Homicide Bureau (Columbia, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, March 9), after my husband Charles and I watched The Last Woman Who Lived Here, I screened us an odd post on YouTube of a 1939 film called Homicide Bureau. Its opening scenes made it look like Dirty Harry 32 years early: a boorish homicide lieutenant named Jim Logan (Bruce Cabot) gets chewed out by his immediate supervisor, Captain Haines (Moroni Olsen), for his blatant disregard of Constitutional rights in his fanatic pursuit of criminals and particularly his resort to dragnet tactics. When he defended his practice of arresting anyone willy-nilly every time a major murder occurs whether there’s any actual evidence against them or not, his dialogue reminded both Charles and I of the famous line from Casablanca: “Round up the usual suspects.” Logan is the sort of police officer who thinks he can solve crimes by browbeating arrestees into confessions, while Haines and a delegate from the city’s Police Commission question whether those tactics do more harm than good even while they acknowledge that the public (represented here by photos of newspaper front pages) demands quick action to solve those crimes. The film opens with a montage of various assaults on law-abiding citizens, including one in which a dairyman’s milk containers are shot to pieces, but there doesn’t seem to be anything to do with homicide until a sinister thug enters a pool room and shoots down a seemingly innocent bystander. Logan gets assigned to the case and immediately fastens onto small-time hood Chuck Brown (Marc Lawrence) as the killer. There’s an eyewitness, but a man who’s either representing the Police Commission or Brown’s defense attorney shoots down the I.D. as inherently unreliable because the so-called “witness” never actually saw the killer’s face.

Homicide Bureau got posted to YouTube because Rita Hayworth is in it, and she’s actually billed second under Cabot, but it’s a pretty nothing role. She’s the new forensic technician at the police department, replacing a man who was forced to retire at age 60, and of course screenwriter Earle Snell couldn’t resist the old gag of having Logan, who’s only been given the name “J. G. Bliss,” expect her to be a man and do a shocked double-take when she turns out to be (gasp!) a woman. This film was made during the remodeling campaign Hayworth’s first husband, used-car salesman Edward Judson, put her through. To disguise her Latina origins Judson had her use her Irish-American mother’s last name, Haworth (adding a “y” to make it look classier), instead of her father’s Argentinian name, Cansino. After this film, in which she’s still black-haired and has her original Latina hairline, he subjected her to electrolysis to raise her hairline and dyed her hair red. Like Ava Gardner in her “B” movie Ghosts on the Loose with Bela Lugosi and the Bowery Boys (1943), Hayworth here looks no more than ordinarily attractive as she rather glumly goes about her business of doing lab work to help the cops catch the crooks. There’s a clinch between her and Cabot at the end but it seems pretty perfunctory.

The real interest in Homicide Bureau is in the debate between strong-arm police tactics and more thoughtful methods of law enforcement, and the topicality of the MacGuffin. With World War II looming on the horizon, Snell decided to base his script around a secret shipment of armaments for one of the belligerent sides in the conflict despite America’s official neutrality. The shipments are being organized under the cover of a junk dealers’ “protective association” (really, of course, a racket) and are being loaded directly onto a ship instead of being taken to the docks by land freight as usual. They’re in boxes called “Radio” and “Refrigerator,” but one of the “Radio” boxes breaks open on the pier and reveals high-powered combat rifles. Ultimately, of course, the gangsters running the racket are busted and the good guys win, and Logan even wins a grudging acceptance of his strong-arm tactics from Captain Haines. Homicide Bureau was made by a quite capable director, Charles C. Coleman, and it’s full of loud, exciting action resembling a Warner Bros. gangster “B” from the same period; it just seems like we’ve seen it before, and in the only significant female role Rita Hayworth doesn’t harm the film but she doesn’t do much for it, either. She’s just there, looking reasonably pretty and defying one’s mental image of a forensic scientist, then or now. The explosively sexual Hayworth that launched a million jack-off sessions among American servicemembers during World War II, in which she and Betty Grable were the number one sex queens of American film, was still to come.