Nearly forty years before Dirty Harry (1971) stamped the terra, Preston Foster played a rogue cop following by his own rules in RKO Radio Pictures' We're Only Human (1935). Foster stars as Pete McCaffrey, a maverick city detective under fire from both the Underworld (in the person of slimy Mischa Auer) and his own superior officer (Moroni Olsen) for his unorthodox practices. Rian James' screenplay opens up Thomas Walsh's short story "Husk," published in The Saturday Evening Post in February 1935. A former Baltimore reporter, Walsh was a frequent contributor to the pulp fiction concordance Black Mask and his later novels served as the basis for Union Station (1950) and Pushover (1954). The film's supporting cast includes Jane Wyatt (as a heroic girl reporter), James Gleason (as Foster's doomed partner), and Arthur Hohl (as an underworld mouthpiece), as well as Jane Darwell, Ward Bond, and Hattie McDaniel (as, what else, a maid). We're Only Human was shot by in-house cameraman J. Roy Hunt, who later photographed I Walked with a Zombie (1942) and Mighty Joe Young (1949). Invisible in the credits but a contributor to the film's adaptation was Bartlett Cormack, a former newspaperman who found work in Hollywood bringing a level of verité to such films as The Front Page (1931) and Fury (1936). Cormack's 1927 play The Racket has long been considered the model for the Hollywood gangster pictures that followed.

By Richard Harland Smith