WARNING: SPOILERS

My favorite moment is a line reading from Boris Karloff.

Three men are in a jail cell and the youngest, Robert Graham (Philips Holmes), gets hysterical after he receives word that—shades of “White Heat”—his mother has died. A guard, Captain Gleason (DeWitt Jennings), who is not so much sadistic as just a big fat jerk, wants to know what the commotion is. Jim (Otto Hoffman), the old hand, says they got the kid under control but Gleason isn’t satisfied. “No con under me can yowl that way and throw this pen into a panic—kick him over here.” At which point the camera focuses on Galloway (Karloff), who says, slowly and plainly, “Come in and get him.”

It’s not an overt threat, it’s just filled with underlying menace. I was like: Holy shit.

Earlier, before the telegram, as the other two talk, Galloway is mostly silent, reading his newspaper. Then we get his back story. He’d been sentenced to 20 years, got out after eight, and went to a speakeasy to wash the taste of the place out of his mouth. But he was spotted, ratted on, and sent back for the remaining 12. “Twelve years, for one lousy glass of beer,” he says. “The guy that squealed is in here, too. I’ve got an appointment with him—and 12 years to keep it.”

Gleason is the guy who squealed.

All of which made me think that even if Karloff didn’t become famous for “Frankenstein,” we still would’ve heard of him. Who knows, maybe “Frankenstein” unfairly stuck him in a genre, horror, that tends to the cheesy and slapdash.

A man must have a code
Karloff isn’t the hero of “The Criminal Code” but might as well be. He’s the guy who enforces the second kind of criminal code.

Yes, the title has a double meaning. To the lawmen, it’s the code against criminals—to throw the book at them, basically. To the prisoners, it’s the code of criminals, a code of honor, which begins and ends with: Don’t snitch. Galloway is the one who embodies this latter aspect. He kills the cowardly prison snitch, Runch (Clark Marshall), going after him slowly and stiff-legged, almost like a precursor to “Frankenstein”; and when Graham gets solitary for not snitching on the killing, and may get worse when other cons send him a knife, it’s Galloway to the rescue. “That kid don’t take no rap for me,” he says. “I’m going to keep an appointment.” The one with Gleason.

The ostensible hero, though, is Mark Brady (Walter Huston), who begins the movie as a crusading district attorney, unsuccessfully runs for governor, and is then appointed prison warden. Huston gets one good scene. He prosecuted a bunch of the cons himself, they’re plotting against him, and when they see him in a window they start yammering. Just a lot of noise. So Brady goes down to the yard himself. Outside, he lights a cigar, and walks into a sea of parting cons. The yammering stops. He stares straight at them, and then at one con in particular. “Hello, Tex.” Long pause. Tex bends his head. “Hi, Mr. Brady.” And that’s that. He’s won the day. I don’t buy the scene but Huston sells it well. 

I just didn’t like Brady. He’s the one who first annunciates the lawman’s version of the criminal code. The movie opens with an accidental murder by Graham (nightclub, jerk, bottle), and, looking at the evidence, Brady talks about how he could get the kid off if he were his defense lawyer. “It’s just a rotten break, that’s all,” he says. But when the kid’s out-of-his-element attorney suggests 10 years on a manslaughter charge is too much, Brady jumps down his throat:

Good lord, man, what do you want? There’s a boy lying on a slab in the morgue. That’s a big piece out of his life—all of it. Somebody’s got to pay for that! An eye for an eye. That’s the basis and foundation of the criminal code. Somebody’s got to pay!

These words are repeated throughout the film. Galloway uses similar ones when talking about Runch and the other criminal code: “He squealed, turned on his pals, and a man’s dead. Somebody’s got to pay for that.” Then when the kid is left holding the bag for Runch’s death, and Brady suspects his innocence and is trying to sweat it out of him, Brady’s original words are tossed back at him by the state’s attorney (Russell Hopton), who wants someone charged ASAP:

A man’s dead and somebody’s got to pay! An eye for an eye! That’s the basis and foundation of our criminal code, Mr. Brady.

Not a bad structure: the first-act criminal code puts a poor kid in prison, the second-act criminal code leads to the death of a prison snitch—for which that same kid might unfairly have to pay if the third-act criminal code is pushed forward. But it’s not. When the state’s attorney leaves his office, Brady lights a cigar, looks after him, and says “fathead.” He says it twice. One gets the feeling the second “fathead” is for his earlier self—the one without empathy.

There’s also a romance between Graham and the warden’s daughter (Constance Cummings, making her film debut), which isn’t bad, considering it’s a romance between a con and the warden’s daughter. 

How does it all play out? As Brady sweats Graham, one con (Andy Devine!) sends Graham a knife, Galloway says enough of that and gets himself tossed in the hole, too. There, after a failed shootout, he throws the gun out but grabs the kid’s knife and uses it to kill Gleason; then he’s killed himself. The warden then reunites his daughter with Graham—without even a shower for the kid—and they hug and kiss and profess their love, while Brady repeats the line he told Graham before sending him away: “That’s the way things break sometimes.” 

Right. At this point, I already miss Karloff.

The death of Runch: Frankenstein before Frankenstein.

Early QT
The movie’s got a good opening anyway. Two detectives are playing pinochle at the station, a call comes in about a fight at Spelvin’s Café, and they’re told to get going. They do, but their minds are hardly on the work:

Cop 1: By my rules you owe me 42 cents.
Cop 2: That’s you all over: arbitrary.
Cop 1: I don’t know what arbitrary means but you still owe me 42 cents!

Dudes on a case talking about everything but the case. It’s like Tarantino 60 years before Tarantino.

I also like an early scene in the D.A.’s office when the girl the fight/murder was over, sitting next to Brady’s desk, inches her skirt just above the knee to distract Brady. “Pull down the shade,” he says to her.

Howard Hawks directed this before he became Howard Hawks. (His next film was “Scarface.”) Seton I. Miller was one of two men adapting it (from a stage play by Martin Flavin), while James Wong Howe was one of two cinematographers on the project. Back then he was sometimes credited as James Howe but this is the only time his name was misspelled: “James How.”