Dangerous to Know – Indicator

Director: Robert Florey
Screenplay: William R. Lipman, Horace McCoy
Based on a Book by: Edgar Wallace
Starring: Anna May Wong, Akim Tamiroff, Gail Patrick, Lloyd Nolan, Harvey Stephens, Anthony Quinn
Country: USA
Running Time: 70 min
Year: 1938
BBFC Certificate: 12

With Eureka! Releasing a box set of CCC’s Bryan Edgar Wallace krimis, here’s Indicator with another Edgar Wallace adaptation, here an American gangster picture from Paramount. Produced by Paramount’s B unit as a programmer, it feels like a slightly off version of American gangsterland. Based on a 1920 play by Wallace, it is like Scarface (1932), a roman à clef based on Al Capone. Like Scarface, in the original play, the character is called Tony, in Wallace’s work, Tony Perelli. However, in the film, Akim Tamiroff, an Armenian, plays the ethnically ambiguous Stephan Recka. This, the fact it was by a British writer, and the lateness to the 1930s gangster party, and the fact it is set in an unnamed city mark it out as odd, taking place in a kind of neverworld not too far from the work of James Hadley Chase.

The ethnic fluidity is interesting. Mexican-Irish Anthony Quinn plays ‘Nicki Kusnoff’, who presumably is of the same background as Recka, while first billing goes to Anna May Wong as ‘hostess’ Madame Lang Ying, a rare first billed American major studio part for the Chinese-American actress. Being a post-Hays Code film, it feels kind of neutered.

Recka, the king of a city who orders about the mayor (Porter Hall), and a senator (Pierre Watkin) whose wife (Hedda Hopper!) sneers at him, yet is obsessed about trying to enter high society. The film is a typical gangster lark. Tamiroff is odd casting as an American gangster, but more believable as an ethnic thug than say the more romanticised versions of Capone we would later see. Wong is typically beauitful in Edith Head gowns, and yet has little to do until the finale, beyond looking gorgeous. The climax gives her some dragon lady stuff to do that recalls her work as Fah Lo Suee in Paramount’s Fu Manchu cycle, but also more pertinently feels like the most Wallace stuff. Quinn, meanwhile, is more convincing as the goon, in the first of his long run as Hollywood’s favourite man of every race.

All in all, the film is an interesting curiosity, stylishly directed by Universal horror vet Robert Florey. However, it doesn’t stick in the memory, much like the title.

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