“G” Men (1935)

(On Cable TV, October 2020) There’s a really interesting context to “G” Men that gives an added dimension to what could otherwise be dismissed as blunt pro-police propaganda, and it’s really no accident if this is a film from exactly 1935. At the time, producing studio Warner Brothers was far better known as a purveyor of gangster pictures, many of them taking a hypocritical approach to crime by glorifying the criminal… before ensuring that he was perfunctorily punished for his crimes right before the end credits. But this ended up being a factor in the drive to rein in Hollywood with an expansive Production Code of what could be shown on-screen—a code that went into effect in 1934, putting an end to the freewheeling Pre-Code era and posing a specific problem for Warner Brothers, as their best-known product was directly threatened. One of their solutions was to flip the script around and make policemen the heroes catching the criminals, and that brings us squarely to “G” Men, a film following an incorruptible young man (played by the roguish James Cagney, hilariously enough) as he joins the then-rather-newly named FBI to take down an organized crime boss. There’s a little bit of training, romance and action in the following scenes, as the film starts putting together the building blocks of the FBI’s reputation as a fearsome federal agency (a reputation that FBI chief Hoover would capitalize upon—indeed, the most commonly shown version of “G” Men is the 1949 re-release with an even blunter framing device introducing it as a training film for recruits. I can’t quite call “G” Men a good film—it plays in now-obvious clichés, outright propaganda and very familiar plot elements—but it’s certainly a fascinating illustration of the immediate impact that the Hays Code had on Hollywood… and the ever-creative solutions that studio executives will find to deliver more or less the same thing as per the tastes of the day.