Confidential (Mascot, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Jesus of Montreal crept to a close I put on an hour-long 1935 “B” movie I’d stumbled across on YouTube and found it considerably more entertaining even though obviously less “major.” It was produced by Nat Levine for Mascot studios and was called Confidential, directed by Edward L. Cahn from a script by committee: John Rathmell and Scott Darling (“story”), Wellyn Totman (“screenplay”), and Olive Cooper (“dialogue”). The year 1935 was consequential in the history of both moviemaking and politics: it was the year that Congress changed the name of the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Investigation to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI, for short), though the change was made too late to be incorporated in this film. It was also the year that Herbert Yates, owner of Consolidated Film Laboratories (an outfit that processed film for minor studios too low-budget to afford their own labs), decided to become a studio owner. He pressured Nat Levine of Mascot and W. Ray Johnston of Monogram to turn over their studios to him for $1 million each and forgiveness of all the money they owed him in lab fees. Johnston banked the money and used it to restart Monogram in 1937; Levine, a compulsive gambler, blew most of it on horse-racing bets and in 1939 went hat in hand to MGM and offered his services as a “B” producer. (He only made one film there, a drama about nursing students called Four Girls in White.) As one of the last films Mascot made as an independent company, Confidential is quite interesting; it almost seems like a Warner Bros. picture in exile, since the leads, Donald Cook, Evalyn Knapp and Warren Hymer, had all been run through the Warners meat grinder.

Confidential – a title which is nowhere explained in the actual movie – is a fast little film dealing with the numbers racket and the efforts of Bureau of Investigation agent Dave Elliott (Donald Cook) to suppress it nationwide. The film opens with a meeting of what amounts to a board of directors of gangsterdom, headed by crooked entrepreneur J. W. Keaton (Herbert Rawlinson), to get all the nation’s rackets under their control and drive out all independent criminals. (It starts to sound a bit like the 1920 Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle film The Life of the Party, but without the laughs.) We see them going to neighborhood grocers demanding that the poor schnooks put in their slot machines and arcade games instead of the ones they already have from other suppliers. The film then cuts to Dave Elliott heroically chasing down a pair of crooks in an airplane; he’s trying to impersonate a crook named Grimley, or Growley, or whatever, to catch the gang red-handed with a large sum of money from a kidnapping ransom. Unfortunately he’s at least partially recognized by “Lefty” Tate (J. Carrol Naish), who throughout the whole movie tries to recall where he’s heard the voice of Dave Elliott before, even though now he’s impersonating yet another crook, Pat “Duke” Turner, in an effort to infiltrate the numbers racket. Broke (or pretending to be broke) and posing as a convict recently released from prison, “Duke” befriends “Midget” Regan (Warren Hymer as a comic-relief character), who shows him how to sell policy numbers and enlists him in “Lefty”’s crew. “Duke” also befriends “Lefty”’s bookkeeper, Maxine Travers (Evalyn Knapp), who’s a basically decent girl doing this because she needs the job.

Eventually they fall in love, though there’s a crisis in their relationship when Maxine decides that “Duke” is too nice a guy to get caught up in the numbers racket – especially after “Lefty” beats to death an ordinary Italian-American proletarian named Giuseppe Giaconelli (Monte Carter) for having won a $3,000 numbers bet and then having tried to leave with his winnings in cash. Ultimately “Lefty” realizes where he’s heard “Duke”’s voice before and “outs” him as FBI agent Dave Elliott, after “Lefty” has already shot and killed J. W. Keaton, Jr. (Kane Richmond, who’d eventually become a stalwart at Republic, the studio Yates founded on the bones of Mascot, usually playing costumed superheroes in serials), son of “The Big Boss.” Keaton, Jr. innocently recognized Dave as his roommate at Yale – one of the quirkier aspects of this movie is that the crooks pose as “university” graduates when they’ve actually spent time in prisons – and unwittingly got in the way of a bullet “Lefty” meant for “Duke.” Keaton, Sr.’s one moment of conscience occurs when he realizes that his involvement in crime has got his son killed, but that quickly passes as he and the other gangsters are arrested. Though Confidential is obviously a much less “significant” movie than Jesus of Montreal, quite frankly I found it a lot more entertaining precisely because it was a straightforward gangster tale that didn’t pretend to be anything else. Edward L. Cahn was an unambitious director but one with a good sense of energy, who could get a story on and off the screen quickly and with a good sense of pace. He made cheap movies, mostly about gangsters but with a few forays into Westerns and sci-fi, from his start with Up for Murder in 1931 to his finish with, of all things, an adaptation of Beauty and the Beast from 1962, just a year before his death.