Bad Company (1931) DVD

Writer/director Tay Garnett reunited the stars of his fabulously successful Her Man (1930) for the 1931 RKO crime drama Bad Company. Ricardo Cortez plays a ruthless, near-psychotic gangster who withal follows his own code of honor. Helen Twelvetrees co-stars as a trusting young woman who marries mob lawyer John Garrick, never dreaming that both her husband and her brother Frank Conroy are involved in the rackets. When she does learn the horrible truth, it is she who determines to "cleanse" her family of the tinge of crime by dealing directly with Cortez-and we mean directly. Drawing most of its incidents from actual events, the screenplay even serves up a fascinating variation on the St. Valentine's Day massacre (it's staged in a hotel room rather than a garage, and it's the best scene in the film). Bad Company was adapted by Garnett and Thomas Buckingham from Put on the Spot, a novel by New York "expose" journalist Jack Lait.