The Vice Squad

"The Vice Squad" is a most unusual movie...one that Hollywood probably could not have gotten away with making just a few years later with the new toughened Production Code. This is because the villain in this film is a cop--a dirty, manipulative one...something you were simply not supposed to have in films after the industry was morally sanitized in mid-1934.

When the story begins, Stephen Lucarno (Paul Lukas) is on a lonely country road at night talking to a woman. They aren't doing anything illegal...just talking. Soon, a cop approaches them and begins threatening them...and the woman runs over this policeman and kills him!! Stephen is left at the scene and a vice cop arrives and announces that Stephen will be his informer and help him on prostitution cases OR he'll be sent to prison for murder...a murder he did not commit. Well, Stephen is naive and soon becomes the cop's number one stoolie. Now this is odd, as Stephen works at the embassy. They don't say he's the ambassador but he most likely DID have diplomatic immunity and should have stood firm against the threat...but he didn't. What's next? See the picture.

Normally I wonder why Lukas was in so many American films in leading roles. After all, his Hungarian accent is thick...kinda Dracula-like. But here, the accent and fine manners work well with the character. He is fine in this role. As for the movie, it's also pretty good...despite the plot being a bit difficult to believe. Worth seeing.

Paul Lukas refuses Vice Squad Rockcliffe Fellowes demand to name the lady he was with -- the ambassador's wife, who has run down and killed the officer who tried to arrest her. Fellowes offers him a choice: accessory to murder, or work with him as a "stool pigeon", trapping girls for .... well, they call it "vagrancy" in the movie. A couple of years later, he's still at it, drinking his meals. When he rescues Judith Wood, who's been living in Greenwich Village as an aspiring writer, she returns the favor by nursing him during a session of the DTs. A couple of days later, he's sent to her apartment, but on the way out he tells Fellowes the truth: there's no morals charge involved. Fellowes arrests her anyway.

It's a serious social problem movie, with titles that speak to this sort of police misconduct. Despite the lack of anything particularly prurient on screen, it marks itself as a serious Pre-Code; while the Warner Brothers Studio would show the gangsters having a grand time shooting up the sets, or Demille would give the audience a wild party, this one makes it a personal story, well acted by Lukas, torn between Miss Wood and his former fiancee, Kay Francis, who offers him a return to respectability, but warns him that if he disgraces himself by testifying in court, she will drop him back into the gutter.

Because of the lack of excitement and Lukas' low-affect depression, I found it to be an earnest but not particularly cinematic effort.

This interesting film is not a crime film. Instead it deals with municipal and police corruption in a big American city, especially as it is centred in the city's Vice Squad. This particular vice squad problem was widespread in the 1930s but after the Second World War it seems to have evaporated, presumably because of an updating of public morals by then and exposure of the corruption. This film is one of the excellent early films directed by John Cromwell, later to be famous for such classics as DEAD RECKONING and THE GODDESS. In this story, a senior diplomat from a foreign embassy is implicated in a fatal car crash caused by his ambassador's wife. He himself is innocent but feels he must protect her good name. However,t as a result he is blackmailed by the city's Vice Squad and forced to act as a pretend client of prostitutes in order to increase their quota of arrests. He is forced to resign from his diplomatic service and barely survives on the tiny wages given to him. He was supposed to marry his fiancée, played by Kay Francis, but has to break off with her without explanation and disappear into obscurity. He is befriended by a young woman played by the fascinating Judith Wood, whose last credited film was only five years later, after which she married and things did not work out for her. She lived to be 95, but her disappearance from the screen was a great loss because she had such a natural charm and intelligence, as well as very good looks. The film is well made and certainly worth seeing.

Intelligent drama benefits from literate script and a sensitive central performance by Paul Lukas, well cast as a diplomat blackmailed by corrupt vice cops into entrapping prostitutes. Lukas nicely balances a shabby gentility with despair as he's driven to drink in lowdown Greenwich Village dives to forget his "dirty" job. Choosing between sleek Kay Francis and blonde Judith Wood presents a romantic dilemma paralleling the moral decision he must make. Esther Howard--a longtime character actress and Preston Sturges favorite--here looks unrecognizably youthful as a salty-tongued artist's model.

...ha cha cha cha. So sang Kid Creole and the Coconuts and this must have inspired the writers to embark on a 'stoolie' story. The outcome is an attack on the corrupt police in the Vice Squad. After the dramatic killing of a policeman by Ambassador's wife, Juliette Compton at the film's beginning, Paul Lukas (Stephen) is left to take the blame and so is blackmailed into becoming a police informer. His role becomes one to set up girls to be prosecuted on vagrancy charges, ie, prostitution. However, once kindly Judith Wood (Madeline) is targeted, he has second thoughts about his new profession.

The film is ok, made more interesting by the fact that this is pretty well what actually went on. It has a good social history value. The film also depicts idiot policemen getting their come-uppance. This happens at the beginning of the film when the rozza books Lukas and Compton for 'necking', even though they weren't, after shouting out "Vice Squad" at them. Who does he think he is? Well, Compton sorts him out nicely. Even if it is a bit of a shock.

The film loses its way a bit with Lukas in the lead as he gets s bit mopey and you sometimes can't understand him because of his thick accent. I'd watch it again, though.