very weak, unfortunately

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Warner Archive offers a DVD of The Beast of the City (1932), in which Walter Huston plays a career cop who tries to clean up the city, despite determined opposition from politicians, the press, the public, his superiors - and even his brother (Wallace Ford) who has made an attachment with a gangster's moll (Jean Harlow). A dark and gritty film noir (which tends to go overboard in its concluding stages), the film was financed for Metro by William Randolph Hearst as an answer to Little Caesar. Both Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg were horrified by the finished film and attempted to withhold it from release. They kept it on the shelf for a year and then instructed salesmen to make little attempt to book it into theaters. The MGM brass hoped the movie would show a loss (which it did) and thus discourage moneybags Hearst from further forays into the grim and totally alien world of film noir.

A 1932 crime drama that Leonard Maltin said is sort of like Dirty Harry. Walter Huston plays a detective who is willing to do almost anything to bust the gangsters but he is given a desk job in a small town instead. A lot of people are upset about it and Huston is made Chief of Police. Huston has a brother in the vice squad who has gotten involved with Jean Harlow and she is friends with several gangsters. The brother is upset about being passed over for promotion and winds up helping out the gangsters in a robbery. Mickey Rooney plays Huston's son but he's only in a few scenes and Jean Harlow isn't in here very much. Walter Huston played a role just like this in Howard Hawks the criminal code in 1931.

Really very well done, though the ending has to be seen to be believed. It seems to start a bit slowly, but it really packs in a lot of action, humor and human interest. The film that made Jean Harlow a big star.

This is one of the grittiest of the pre-Production Code features. It is important to realize that just two years later, with the implementation of the rewritten Production Code in 1934, this film could not have been made.As with any piece of popular entertainment that is nearly 70 years old, there are going to be dated elements. What is more important is how relatively modern this film feels, especially compared to the films made under the Production Code after 1934. The story is a hard slice of life, and it will not suit all tastes. This is especially true for those who have been too conditioned by Production Code features and television.The ending has been compared to Sam Peckinpah's THE WILD BUNCH and Don Siegel's DIRTY HARRY, and not without cause. However, try to imagine yourself as a member of the original theatrical release audience in 1932. There would have been very little to prepare you for it, apart from DOORWAY TO HELL, LITTLE CAESAR, PUBLIC ENEMY, and SCARFACE. The difference here is that the story is told from the point of view of the men in law enforcement. It focuses on something that was common knowledge at the time, that prohibition had corrupted law enforcement far beyond the scope of anything the public had ever known.The remedy for corruption that this film prescribes is very strong medicine indeed. You may not like it, but I defy you not to think about it for a long time after you've seen it.