GamerTab That was an excellent one.

Stellead Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

Jayden-Lee Thomson One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Francene Odetta It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

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.

kidboots After a couple of years of exciting, stylized gangster action usually depicting the mobsters as colourful, quirky individuals - enough so that a poll taken in the early 1930s showed that gangsters were high on the list of who the man in the street wished he was, J. Edgar Hoover got involved. He was alarmed that his F.B.I. department was not looked on with the proper respect and went about changing the way the public viewed officers of the law. By 1932,33, it was all about law and order with gangsters playing a very supporting role: new characters made their mark - reporters, gossip columnists and lawyers!!"From Headquarters" was exactly that, with an emphasis on police procedure and forensics and fortunately Warners was able to make it a showcase for their bevy of character actors - Henry O'Neil is the stolid Inspector Donnelly, Hugh Herbert is the used car salesman for the bail bond business, Murray Kinnell is Horton the enigmatic butler, Eugene Palette in another of his gallery of irascible detectives, Ken Murray a fast talking reporter and henpecked Hobart Cavanaugh, playing against type, as Mugs Manson, a crime boss who knows something vital about the crime but is not listened to. He is a "person of interest" in the murder of Broadway playboy Gordon Bates (who else but Kenneth Thomson). George Brent (at his very dullest) is Lieut. Jim Stevens called in to investigate and shocked to learn that his old flame, showgirl Lou Winton (lovely Margaret Lindsay)is the girl in the picture, supposedly engaged to Bates although she strenuously denies it. Forget Brent and Lindsay, Edward Ellis is terrific as the forensic officer with a mad gleam in his eye who is just itching to get his hands on a good old fashioned murder!!Just to relieve the procedural tedium and to show you that it is really a pre-coder, Bates is discovered to be a drug addict and Dorothy Burgess has a "way out" scene as Dolly White, an agitated hop head (whose performance of crazy laughter is worthy of "Reefer Madness") - she also saw Bates at his apartment and clocked him on the head with a statue. This fellow was knocked on the head by so many people, did he really need to be shot as well?? Robert Barrett was just a fantastic character actor, equally at ease playing detectives, butlers and in this case Mr. Anderzian, a shifty foreign importer who is involved in the most exciting scene in the movie. Also interesting how the police obtain his fingerprints - he thinks he is pretty nifty but he doesn't reckon on an ungloved hand on a polished wooden desk!!

bkoganbing I'm betting that George Brent got the lead in From Headquarters because Pat O'Brien had not arrived at Warner Brothers. O'Brien was cast in the lead in the very similar Bureau of Missing Persons and he fit the part of a detective so much better.Still and all Brent does all right with the part as one of two detectives assigned to the murder of a well known man about town. Only this particular man was seeing Brent's former flame Margaret Lindsay and she's a suspect.Brent and Lindsay get good support from Eugene Palette who is carrying over his Sergeant Heath character from Philo Vance and Henry O'Neill as the chief inspector.Two characterizations that should be noted are Robert Barrat as a rather sophisticated, but inpatient suspect who does in his own alibi and Hobart Cavanaugh as a safecracker who really manages to get himself murdered at police headquarters.One guy I don't think belonged was Hugh Herbert who brought his 'woo woo' act into a serious film as a wacky bail bondsman. I guess someone at Warner Brothers thought he'd be good comic relief, but not here. Also Dorothy Burgess as another murder suspect was way over the top.Look fast and you'll see Frank McHugh right at the beginning of the film as one of a group of prisoners being brought into the station in a paddy wagon. He gets a line to speak and his voice is unmistakable.From Headquarters is a not bad B picture that played well on a double bill with their more well known gangster stars.

chris-48 As a mystery, From Headquarters isn't very challenging, but it might hold your interest as a behind-the-scenes glimpse of police procedure. The film is at its best when showing the details of a typical murder investigation, including two scenes that prove how little ballistic testing has changed in more than five decades. Another plus is the photography, which generally rises above other programmers of its ilk. [In one set-up, the camera establishes a shot of an autopsy in progress and then takes the vantage of the corpse looking up at the doctors.] There is also a pre-code reference to drug addiction, personified by a murder suspect (Dorothy Burgess) who is a riot of facial ticks, jitters and hysterical laughter. The cast is competant, if largely uninspired, with leads Brent and Lindsay their usual drab selves. Some of the supporting players--Hobart Cavanaugh's non-comic safe cracker, Hugh Herbert's pesky bail bondsman, Edward Ellis's enthusiastic forensics man and Robert Barrat's eccentric rug importer--are decidedly better. Not one of director Dieterle's best, but an interesting curio all the same.