earlier fellow with the same name; he died in 1932 at the age of 69 after a long career on stage and in film.