terrible... so disappointed.

This is a tender, generous movie that likes its characters and presents them as real people, full of flaws and strengths.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Maybe I'm looking at this the wrong way but I don't think the Secret Six had very much to do with the story. Quite late in the picture the masked tribunal is introduced as the greatest force for law and order in the country, formed to go up against the power of gangsters run amok. Once they come on the scene though they're gone just as quickly. Oh well, the title sounded cool anyway.For all it's inconsistencies and outright gaffes though, this was a pretty entertaining picture. An opening scene shows 'Slaughterhouse' Scorpio (Wallace Beery) plying his trade by using a sledgehammer, presumably to whack a side of beef to death. Shortly after, he's shown leaving the plant with one of his buddies, and they're both dressed in suits and ties! Think about that one for a minute.I'm not saying it's impossible, but the way Scorpio made his way up the ranks of the mob world seemed pretty peculiar to me, especially since his IQ seemed to place him at the lower end of the scale. I cracked up when he took out gang member Johnny Franks (Ralph Bellamy) with a burst of machine gun fire and when the camera panned back to him he was holding a revolver! Better yet, when reporter Hank Rogers (Johnny Mack Brown) filed his story with The Tribune, he stated that Franks had three bullets in his back. How did he know? Say, did you catch the signage at Franks Steak House after Scorpio took over - 'Eighteenth Amendment Strictly Observed"! Just like a bootlegger to flaunt his support of Prohibition. I wouldn't have minded trying his twenty five cent chili though, I bet it was pretty good.Well forget about the screwball stuff for a minute, this film has a cast list that would be the envy of most films of the era. Besides those already mentioned you have Lewis Stone, Jean Harlow, and Clark Gable, and they're just some of the supporting players. This might be the earliest picture I've seen Clark Gable in and it was uncanny how much he resembled a young George Clooney - check it out. Or if you're watching a Clooney flick, maybe he looks like a young Clark Gable - it works both ways.As an early gangster flick, this MGM picture doesn't quite measure up to the ones Warner Brothers put out the same year 1931 - "Little Caesar" and "The Public Enemy", but I'd still recommend a viewing to see all the principals at work. You have to see the look on Scorpio's face when he knows he'll get the chair for his misdeeds, it's enough to write Grandma and Aunt Emma home about.

Rather trite and confusing gangster story that nonetheless boasts some good performances by Wallace Beery, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Marjorie Rambeau and Lewis Stone. I have no clue who the Secret Six (they wear little What's My Line masks) are supposed to be, but the cast is game and the story bumps long nicely. Beery plays a thug who rises in the gangster ranks after killing rival Ralph Bellamy (with scars and blacked out teeth). Gable and Johnny Mack Brown play rival news men. There's a good scene while both men phone in their stories and flirt with Harlow at the same time. Very funny. Stone is the elite lawyer/head of the gang. Rambeau is a floozy who hates Beery. Somehow it all comes together more or less, but never quite makes sense. The parts are sometimes more than the whole. Harlow is quite good. Carol Tevis is funny as the manicurist. John Miljan, Murray Kinnell, and Paul Hurst have co-starring parts. Harlow is a scream as the floozy with the MGM fine-lady accent! And Gable is definitely the star on the fast rise.

While not on the level of the work being done in Warners crime films during the same period ("The Public Enemy," "Little Caesar"), "The Secret Six" is a fine picture with a lot to recommend it.Primarily, this comes from the cast. Wallace Beery, then at the height of his fame, makes for a good central figure as Louis "Slaughterhouse" Scorpio, as the name implies, a former slaughterhouse worker turned bootlegger and murderer. His ordering "a hunk o'steak" after spending all day crushing animals heads with a sledgehammer suggests, right at the beginning, that killing means nothing to this huge primate of a man. Lewis Stone, on the wrong side of the law for once, is Newton, the dandyish crooked lawyer and head of the gang, giving an understated, sinister performance and making every scene count. Ralph Bellamy, one of the movies' perennial nice guys, plays a very, very bad guy here, as the gangster who brings Scorpio into the gang, to his later regret. And veteran Marjorie Rambeau, while she has little to do overall, is good as Bellamy's blowsy mistress, Peaches, a far cry from the society matrons she would specialize in later in her career.But the big surprise, and one of the main reasons for watching this picture, are the solid early performances of Jean Harlow and a young, sans-mustache Clark Gable. Both were free-lancers who were hired for this film on a one-time basis. MGM was so impressed with their work as, respectively, Anne, the cigarette girl who loves and loses reporter Johnny Mack Brown, and Carl, the crusading reporter who aids the Secret Six of the title in bringing down Stone and Beery's criminal organization, that they were hired to long-term contracts right after the picture was completed. Both turn in solid performances. Those who think Harlow couldn't act should see her in the last third of the film, particularly the trial scene. And the sheer mile-a-minute energy Gable brings to his role makes his every scene watchable. Within the next few years, these two would establish themselves as the stuff of Hollywood legend.Directed by the excellent, underrated George Hill ("Tell It To the Marines," "Min and Bill," "Hell Divers"), scripted by the great Frances Marion, and with the aforementioned solid cast and the usual MGM gloss, "The Secret Six" makes for a very enjoyable film, for historians, crime film buffs, fans of the stars, and just those of us who appreciate a good, involving story.

This is a great gangster movie with a very talented cast. Wallace Beery plays a Capone-type hoodlum that allows nothing to stand in his way. Well, tax problems do put his power and glory on the skids. The veteran actor Lewis Stone is a 'high brow' crime lord. Usual good guy Ralph Bellamy is a bootlegger/night club owner. The Chicago night life and gangland activity keeps this flick rocking back and forth, but well worth watching.Talk about a great supporting cast. Get a load of this: Johnny Mack Brown, Clark Gable and the enchanting Jean Harlow. Fun to watch on the same evening with SCAREFACE(32) and THE STAR WITNESS(31)