Dangerous to Know (Paramount, 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, September 11) at about 9:25 I cracked open the Kino Lorber boxed set of three late-1930’s Paramount “B” films starring Anna May Wong and my husband Charles and I watched the first in the sequence. It was called Dangerous to Know and was made in 1938, but its origin was a stage play written by prolific British thriller writer Edgar Wallace after he was in Chicago during the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. This was the incident in which Al Capone sent a hit squad to a garage in Chicago to massacre rival gangster Dion O’Bannion and his men. Wallace was inspired enough by this notorious crime to create a play called On the Spot, dealing with gangster Tony Perelli, which he reportedly wrote (actually dictated to his secretary) in just four days. The play premiered on the West End of London in 1930 with Charles Laughton in the lead role of Tony Perelli and white British actress Gillian Lind as Perelli’s Chinese mistress. When the play debuted on Broadway later in 1930 Anna May Wong played the mistress and Crane Wilbur (later better known as a writer than an actor) played Perelli. For the 1938 film writers William R. Lipman and Horace McCoy (Lipman is a name unknown to me otherwise but McCoy wrote the novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and that garnered him enough attention to attract the Hollywood studios even though his novel wasn’t filmed until 1970) changed “Tony Perelli” to an ethnically ambiguous “Stephan Recka” (Akim Tamiroff), a Prohibition bootlegger who built a major criminal organization that dominates the politics of his city (carefully unnamed) and has been able to survive since Repeal.

Anna May Wong got to reprise her Broadway role as Madame Lan Ying, though in deference to the Production Code Administration she’s referred to as Recka’s “hostess” instead of “mistress,” which actually in some ways improves the story. It gives a sense of moral ambiguity to her role and her character’s relationship with Recka. Dangerous to Know also gave Akim Tamiroff the best role of his career – or at least the best role I’ve ever seen him in. While in his other films he’s just an annoying character actor, in this he gets to play a morally ambiguous character, an amateur musician (he has a built-in organ in his living room and at various points plays Bach’s “Air on the 'G' String,” a bit of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, Schubert’s “Ave Maria” and Wagner’s “Song to the Evening Star” from Tannhäuser on it, though there’s a howlingly funny mistake from the writers when they have Recka announce to his guests that Bach died in 1695: the actual date was 1750) and a sensitive man who just happens to make his living through crime and graft. The plot deals with Recka’s growing interest in Margaret Van Case (Gail Patrick), a member of one of the city’s oldest and most prestigious families who’s now broke and barely hanging on, living with her aunt in the family’s old mansion, and his ability to skirt the law. Surprisingly for a character whose ultimate inspiration was Al Capone, Recka has figured out a way to get rid of his various enemies without shooting them. There isn’t a single firearm used in the film at all (though Recka points a gun at a disloyal confederate in one scene), a quite remarkable twist for a gangster movie.

Instead Recka uses the gun to force his former henchman, John Rance (Edward Pawley), to write an apparent suicide note and then forces him out of an eleventh-story window, where he falls to his death. Recka had bugged the office of City Councilmember Murkil (Robert Brister), who was contemplating a run for Mayor against Recka’s stooge Harvey Gregson (Hugh Sothern), and learned from the recordings that Rance had betrayed him and gone to Murkil with evidence against him. Recka is presented with the evidence of Rance’s betrayal by his current secretary, Nicholas “Nicki” Kusnoff (a young Anthony Quinn) – though I don’t think his last name is ever used in the actual film, but it’s in the closing credits. Recka is anxious to be accepted into high society, and one of the ways he hopes to do that is via a dinner invitation from Senator Carson (Pierre Watkin) and his wife Emily (Hedda Hopper), who insists that she won’t have this despicable man over to their home but ultimately does so anyway. Eventually the film turns into a knockoff of another Anna May Wong vehicle from four years earlier, Limehouse Blues a.k.a. East End Chant, also made by Paramount and also casting Wong as the mistress of a dastardly gangster – though in Limehouse Blues the gangster was played by George Raft (with far less distinction than Tamiroff supplied here) and he was supposed to be half-Chinese. In both films Wong’s relationship with the gangster lead is jeopardized by his growing interest in a white woman, and in both the gangster frames his white love interest’s boyfriend for a crime and then offers to use his influence to “free” him if the heroine will marry the gangster she doesn’t love.

In Dangerous to Know the boyfriend is hapless bond salesman Philip Easton (Harvey Stephens), a milquetoast actor who hardly rises to the level of the rest of the cast, whom Recka frames by having his gang steal over $200,000 worth of bonds and kidnap him, thereby making it look like he stole the bonds and absconded with them. The good cop who has somehow avoided getting enmeshed in Recka’s corruption is Inspector Brandon (Lloyd Nolan, wearing a moustache for one of the few times in his career), who’s determined to bust Recka for something. He gets his wish in the end when Lan Ying confronts Recka holding a dagger, and we think she’s going to kill him for leaving her for the white girl, only [spoiler alert!] she really stabs herself instead, and as Recka pulls the dagger from Lan Ying’s body Inspector Brandon, who’s been watching the whole thing from outside through an open window, immediately busts Recka for Lan Ying’s murder. Dangerous to Know is a surprisingly good movie, ably directed by Robert Florey (one of those directors who made such good “B” movies he got stuck in the low-budget salt mines his entire career) and photographed by Theodor Sparkuhl (whose name grew or shed umlauts and other diacriticals as he moved from his native Germany to France and then the U.S.), though it’s an oddly plainly photographed movie with few visual intimations of film noir despite Florey and Sparkuhl having pioneered much of the film noir style in their other movies. Still, Dangerous to Know is a quite good movie, with Anna May Wong as stunning in her closeups as usual (Charles made the point that much of the film is shot almost like a silent movie, emphasizing closeups, which was unusual for a “B” since most “B” directors avoided closeups as much as possible because they took much longer to light) and Akim Tamiroff delivering the performance of his life in a far more complex role than he usually got to play. Who ever thought this overripe and overbearing character actor not only could play a lead but had this much subtlety and talent in him?