Homicide Bureau

Political ironies abound as hopelessly right wing L.A.P.D. investigator Bruce Cabot bridles under foolish legal restraints conflicting with his tried and true police state methods such as breaking and entering, unlawful searches and seizures, and beating up suspects.

Particularly frustrating are naïve wealthy liberal matrons who misguidedly protest violations of evildoers' constitutional guarantees.

The pre-Patriot Act bad guys are colluding with warring foreign powers (read 1930s Japan and Germany) wanting American scrap metal for munitions.

Youthful lab chemist Rita Hayworth (modernly called a forensic investigator) does precise scientific sleuthing with her amazing Spectrograph, a wondrous device that tells all, even resulting in a marriage proposal from callous cop Cabot whose police brutality contributes to the gang's downfall.

A laughably bad film, concluding with the police commissioner apologizing for hampering his "coppers" with "too many kid gloves." Clearly illegal police procedures win the day keeping America's junkyards safe from hostile foreign dictatorships.

Demonstrating versatility, actor Marc Lawrence, later blacklisted in the anti-Communist 1950s, plays a fascist thug.

With all the criminal forensics displayed on television these days it's a surprise to see a late version thirties version of it. Avoiding the autopsy part, RIta Hayworth playing a forensic expert examines murder weapons and other physical evidence. Nobody makes a big deal about her gender except at first. I was expecting to see her quit and get married by the end of the film but surprisingly she never even comes close to thinking about it. While a major part of the movie, the forensics is second to the main topic of the movie, police brutality.

The police force is under new rules passed by the city council preventing the police from roughing up the suspects. The officers chafe under the restrictions just hoping for a chance to torment the apparent villains into a confession. The brutality isn't shown, just alluded to, except in a scene where the hero cop breaks into a crook's apartment and throws him around until an accident nearly kills the crook. There's also a scene where the city politicians react to a dragnet that the police do in a desperate attempt to solve a murder.

It actually interesting until the point where the standard B movie plot dynamics take over and the film reverts to typical matinée cops and robbers complete with a kidnapping, a silly shootout and eventual redemption for the tough guy hero. The police brutality topic is, unfortunately, dropped.

Pretty good except for the standard ending.

Starring Rita Hayworth before she got big, and Bruce Cabot of King Kong fame. Cabot plays a hit'em first and ask questions later cop, and Rita Hayworth.....are you ready for this? Plays a Crime Scene Investigation SCIENTIST. She pulls it off, however.

Cabot is after a gang of clever thieves who ship junk along with some sensitive items to foreign powers (not mentioned, but probably the Axis powers), The plot is not the usual cops and robbers, which makes it a bit more interesting that the usual B movie fare.

The movie follows a path of crime that was not usually featured in most B films. Be sure to catch this one, and see how a decent film can be made in just under one hour. That could never happen in today's studios.

One thing that surprised me in this film was the amount of scientific documentation it exhibits. A female scientist is assigned to the police department in a forensics position. I was also surprised at how little controversy was shown about that fact. But during the course of the movie, comparison of materials (from a single source or not), ballistics evidence, weapon edge evidence and more are all showcased. Not quite a commercial for police as scientific marvels, seeing as how another part of the main story involves whether or not police ought to be able to rough up criminals or not, but considering how far before the Miranda ruling this movie was made, it now comes across as an interesting look at the state of forensics in the late 1930s. For true devotees of The New Detectives (and maybe CSI, though it has little to do with crime scenes per se), this is certainly an interesting title.

Bruce Cabot is a detective who is angry that so often gangsters get away with their crimes because of stupid things like the Bill of Rights! When time and again the cops are thwarted, he suggests pretending these civil rights no longer exist (or at least temporarily put on hold). At one point, he says basically "just let me beat the truth out of him" to the Captain! However, despite this start, the film is actually NOT a "let's beat the gangsters to a bloody pulp" film, but excels at showing the forensic work the police and police labs (headed by Rita Hayworth in a bit of unusual casting) do in order to catch criminals. Plus, in order to keep the film from being too cerebral and low-key, there is some dandy action as well--particularly during the exciting ending.

While so often the term "B-movie" has come to mean a cheap or badly made film, HOMICIDE BUREAU is evidence that just because the production values are lower than a big-budget film doesn't mean the film is second-rate. Sure, Bruce Cabot and the then unknown Rita Hayworth were not particularly famous at the time, but they were good actors and the writing is far better than a typical crime film. In fact, compared to the gangster and cop films being made by rival (and bigger budget) studio, Warner Brothers, this Columbia picture seems far more realistic and less formulaic. One reason the film worked so well is that I THOUGHT by introducing Miss Hayworth that the film would become a clichéd "women have no place in a man's world" diatribe, but the fact that she was a woman (and a beautiful one at that) was not an important part of the film--the police came to accept her very quickly and the film centered instead on good old fashioned police work. The bottom line is that the film still holds up well today and held my interest throughout.