1930's Movie Post: Scandal

Scandal is a gangster crime film starring Clark Gable, Bette Davis and Basil Rathbone. Clark plays a detective who investigates the case of a criminal, played by Basil, who robbed a bank. The criminal, as the audience finds out, is an old childhood friend of the detective but their paths separated as they grew older. The movie follows the two perspectives of both the detective and the criminal as they chase one another. In the end, Basil is killed in a shoot out with Clark when he was cornered on his attempt to rob another bank.
We decided to produce the film under Warner Brothers because they were known for their gangster film during the time period. We shot in three strip Technicolor because during this time, a lot of the movies that were coming out were in black and white because it was cheaper, but we wanted to stand out from the other movies that were coming out.
Our film follows the Hayes Code by never showing violence, just implying it. In the last scene where Basil is killed, it shows them standing there in the darkness facing one another and then a graveyard with a head stone saying the criminals name. We went around the code by not showing the shots being fired but that he died by showing his headstone.
If I could change anything about the film, I would change the lead character from Clark Gable to Edward G. Robinson. Robinson played the gangster in Little Caesar in 1931 which was produced by Warner Brothers as well. Clark Gable was a actor for MGM in the '30s, so we had to trade one of the Warner actors in order to get Gable in our one movie. I would have made Robinson the detective because he is under Warner and has played the bad guy in another gangster movie so he knows how the criminal thinks which makes the chase scenes more intense.