This early gangster film, one of the first of the sound era, pits bad cops against worse crooks in a battle to see who can be dirtier. It was nominated for Best Picture in the second year of the Oscars, and while it is an interestingly nuanced look at the extent to which cops must become corrupt in order to do their jobs, it is hampered by almost universally bad acting and the obvious onus of converting from silent to sound in mid-production.

Chester Morris, who was nominated for Best Actor for this performance, plays Chick Williams, recently released from prison on a trumped-up charge. He seems like a nice guy: he wants to go straight, and he's engaged to a real sweetheart, Joan (Eleanore Griffith), whose father is a cop. Her dad, Pete Manning (Purnell Pratt), is completely against the idea of his daughter marrying a thug, and it doesn't help that Pete is the guy who framed Chick in the first place. Joan rejects the advances of the kindhearted cop Tommy Glennon (Pat O'Malley), because she can't stand the idea of being married to someone who will turn out as corrupt as her father.

But wait! We are quickly cured of our notion that Chick is a good guy being hounded by bad cops. There's a robbery, and a cop is murdered, and it looks like Chick was involved. It took me a while to figure out that this was true: I had quickly sided with Chick, who seemed like a nice guy, and I only gradually realized that there was something to the charges being made against him. When he needs an alibi, he turns to drunken stockbroker Danny (Regis Toomey), who happens to be an undercover cop—and Chick's doting wife Joan knows.

The film's moral universe is strongly reminiscent of that in The Racket, which was released the previous year. There's no real distinction between the "good guys" and the "bad guys," outside the fact that some wear badges and others don't. While Chick Williams and his henchmen are vicious thugs, the cops don't come off much better. One scene, brilliant in its conception if not in its execution, has Tommy Glennon and Pete Manning basically threatening to murder a gangster—to "shoot him while escaping"—unless he gives up Chick Williams for the murder of the cop. The film doesn't have anything nice to say about anybody; even the clergy are suspect, as Chick divulges when he rejects the idea of finding a deacon to give him a "respectable" alibi, saying "Aww, I said respectable."

So there are bad cops, worse criminals, and disreputable clergy. The only characters to come off even remotely good are the women, who are allowed to be merely stupid. Watch how Jean "accidentally" gives away the identity of the undercover cop, and ask yourself whether she's doing it on purpose or whether she's just too dumb to know better.

This was early in the sound era, and the producers were eager to show off their sound capabilities. This unfortunately often resulted, as it does in this film, in a surfeit of unnecessary musical numbers. One guesses that the only reason that some of the scenes are set in a noisy club is so that the filmmakers could include some music. There are at least three completely extraneous songs performed in their entirety, shot with still cameras mounted at a high angle, so we get the experience of sitting in the balcony of a theater watching a so-so musical number, unable to turn our heads.

If the novelty of sound led to some bad musical numbers, it also led to some interesting experimentation. The robbery scene, where the cops bang their nightsticks on the walls and light poles, is one such experiment. One might assume that cops would carry whistles, but a whistle isn't as impressive as the rat-a-tat of those billy clubs. The opening sequence, where Chick Williams is being released from prison, is another showcase: again tap the billy clubs, along with the syncopated stomping of inmates' feet and cell doors clanging shut. Sadly, the sound is the worst thing about the video copy I watched, released by Kino. There's a loud hiss that makes some dialog all but inaudible, and the numerous pops muffle much of the rest of the dialog.

What dialog we can hear is delivered in an over-the-top manner left over from the silents. Even giving them the benefit of the doubt—it was still the first full year of sound in films—the acting is pretty bad. Compare it to, say, the acting in Rouben Mamoulian's Applause, released the same year, and you'll see what I mean. It's delivered to the back rows, with exaggerated facial expressions and gestures. The worst violator of acting decency is Regis Toomey, whose attempts to portray drunkenness are nearly unwatchable.

The film was retrofitted for sound after initial filming was complete, and this is obvious from the finished product. As I said, the dialog scenes are stilted and stage-bound, unlike the somewhat more fluid camerawork of the silent scenes, which had creative sound effects added. The silent version was reportedly released at the same time as the sound version, but I don't know if it survived. I suspect that it would have been better; at the very least, the acting style wouldn't have been so distracting.

Some reviewers have commented on the film's use of the trappings of German expressionism, but I am baffled as to what they're talking about. The bulk of the film is talky interior scenes, lit so much that there are no shadows and photographed with a camera that seems bolted to the floor. Some of the set design, created by William Cameron Menzies, is certainly expressionistic—most notably in the back room at Bachman's club, where the wallpaper and stained-glass doors are crazily patterned. But the skewed angles of, say, a Nosferatu, or even the stylized shadow-play of any number of 1940s noirs, are completely absent from this film. Other than the wallpaper and one neat silhouette effect, this is a far cry from expressionism.