Another Face (1935)

Director: Christy Cabanne

Starring: Wallace Ford, Brian Donlevy, Phyllis Brooks, Erik Rhodes, Molly Lamont, Alan Hale, Addison Randall, Paul Stanton

More info: IMDb

Tagline: Wanted For Murder, he changed his face... then hid in the glare of a spotlight!

Plot: A notorious gangster, Broken Nose Dawson (Donlevy), has plastic surgery to change his face and makes his way into a starring role in a gangster movie, leaving everyone (almost) unaware of his true identity.

My rating: 5.5/10

Will I watch it again? Nah.

Here's a routine gangster programmer with a twist. It sounds like a comedy, so much that I'm sure one was made but this one is played straight. You know because of the era that he'll get away with it for a while until someone figures it out, there'll be a chase/fight and the bad guy's going to snuff it. What makes this one a little better than average is having Alan Hale as the studio boss who, after finding out the true identity of his latest star, keeps it under wraps until he and a fast talking press agent, Joe Haynes (Wallace Ford), can capture Broken Nose Dawson on the set thereby creating a huge story and getting tremendous press out of it.


Donlevy fares much better in a gangster picture than he later did in the Quatermass movies in England in the late 50s. He was wooden and out of place in those pictures at that time. Like a lot of these B-movie double feature fillers it's pretty short (69 minutes) and easily digestible. Not a bad way to kill an hour. Now, if James Cagney had done this picture it could've been a masterpiece!