THE SECRET SIX
US, 1931, 83 minutes, Black and white.
Wallace Beery, Lewis Stone, Johnny Mack Brown, Clark Gable, Jean Harlow, Marjorie Rambeau, Ralph Bellamy.
Directed by George W. Hill.
Clark Gable's fifth film. It was also an M.G.M. contribution to the gangster genre that was developing at this time: Little Caesar, Scarface, Public Enemy. While this film has the M.G.M. gloss, director George Hill was apparently influenced by German styles and adapted these to the American scene - for example, skyline silhouettes, superimpositions and collages, a sinister deaf mute along the lines of Peter Lorre. The film was considered brutal and bloodthirsty in its time and banned in several places.
The film shows, as with so many of the time, the rise of a petty hoodlum played by Wallace Beery into a power behind a mercenary governor. Beery, a worker in a slaughterhouse, becomes involved in crime and gradually moves to the top. It is an eccentric performance for Beery is a milk-drinking, satin pyjama-wearing slob. He does not lose his rough manners even at the top until, with so many killings, he goes to prison to face justice along the lines required at the time. It is an interestingy if sketchy, performance of a hoodlum.
Lewis Stone gives a studied performance as the aristocratic mannered mayor who backs Beery and suffers the consequences. There are interesting brief performances by Marjorie Rambeau and Jean Harlow as gangsters' molls. Harlow has a few brief encounters with Gable in this film - and was soon to meet him in Red Dust, Wife Versus Secretary, Saratoga. There are interesting supporting roles for John Mack Brown and Ralph Bellamy.
The Secret Six are an odd group - rather like comic book characters meeting to discuss the fight against crime but wearing masks which, presumably, are meant to conceal their identity. This has the echo of the serials so popular in the thirties and forties.
Clark Gable is a newspaper reporter - the kind of role he was to play many times afterwards. He is eager, unscrupulous, openly mixing with the gangsters to get stories, repentant when there is human interest, and on the side of the Six in their fight against crime. He happily rushes off on a new assignment at the end of the film.
The film is of historical interest for the gangster films of the early thirties, for M.G.M. production values, for the early work of Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. It raises the usual questions of social comment on the American cities, crime and politics, the power and brutality of hoodlums, ordinary citizens suffering violence, the administration of justice.
