Evengyny Thanks for the memories!

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Tayyab Torres Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

blanche-2 When a Broadway playboy is found dead, it's first thought to be a suicide, then a murder. Police Lt. Jim Stevens (George Brent) is on the case. Lou Winton (Margaret Lindsay), a Broadway performer with whom he's in love, is one suspect, but he's sure she didn't do it. It's obvious from her first questioning that she's protecting someone. It turns out to be her brother. Then there's a coke addict, Dolly White (Dorothy Burgess). And what about Anderzian (Robert Barrat)?This mystery moves right along, and is more interesting than many of these films due to the use of actual police techniques from those days - examining a bullet, getting fingerprints, and my favorite, the use of IBM punch cards and a sorting machine to search a database. This may be the first display of that technology in film. Not only interesting, but fun to see, and also to note that those techniques in one form or another continue to be used.George Brent is handsomer, I think, without his mustache, and does a good job here as an intelligent inspector.Hugh Herbert is on hand as a bail bondsman, and Frank McHugh is on very quickly at the beginning. This is an old one!See if it is on TCM - you'll enjoy it.

kapelusznik18 ***SPOILERS*** Murder and blackmail is on the menu of this crime flick that takes place mostly in police headquarters with Lou Ann Winton, Margared Lindsey, accused of killing rich antique gun collector Gordon Bates, Kenneth Thomson, with one of his antique guns. There's no denying that Bates had it coming with him drunk and on drugs trying to force himself on Lou Ann but she claims she had nothing to do with his death and seems to be covering up for the person who in fact did it.In trying to find Bates's killer Let. Stevens, George Brent, soon comes up with a number of suspects who have as much reason to have killed Bates as Lou Ann did including her hot headed and red haired,a strand of red hair was found at the murder scene , brother Jack Ted Newton, who doesn't deny that he was there. But it's later found out with blackmail letters written in invisible ink there was another reason to knock Bates off that had someone very close to him who just have enough of his actions and took the law into his own hands.***SPOILERS***The big surprise in all this is that yes another murder was committed that really had nothing at all to do with who murdered Bates. That was when the blackmailer feeling he was going to be exposed had his flunky murdered to keep him from talking. The big mistake on the blackmailer's part was that he murdered him, like the Lee Harvey Oswald killing by Jack Ruby, right inside the police station and was spotted by someone there hiding the murder weapon, a straight edge razor, in a spittoon. Razor sharp and restored black & white photography as well as crisp sound recordings not only makes the movie, now over 80 years old, watchable but we also get to see the back then state of the art police science-fingerprints ballistic and blood-work-that helped in solving the case.

MartinHafer In the 1930s, detective and crime stories were a dime a dozen. Very few of them were about realism but about entertaining the audiences. Because of this, there were a lot of clichés you could expect in a film about murder....such as the cops being idiots, the bad guy confessing to everything at the end of the film even though the good guys could not prove they did it and police procedures were practically non-existent...they just kept arresting the wrong people until they got the right one!! The films don't age well because of all this and there is a serious sameness to them. Fortunately, among these many cliché-ridden stories is one like "From Headquarters"!The film begins with a murder. Non-stupid detectives begin investigating and you follow the case from start to finish. You see them taking fingerprints, searching files and early computer systems and questioning various witnesses. While the guy played by Eugene Palette is a bit like the dopey detectives (in fact, this same actor played dopey detectives in several films), he's not over the top and is competent. His boss (George Brent) is quite competent and clever...like you'd hope a detective would be. The bottom line is that this film is extremely well written, has much better than usual acting and has aged very well. The actors seem more realistic and less like archetypes in this one. Plus, it is fascinating seeing how thing have and haven't changed over the last 80 or so years. Well worth seeing.

st-shot From Headquarters is a rather contrived and convoluted murder mystery but its brisk running time of 64 minutes and economic cross cut editing give the film more of a vitality than one would expect with the stolid George Brent in the lead. Clichés abound but a gallows humor among the precinct set nullifies them much of the time as the cops turn the screws on the suspects and the supporting cast steals most of the film.It's another day down at headquarters of processing common criminals and chasing leads while reporters slovenly lie about waiting for a big story which comes in the way of the murder of a lecherous, blackmailer. Detectives Stevens (Brent) and Boggs (Eugene Palette) are given the case but approach it differently. Forensics meanwhile jumps into high gear gathering evidence through devious means and the killer as well as the victim remains in doubt until the final moments.With the exception of the retiring Brent From Headquarters entire cast plays it broad and over the top. Margaret Lindsay's suspect and also the ex of Steven's divides her time between being stilted and hysterical while Palette's Sgt. Boggs spends the entire film lunging like a mad bulldog at all the suspects. In the same respect Hugh Herbert's overzealous bail bondsman, Robert Barrat's unctuous rug dealer and Edward Ellis's dark humored pathologist fit well into the spirit of the film.Director William Dieterle and cameraman William Rees provide a decent look and rhythm to From Headquarters most of the way evoking in moments comparison to His Girl Friday and The Detective Story but its incredulous story line can only elevate it at best to a decent Charlie Chan.