James Cagney plays James 'Brick' Davis, a lawyer who quits his practice to join the US Justice Department's fledgling G-Men federal law enforcement agency, in this J. Edgar Hoover (then Director of the FBI) approved advert for giving the good guys semi automatics.
In synopsis, the story looks quite interesting, and Cagney for once is on the side of the good guys. However, he's still a tough-nut orphan (didn't his mother ever get fed up with his constantly being cast as brought up by faceless institutions?), and the film turns out to be laborious and predictable.
From the point of view of anyone who has experience of living in real time, it's an increasingly surreal experience watching the director completely ignore the normal passage of events and hold time hostage to whatever Cagney happens to be doing. In one scene, he receives a call about a dying women from his hospital bed - Ann Dvorak as bad girl Jean meeting her inevitable 1930s fate. He manages to get dressed and cross town in order to catch the ending and have a chat, then go round the corner to her killers hang in time to catch him returning (from some kind of warp in the space-time continuum).
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