The March of Crime (2nd Edition)

March of Crime (2nd Edition), The (1936)

** (out of 4)

This second entry in the series only lasts seven-minutes but warns people about kidnappers and why we shouldn't pay ransom. For the most part this short looks at the Edward Hickman case. Hickman was a man who kidnapped a twelve-year-old girl and demanded ransom. When the child's father paid it turned out that the girl was already dead with her arms and legs removed as well as her organs taken out. This short goes over the crime as well as talks about Hickman's death. There's really not too much to know here but it's clear this thing just liked talking about graphic details of evil people. The film pleas for people to trust the police and government officials when they're looking for missing kids but that's pretty much all we got. Apparently Dwain Esper was either the producer or director of this thing and the sloppy editing looks like his work. This was obviously taken from some other newsreel as the edits are so bad that at times we see title cards, probably from a silent, but they're so fast that you can't read what they say unless you pause the film.

The first of this series was a faux "lesson" to parents. The march in that film was the march of errant children toward deviant brutality. It must have been a huge success, because it spawned a whole category.

This is the next in the series, and it drops the lesson to parents. Instead, it gets to the brutal and salacious details of one case. It happens to be one that they had film on: a teen kidnapping, torture, rape murder and mutilation. The "march" in this edition is the constant march of characters like this guy against us reg'lar folks.

Because it lacks the hypocritical wrapper of the previous one, this exploitation project is even less interesting. It kidnaps us.

The news footage seems to have originally been silent, having placards for text. Oddly, the editing here is so rough that it contains snippets of those, and not just in a few places.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of you