genre perfected at Warner Bros. in 1931 with LITTLE CAESAR and THE PUBLIC ENEMY. The Warner Archive collection consists of three B- length films which star Karloff because the stu- dio had signed him to a four-picture contract which kicked off effectively with THE WALKING DEAD (1936). When the ban came in, three non- horror vehicles had to be found: Karloff may have enjoyed showing his range, but Warners must have wearied of the business of selling apples in orange boxes.
Though he’d been a jobbing actor since the 1910s and had played several eye-catching silent character roles (in THE BELLS, 1926, for instance), Karloff often credited Howard Hawks with signifi- cantly advancing his career by holding him over from the stage cast of Marvin Flavin’s play when he made THE CRIMINAL CODE (1931, 96m 20s) for Columbia; Hawks would also use Karloff in SCARFACE (1932), and footage from THE CRIMI- NAL CODE would show up in TARGETS (1968). The film follows Mark Brady (Walter Huston) and Bob Graham (Phillips Holmes), who meet when District Attorney Brady puts naïve young Bob away for murder after he’s semi-accidentally killed a well- connected speakeasy bully. When Brady becomes the warden in the penitentiary where Bob is suf- fering through a long, hard sentence, the consci- entious official tries to make it up to the not-yet-hardened con. Columbia greenlit the project after the success of MGM’s THE BIG HOUSE (1930), so the prison movie clichés here (the liberal warden and the brutal guard captain, the “yammering” of the cons, the doomed squealer, the escape attempt cut short by a search- light and machine gun bullets, grim spells in solitary) were rela- tively fresh. Hawks stages crowd scenes with shuffling ranks of hangdog cons as if he’d just seen METROPOLIS, but is also devel- oping his signature vision of male groups with their own codes. When Bob gets a telegram about his mother’s death while playing checkers, his kindly cellmate’s response is “Make your move!”— a sketch for the “Who’s Joe?” scene from ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS (1939). Galloway (Karloff) has murderous grudges against con Runch (Clark Marshall), who tipped off the guards about the escape attempt, and guard
Gleason (DeWitt Jennings), who reported him for breaking parole in another speakeasy (“Twelve years for one lousy beer!”). Karloff is a killer here, but also an alter ego for both Brady and Bob: as rigid in his adherence to his criminal code as the DA and warden are to theirs (both boil down to “someone’s got to pay”), he finally goes down in the expected hail of bullets, partially to enable Bob’s release (and romance with the warden’s daughter, Cummings).
Most of the first wave of talkie gangster films borrow the plot of MACBETH: a lieutenant gets ambition, kills his boss, takes over the rackets, then gets cut down by rivals. THE GUILTY GEN- ERATION (1931, 81m 25s), directed by Rowland V. Lee (who would direct Karloff in SON OF FRANKENSTEIN and TOWER OF LONDON), picks ROMEO AND JULIET as a model instead. Architect “John Smith” (a youthful Robert Young, with an ill-advised mustache) has changed his name from Marco Ricca and disso- ciated himself from his bootlegger papa Tony (Karloff). He falls for Maria (Cummings), inno- cent daughter of Ricca’s deadly rival Mike Palmero (top-billed Leo Carillo), but tit-for-tat gangland killings (mostly offscreen) complicate the course of true romance. This sticks close enough to its source to include an equivalent of the Nurse in Mike’s events arranger (Ruth War- ren), but is built around the Juliet’s father figure. The climax finds the hood’s disapproving mother (SON OF FRANKENSTEIN’s Emma Dunn)—a character type familiar from THE PUBLIC ENEMY
Karloff plays a father to ingenue actor Robert Young in Rowland V. Lee's mob drama THE GUILTY GENERATION.
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