Film review – Dangerous to Know (1938)

My notes on Dangerous to Know (1938)

Edgar Wallace’s play On the Spot (1930) was one of many, many a clef accounts of the criminal career of Al Capone – with especial reference to the St Valentine’s Day Massacre.  It didn’t get filmed in that clutch of Capone-type gangster pics of the early 1930s – Scarface, Little Caesar, etc – and only made it to the screen in 1938, well after the initial gangland cycle, as a lower-case Paramount picture which is as much an antihero melodrama as crime movie.  Oddly, it’s fairly sympathetic to its ethnically ambiguous Capone stand-in Stephan Recka (Akim Tamiroff) – he was ‘Tony Perelli’ in the play –  who is guilty of committing eight suicides of other people (he backs a victim out of a high window after forcing him to write a suicide note) but winds up being busted by a cop (Lloyd Nolan) for the murder of his ‘hostess’ Madame Lan Ying (Anna May Wong), who actually has committed suicide.

It opens by establishing the wrecking power Recka has in an unnamed city a lot like Chicago – a cab driver dropping off his top goon Nicki Kusnoff (Anthony Quinn) at City Hall just has to show the name of his sponsor to get out of paying a ticket for parking where he shouldn’t.  Recka dishes out orders to the Mayor (the weaselly Porter Hall), the state senator (Pierre Watkin) and other officials.  Rance (Edward Pawley), of the suspiciously low windowsill and upper-storey apartment, is on his death list not because he’s against corruption but because he’s scheming to get a bigger cut of the graft and displace the Big Boy.  As in The Great Gatsby, the hood’s flaw is an obsessive need to crash high society – though a senator’s wife (Hedda Hopper) sneers at him behind his back even at his birthday party – as represented by his crush on high-born but broke Margaret Van Case (Gail Patrick).  He spends most of the film working a frame for Margaret’s stockbroker ex-football player fiance (Harvey Stephens), who’s obviously a clod but was born into the club.

Recka’s mansion is full of Napoleonic memorabilia and other self-aggrandising tat, including a pipe organ (probably the Paramount prop from Dr Jekyll’s house) on which he plays Bach.  He’s made his dough in bootlegging, but doesn’t drink; the William R. Lipman/Horace McCoy script subversively goes against the then-prevailing belief that ending Prohibition broke the rule of the gang bosses by showing a post-booze baron thug still essentially running a city and owning the political machine.  Tamiroff, obviously not a romantic leading man, is not a contender to cop off with Patrick but others are obsessed (even in love) with him – including cop Nolan, goon Quinn, butler Barlowe Borland and top-billed Wong … though Quinn is also envious and afraid of his boss and Wong has to stand back and let others handle the heavy lifting until a finale where she has great tear-stained close-ups and does this strange suicide which destroys the man she loves (she’d played the role on stage).  Directed by Robert Florey, it’s a pre-noir movie – not overly shadowed, but concerned with character flaws rather than social problems.  Sometime-ham Tamiroff underplays in a way Edward G. Robinson wouldn’t, giving a surprisngly subtle performance – though people who’d got on the wrong side of the real Capone might not have appreciated the suggestion that OG Scarface was really a big softie and those country club snobs are worse than he was.  This being a Paramount movie, Wong is given some spectacular Edith Head gowns.

Late in the film, as the overly complex frame with bearer bonds falls apart, Recka tells Nicki that the sap fiance will have to be taken ‘to the garage’, which audiences in the 1930s would have pegged as a St Valentine’s Day massacre reference.  There’s an oddly undotted I in the plot, perhaps a censor-appeasing loophole.  The cop tells Recka as he’s being arrested that even if Lan Ying is ruled s suicide, they’ve got him on the Rance murder but not how — though Florey had Tamiroff make a flourish which ought to get him nabbed (he takes the pen Rance has used to write the suicide note away with him – which ought to get the crime scene boys wondering how the deceased wrote that note with no pen on the desk).  Paramount obviously didn’t want to use Wallace’s title, though they did the film few favours with the ultra-bland substitute – Dangerous to Know is the kind of monicker you forget while you’re watching the film; Monogram used On the Spot for a Frankie Darro-Mantan Moreland comedy in 1940.