One of several movies made by Bette Davis in 1933, The Big Shakedown (1934) is considered the runt of the litter - if only because the actress is stuck playing the good girl role of fiancé (and later wife) to pharmacist hero Charles Farrell while fourth-billed Glenda Farrell, as a racketeer's moll, gets to have all the fun. (Worse yet, the bleach-blonde Davis gets to play no part at all in a wild hair-pulling catfight between Farrell and Renee Whitney, which seems a missed opportunity.) Based on an original story by screenwriters Niven Busch and Samuel Engels titled "Cut Rate," The Big Shakedown finds New York bootlegger Ricardo Cortez shifting business models from bathtub hooch to the growth market of imitation pharmaceuticals - a scam that runs the gamut from knock-off toothpaste to a useless substitute for digitalis. (The film marked the last directorial effort of John Francis Dillon, who succumbed to, of all things, a fatal heart attack in July 1934.) One of the last Hollywood movies produced before the institution of the Production Code, The Big Shakedown climaxes with one of cinema's first acid bath demises, foreshadowing in its own indirect way an extreme of movie violence that would not again be permissible onscreen in America for at least thirty years. On the horizon for jobbing actress Bette Davis was a 1935 Academy Award nomination for Of Human Bondage (1934) and a 1936 Oscar for Dangerous (1935).

By Richard Harland Smith