Civismo

Ralph Murphy directed a number of pleasant little programmers of which Partners In Crime is probably the best of the several dozen I have seen. This Paramount release from 1933 also rates highly for its interesting panoramic view of American history between 1916 and 1933 from the point of view of a German-American family.It covers the Great War in which patriarch Jean Hersholt loses one of his sons, Prohibition, and the Stock Market Crash. The story turns into a gangster drama, a genre popular in the early 30s, when Hersholt's beer manufacturing business is affected as one of his former truck drivers, Nails, played by Charles Bickford becomes a criminal purveyor of illegal booze and threatens the German father and his surviving son played by Richard Arlen. A good cast delivers good performances and brings this period, still fresh for US audiences at the time, to vivid life. This time span would be famously revisited in the classic Roaring Twenties six years later.