Bureau criminel

Homicide Bureau casts Rita Hayworth in a rather colorless role of a police forensic scientist. She's an efficient worker and when all's said and done proves rather valuable in stopping a smuggling gang headed by Norman Willis.

Willis is a clever guy and makes a monkey out of Detetive Bruce Cabot when he arrests henchman Marc Lawrence for murder. Cabot is a detective of the old school and would have been a role model for Dirty Harry.

The story has a lot of holes in it and I suspect the cutting room floor got a lot of shot and destroyed footage. Rita is given so little to do here and she really has no chemistry with Cabot.

This one is for fans of the leads.

Homicide Bureau is a modest B crime movie with Rita Hayworth as a forensic expert in a small part and Bruce Cabot as a violent cop (see his scene where he beats Marc Lawrence). The best scenes are those showing the police methods, some violent and some scientific, which is unexpected in a 1939 movie. Director Charles Coleman directed a few movies in the 30's and became after an assistant director on some strong classics. Script writer Earl Snell wrote more than a hundred titles, all B movies that have no reputation, maybe there might be some surprises.

HOMICIDE BUREAU is a nifty little police "B" melodrama from 1939 of interest mainly for the very beautiful (and very young, age 20) Rita Hayworth in the female lead as a forensics expert who replaces a police department's veteran (aged 60 and forced into mandatory retirement!). Across town, ex-felon Marc Lawrence trails a man into a pool hall and shoots him down in the presumably empty hall. The bartender happens onto the scene and (in an astonishingly incredible scene) the ex-con (gun still in his hand) is startled and darts away - the bartender then spots the murder victim's gun (he had been beaten to the draw) picks it up and chases out into the street where he spots the murderer driving away and then begins to shoot up his car but the man gets away. He is later able to identify the man but the man insists he has gone straight and is now a junk dealer and when his gang members replace the windshield with a new, broken windshield and plant a gun in the car that was not the murder weapon, he is released much to "copper" Bruce Cabot's disgust. The man is in fact in the salvage business - but is part of a ring that is selling black market scrap metal to foreign countries to make munitions. There are two more murders, close calls for several cops including the chief, and lots of action before a predictable finale in this 58-minute little pistol with a hard-line "once a crook, always a crook" mentality.

Rita is absolutely gorgeous and to her credit, does suggest a woman with the intellect to handle her position although her role is quite secondary. I've never been particularly impressed with Bruce Cabot before but he is sensational here as a cop so hard he makes many more famous film noir tough-guy movie policemen seem like milquetoast. Marc Lawrence is very good too but the movie is stolen by Norman Willis as the gang leader. Willis, looking like a tougher Ricardo Cortez and sounding like a scarier Edward G. Robinson, played a ton of henchmen in films during this era (usually in small roles) but I don't think he ever had such a major menacing role to rival his gang leader/businessman here. I'm not quite sure who Richard Fiske plays in this movie, a cop or a crook, his role is quite small despite his billing, but he later became a real-life WWII hero, dying in action in 1944. This Columbia "B" may be long forgotten but it's a remarkably successful venture into Warner Bros. mean streets territory.

With all the criminal forensics displayed on television these days it's a surprise to see a late version thirties version of it. Avoiding the autopsy part, RIta Hayworth playing a forensic expert examines murder weapons and other physical evidence. Nobody makes a big deal about her gender except at first. I was expecting to see her quit and get married by the end of the film but surprisingly she never even comes close to thinking about it. While a major part of the movie, the forensics is second to the main topic of the movie, police brutality.

The police force is under new rules passed by the city council preventing the police from roughing up the suspects. The officers chafe under the restrictions just hoping for a chance to torment the apparent villains into a confession. The brutality isn't shown, just alluded to, except in a scene where the hero cop breaks into a crook's apartment and throws him around until an accident nearly kills the crook. There's also a scene where the city politicians react to a dragnet that the police do in a desperate attempt to solve a murder.

It actually interesting until the point where the standard B movie plot dynamics take over and the film reverts to typical matinée cops and robbers complete with a kidnapping, a silly shootout and eventual redemption for the tough guy hero. The police brutality topic is, unfortunately, dropped.

Pretty good except for the standard ending.

One thing that surprised me in this film was the amount of scientific documentation it exhibits. A female scientist is assigned to the police department in a forensics position. I was also surprised at how little controversy was shown about that fact. But during the course of the movie, comparison of materials (from a single source or not), ballistics evidence, weapon edge evidence and more are all showcased. Not quite a commercial for police as scientific marvels, seeing as how another part of the main story involves whether or not police ought to be able to rough up criminals or not, but considering how far before the Miranda ruling this movie was made, it now comes across as an interesting look at the state of forensics in the late 1930s. For true devotees of The New Detectives (and maybe CSI, though it has little to do with crime scenes per se), this is certainly an interesting title.