William Janney is a member of William 'Stage' Boyd's mob. He tells his loving but disapproving sister, Lila Lee, that it's just until he can get a bankroll. He thinks it's not big enough, but when Boyd shoots a cop, Janney takes the fall, and it's going to be through the gallows floor. Miss Lee convinces police captain DeWitt Jennings that her brother probably didn't do it, and sends Monte Blue undercover as a Detroit mobster and Miss Lee's putative lover to find out the truth. This puts him right in the apartment that Boyd shares with his girlfriend, Betty Compson. Boyd is getting suspicious. Can Blue get the details and save Janney before he's discovered and killed himself?
William Beaudine directs this as a pretty rough pre-code movie, even though he doesn't show the guns being fired, or even Boyd slapping around Miss Compson; he does let us hear it though; it's an interest sound technique. The suspense builds nicely, and Miss Compson's casting is just about perfect here. How this movie came to be so rare is a bit of a puzzle. I would guess that when Mervyn Leroy and Howard Hawks got their hands on the gangster genre the following year, everyone wanted Cagney and Robinson, not the curiously inert Blue. Still, as a suspense movie, if not a crime movie, it's pretty good.
