Picture Snatcher (1933)

Picture Snatcher (1933)

Directed by Lloyd Bacon this slightly above average crime drama starring James Cagney was later remade as Escape From Crime (1942) by B movie director Ross Lederman with Richard Travis in the lead role. Cagney plays Danny Kean a gang leader that gets out of prison and decides to go straight. So he looks up a newspaper editor he’d met Al McLean (Ralph Bellamy) who gives him an opportunity after he literally snatches a picture of a firefighter (G. Pat Collins) embroiled in the murder of his wife and her lover. Kean finds himself in a jam at once pursued by McLean’s girlfriend Allison (Alice White) while he falls in love with police Lieutenant Nolan’s daughter Pat (Patricia Ellis). Ironically Nolan (Robert Emmett O’Connor) was the officer who’d caught and jailed Kean in the first place. There’s not much too this story otherwise. Danny enlists the help of his editor (who calls a fellow editor played by Selmer Jackson uncredited) to get Nolan promoted such that he can date his daughter but then uses a drunken reporter (Hobart Cavanaugh uncredited) and the (now) Captain to get an opportunity to sneak a picture of a woman on death row being executed (which had really happened some years earlier at Sing Sing). So Nolan is demoted. But later when the leader of Kean’s former gang (Ralf Harolde) is trapped in his hideout by the police Danny is once again able to "save the day" for himself McLean and Nolan. Robert Barrat plays the owner of the "rag" that employs McLean and Kean; Sterling Holloway appears uncredited as a bombastic journalism student.

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