Watch The Big Shakedown For Free

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Absolutely the worst movie.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The Big Shakedown has Ricardo Cortez looking for a new racket for his mob now that Prohibition is a thing of the past. While in Charles Farrell's drugstore Farrell says to Cortez that a whole lot of things that are sold can be easily counterfeited and he has the chemical know how to do it. As it is Farrell and fiancé and soon to be wife Bette Davis are barely keeping their heads above water with the chain stores moving in. Farrell and Cortez start manufacturing things like toothpaste, cosmetics, various other things you find in pharmacies.But when they start manufacturing their own cut rate pharmaceuticals Farrell balks, but he's in way too deep. This film definitely belongs to Ricardo Cortez. He is really a piece of work even keeping two women on a string Glenda Farrell and Renee Whitney. Featured in the film is a chick fight between the two of them over Cortez whom if these women thought about would have dumped him. It ends badly for one of them. Allen Jenkins and Dewey Robinson make a fine pair of pharmaceutical salesmen.Bette Davis is here and puts whatever life she can into her role as Farrell's faithful wife. But this was one of those thankless parts that Warner Brothers gave her in the beginning.The Big Shakedown is a decent enough B drama, but my big question here is where was the Food and Drug Administration while all this was going on?

Back in the days when stardom meant signing a seven-year contract, Bette Davis didn't have much choice but to play the wife of a struggling pharmacist, who gets mixed up with the mob, in this mellerdrama. Hubby Charles Farrell is conscripted by gangster Ricardo Cortez to make counterfeit products like tooth paste and face powder. But when Cortez demands cheap knock-offs of high-priced medication, lives are in danger...Bette's included. She plays the ingénue role surprisingly well without the tics and mannerisms which would mark (and sometimes mar) her later career. Tall, handsome Charles Farrell, on the other hand, couldn't act. To say that he had two expressions is putting it generously. Fortunately, Cortez as the suave hood behind the counterfeiting scheme takes up the slack and Glenda Farrell drops seductively by as a gun moll who knows too much. A pretty entertaining B movie made moreso by the youthful Bette Davis.

B-movie without an original thought in its script. Naive protagonist used by some crooked hood. Check. Pretty ingénue who stands steadfastly by her man while hoping for domesticity. Check again. Wised up, gum chewing doll who gets double crossed, turns informant and pays a price. You bet. And on and on it goes. You can practically see the conventions of the genre click by as the picture unfolds.It's not that the movie isn't entertaining if you like the formula but it holds zero surprises. The actors all do their jobs professionally. Charles Farrell, one of the better looking men to ever appear on screen, is earnest and callow in the lead but not very memorable. Ricardo Cortez, Allen Jenkins and many other familiar character actors whose livelihood during these years was playing hoods fill their roles expertly but again their roles are standard stuff. Also nobody could play the flashy moll like Glenda Farrell.The only thing that makes this different than the hundreds of other programmers churned out by Hollywood during the thirties is the presence of a very young Bette Davis as the ingénue. She looks great in her extreme blondness and exudes her customary confidence on screen but her part is a nothing. It's no wonder she ultimately rebelled against Warners since they continued to stick her in junk like this even after she had attained star billing and an Oscar.

An interesting but ultimately average melodrama where manufacturers of counterfeit medicinal products make an idealistic girl who works at a pharmacy to be the innocent bystander who pays the price. This was the sort of ultra-gritty movies that Warner Bros. was churning out a mile a minute, and for the lack of gloss and nifty cinematic presentation they made up for in droves with the subject matters they took on -- something no one was doing at the time. It's surprising that the Code didn't step in to evaluate this crime-drama, but given the fact that any bad behavior is more or less curtailed and there is an obvious moral to the story, the end-result was this short little B-movie. THE BIG SHAKEDOWN is, as much of the movies of its time from Warners, a bare-bones plot that moves quite rapidly and focuses less on the actors than on getting from point A to point B in breakneck time. Some mildly disturbing scenes involve a vat of hydrochloric acid and a man falling into it, and Bette Davis' rather bland reaction to her character's miscarriage (and her unbelieably swift ability to bounce back, as if nothing had happened). It's a hoot (for me) to watch Glenda Farrell play her usual gangster's moll as she burns a path right down her lines -- the woman definitely had some talent in being able to enunciate just under four hundred words a minute!