The Beast of the City (1932) Huston, Harlow, Herscholt TVRip>DV torrent

The Beast of the City
MGM, 1932
Walter Huston, Jean Harlow, Jean Hersholt, Wallace Ford, Tully Marshall
Directed by Charles J. Brabin
Produced by Hunt Stromberg
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0022660/

Called "one of the greatest crime films most people have never seen", The Beast of the City is "a reactionary answer to the success of films such as The Public Enemy that glamorized the life of the gangster." MGM wanted to condemn the era's romantic notion of the mob-boss-as-playboy,so they had writer W.R. Burnett (Little Caesar, The Asphalt Jungle, High Sierra, This Gun For Hire, Scarface) shift the emphasis from criminals to crime-fighters while keeping the genre's hard edges intact. The result plays like gangbusters.

The story's plot has dedicated cop Jim Fitzpatrick (Walter Huston) making it his personal mission to take down Chicago's leading gang lord Paul Berone (Jean Hersholt, playing a thinly-veiled caricature of Al Capone). He's willing to do whatever it takes, even it means "filling him full of hot lead".

Eventually rising to the rank of police captain, Fitzpatrick starts cracking down on all of Berone's operations. Fitzpatrick's little brother Ed (Wallace Ford) has fallen for Berone's moll (Jean Harlow) and goes on the take to keep her wallowing in dough, unwittingly becoming the gangster's ace in the hole.

Thanks to Ed and some shyster lawyers, Berone ends up beating the rap, forcing both of the Fitzpatrick brothers to finally take the law into their own hands. The film transcends the awkwardness of the period's technology by sheer inventiveness and verve; the gun battle between the police and the gangsters, in which each faction starts firing across from each other in a speakeasy, seems like it might have been filmed yesterday. Trivia - Mickey Rooney has a small role in this picture as one of John Huston's children.

Excerpted from http://www.culturevulture.net/movies/BeastoftheCity.htm, David Fear
TVRip>DivX/No Subs/NTSC/b&w/640x480/1022kbps/23.976fps/mp3/48KHz/stereo/102Kbps/86min/700Mb