This is a zippy little precode with a most unusual plot line.
Gabby Denton (Edmund Lowe) is the irresponsible type. He blows all of the money that he won gambling and now needs a job. He asks for a job as mechanic at his brother-in-law. Beef's (James Gleason's) garage and gets one. It's not long before Gabby figures out that Beef is in cahoots with some car thieves in the same building as the auto repair shop. Here I have to get into architecture, because it has a major place in the plot. Beef's garage is in an eight story building. The repair shop is on the second floor, the auto paint shop that is fronting for the auto theft ring is on the sixth floor and a speakeasy is on the seventh. There is a circular ramp/driveway that connects the floors together so you can drive from the street all the way to the seventh floor if you wish.
Thrown into this mix is the marvelous Wynne Gibson as Silver, a saucy blonde who is the girlfriend of the titular head of the auto theft ring, Jenkins (Alan Dinehart). Gabby ends up towing her wrecked car one day, and the two embark on an affair punctuated with lots of precode dialogue that consists of rhetoric so ribald that I'm surprised it made it to the screen.
Gabby: What are you sitting on?
Silver: Please judge, do I have to answer that?
Gabby figures the car thieves and Beef's involvement - he's doing it for extra cash for his wife and kid - is Beef's business. But then one day Beef's son and Gabby's nephew is run over by a speeding car and Gabby ties it to a stolen car that was speeding up the ramp where the garage is moments later. At this point, things get dicey.
This is a great precode with a marvelous cast. I always loved Edmund Lowe as the extremely flawed guy who is the private eye or the reporter or in this case just an average Joe who gets mixed up in a dangerous situation. This was a most unusual role for James Gleason, and you need to watch the film to see what I mean. Dickie Moore as Gleason's son is cute as a button. And Alan Dinehart as the titular head of the theft ring always excelled as the slimy weasel with a refined veneer. When you see the real brains of the ring - George Rossener - you figure out why there's a front man. He's playing a deaf mute, but he is also no fun to look at and has a perpetual scowl on his face.
Then there are the strange little things that make the film such as the autopen that the mute gangster uses to communicate with Dinehart and a wedding chapel that is across the street from the garage where everybody who gets married gets interviewed by a radio host and then there is the little person groom at the beginning of the film who gets the last laugh.
I'd highly recommend it as a great example of a precode film. It has everything - including that macabre scene I mentioned in the title. If anything sticks with you years after you see it, it will be that one scene.
