Sneaking a Camera into the Death House

 

If you start watching 1933's Picture Snatcher with no knowledge of what it's about, you'd be forgiven for thinking its a gangster movie as you watch the opening scene. It is, after all, a Warner Brothers movie. And it starts with James Cagney (playing a guy named Danny Kean) getting released from prison and quickly reuniting with his old gang.

But, though the movie does have gangster elements to it, it goes in its own direction. Danny breaks off with the gang, determined to go straight and chasing his dream of becoming a newspaper reporter.

He ends up with a job at a sleazy tabloid called the Graphic News. working as a picture snatcher. In other words, he gets pictures of people who don't want their picture taken. His boss Al, played by Ralph Bellamy, is the city editor--who used to work for more legit newspapers before he started drinking.

Danny also gets a girlfriend--which causes problems of its own when her dad turns out to be the cop who sent Danny to prison.

Danny is the sort of wise-cracking, fast-talking character that Cagney excelled at playing and we enjoy hanging out with him even as we realize that what he does for a living can be a little bit sleazy. And we have to admire his moxie.

A key event in the movie is when he sneaks a camera into the first execution of a woman by electric chair. Danny sneaks in a camera strapped to his leg to get a picture of it (a scene based on the real life Ruth Snyder case). 

This certainly demonstrates his moxie, but it also gets him into trouble. The cops are looking for him and he gets into trouble with his girlfriend's dad (who gets demoted as part of the fallout). 

But then he learns that the man who took over his old gang has killed a couple of police officers. He and Al realize that if Danny can use his old connections to find the killer and get some pictures, this might be their ticket to jobs on a legitimate paper. 

Picture Snatcher doesn't quite reach the level of True Classic that so many of the Warner Brothers gangster movies achieved, but it's still gives us an incredibly entertaining 90 minutes. The comedy and the drama are mixed together expertly and leavened with snappy dialogue. And, of course, Cagney is always top notch.

DECADE BY DECADE: Part 3: G-Men, gangsters and tommy guns

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As we enter the 1930s, it soon becomes apparent that if you want the absolute best in slam-bang action and tough guys (any of whom could, without exception, beat the snot out of modern day leading men such as Tom Criuse or George Clooney without even working up a sweat), then you have to turn to Warner Brothers.


The WB is responsible for the best gangster and crime films ever made. The studio played off the talents of Cagney, Bogie and E.G. Robinson, while drawing plot elements and story construction from the hard-boiled school of detective fiction, Warner Brothers gave us classic after classic during the 1930s. The Roaring Twenties, Bullets or Ballots, Little Caesar, Public Enemy, The Petrified Forest and other gangster films gave us wonderful stories and characters, filmed in beautiful black-and-white while dropping in more than their share of superbly designed action set pieces.


G-Men (1935) is a fun and interesting example of the genre because it takes Cagney's image as a tough guy and manages to believably plop him down on the side of the angels. Cagney is "Brick" Davis, a down-and-out lawyer who nonetheless remains honest and refuses to work for gangsters. When a friend who joined the Justice Department is killed, Brick opts to join up as well, hoping to get a chance to nail the thugs who committed the murder.


The plot is a well-constructed police procedural, with Brick and the other G-Men using reasonably believable methods for tracking down the bad guys. Along the way, they engage the villains is a series of blazing gun battles. There are few more entertaining images in existence than those of Warner Brothers tough guys blasting away at each other with tommy guns, shotguns and .45 automatics. The director was William Keighley, one of a number of Warner house directors who had a spot-on sense of what looked good on film.

A subplot involving Brick's adversarial relationship with his boss and his eventual romance with his boss's sister is handled well, getting us to like these characters all the more without interfering with the flow of the main plot.


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Cagney is backed up in the film by a number of talented character actors, including Robert Armstrong, Lloyd Nolan and Barton MacLane. That is, of course, another main strength of the WB gangster films. The old studio system (where actors were under contract to a specific studio and assigned to the films they appeared in) is open to a lot of legitimate criticism in terms of labor practices, but it did create a stable of skilled character actors that gave real backbone to the movies of that era.