by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Missing
Witnesses, a 1937 chip off the old
Warners’ gangster block dealing with one of their old standbys: so-called
“protection rackets” in which the gangsters bled local merchants dry with
demands for money and threats to wreck their businesses if they didn’t pay. As
the movie begins we see such a gang at work on café owner Hartman (Michael
Mark, who looked so much
like veteran character actor Vince Barnett I thought it was he); he’s already
paying their “protective association” but they’ve raised the prices on him past
what his bottom line can afford. He says no, they wreck his place, but they’re
spotted by a mystery woman and also by a homicide cop, Bull Regan (Dick
Purcell, later the screen’s first Captain America), who nabs them and arrests
them. The prosecutors are able to get a grand-jury indictment against the three
mobsters — Little Joe Macey (Raymond Hatton), Chivvy Prado (Earl Gunn) and
Heinie Dodds (Louis Natheaux) — but on the witness stand at the actual trial
Hartman recants his testimony, saying that other thugs wrecked his restaurant and Macey, Chivvy and
Heinie came by afterwards and rescued him.
The prosecutor, Regan and even the
judge all realize that Hartman has been threatened into refusing to testify,
but the judge has no choice but to dismiss the case. The scandal leads the city
to appoint Inspector Robert L. Lane (John Litel, top-billed) to head a special
police squad to bust the rackets, and Lane gets Regan transferred to it despite
his concern that Regan’s hot-headedness and unscrupulous methods will only be
counterproductive. Regan deduces that Frank Wagner (Ben Weldon), who owns a
restaurant just down the street from Hartman’s, was probably also a victim of
extortion from Macey’s mob, but he comes down so hard on Wagner that the
restaurateur thinks he’s part of Macey’s gang — and when he drags Wagner down
to the police station he finds that Lane has already brought in Wagner’s wife
Gladys (Sheila Bromley) to testify voluntarily. Wagner is put in a room at
Lane’s office and told to go through giant books of photos of crooks to
identify the ones who were putting the bite on him; he does so, but the gang
gets to him by threatening Gladys and he tries to recant at trial — only his
identification was clandestinely filmed and recorded by the police and the film is shown in
the trial (oddly, it’s not until after the film has been run that Macey’s attorney bothers to object!), Wagner
recants his recantation and Macey, Chivvy and Heinie are duly convicted.
Needless to say, though, there’s actually a higher-up, a secret boss of the
rackets, and he’s the real target of Lane’s investigation.
Regan decides to visit Macey in prison
and get him to turn state’s evidence — and of course he doesn’t bother to tell
Lane, who’s been working more gradually to get Macey to talk — and Regan’s
bull-headedness gets Macey targeted for elimination by the gang. We see an
elaborate way to smuggle a note from prison which the gang’s allies on the
inside use to alert the big boss, who turns out to be stockbroker Ward Sturgis
(Harland Tucker), that Macey is about to talk so they can have another prisoner
kill him. We’re given his secret identity halfway through the film and so it’s
evident the writers, Kenneth Gamet and Don Ryan, weren’t planning to have the big boss be someone who was
not only publicly respectable but was posing as part of the racket-fighting
effort even while he was secretly running the racket himself. It also turns out
that Sturgis’ secretary, Mary Norton (female lead Jean Dale), is the mystery
woman Regan saw at Hartman’s café and again at Macey’s first trial; she took
the job thinking Sturgis was just a stockbroker and then found out he was
really a crook, whereupon she sought the right opening to expose him. Only
Sturgis is ahead of the cops; when they raid his yacht, they find a “clean” set
of his books replacing the ones Mary had seen earlier documenting his
ill-gotten gains, and they also find a body and identify it as Sturgis. Mary is
suspected of killing him and flees, but by announcing her arrest Regan lures
her into the open — and learns that Sturgis is still alive: the body was that
of his assistant, Jennings, whom he killed so he could fake his own death and
frame Mary for his “murder.”
The gimmick of the bull-headed cop who ends up
nearly blowing an assignment in which intellect and finesse are important, and
the gimmick of the rich criminal faking his own death and blaming an innocent
woman for the crime, were both used by Warners four years earlier in Bureau
of Missing Persons (1933), in which the
innocent woman was Bette Davis (billed as the star even though she didn’t
appear until the 32nd minute of a 73-minute film), and it ends with
Sturgis traced to a hotel room from which he’s getting ready to flee the
country; he’s duly arrested and Regan and Mary end up together. (In Bureau
of Missing Persons Davis’s character was the
wife of the man who framed her for murder, and he’s killed in the final
shoot-out so she and the cop can pair off at the end.) Directed by the always
workmanlike William Clemens, Missing Witnesses (which for some reason is listed in the American
Film Institute Catalog as Missing
Witness — singular — though the
actual credit lists the title in the plural) is a perfectly ordinary Warners
gangster films, liberally filled out with stock footage from Warners’ previous
efforts in the genre, and
much of it (especially the scenes taking place in prison) taking advantage of
huge standing sets on the Warners backlot that couldn’t have possibly been
built for a film with a “B” budget —and the fact that Clemens, Gamet and Ryan
were able to tell such a convoluted story in just an hour of running time is a
testament to the cool, professional efficiency of the studio system and its
ability quickly to dispatch stories a modern filmmaker would linger over for a
film twice as long and less than half as entertaining.
