"FROM HEADQUARTERS" (1933)

[rmichaelpyle]

I watched "From Headquarters" (1933) with George Brent, Margaret Lindsay, Eugene Pallette, Robert Barrat, Henry O'Neill, Hugh Herbert, Dorothy Burgess, Theodore Newton, and Hobart Cavanaugh. Many other fine character actors are sprinkled among the uncredited others in this Warner actioner. It's a story of police headquarters at a city police department. Brent is fine - actually doing a less than wooden job here - and Margaret Lindsay - whom I admit I like a lot - stays with him all the way. Eugene Pallette is good even in a bad film, so in a good one, as this one is, he's fab. Same year he played the lead detective investigator in "The Kennel Murder Case" (1933), a Philo Vance film (and he'd played that part already three times!), and the year before he played the lead serjeant with the same name as in the Philo Vance films in "The Dragon Murder Case" (1934), a Perry Mason film. He'd done the part so many times by the time he played Alexander Bullock in 1936's "My Man Godfrey" and Friar Tuck in 1938's "The Adventures of Robin Hood" that those parts were quite a relief.

Story line here is as predictable as butter melting in the heat, but with William Dieterle's fine, snappy direction, this one moves like greased lightning, and it fills out 64 minutes as if you'd just watched a two reel silent.

Recommended. From the Warner Archive Collection, and it's remastered besides.