Let 'em Have It (1935) Review - Tommy Guns and Awkward Romance

So, is this 1935 G-man flick actually worth your time today? Honestly, only if you have a soft spot for vintage Tommy gun action and do not mind sitting through some incredibly dated romance. 🔫

People who love early Hollywood crime movies will probably have a pretty good time. But if you hate slow-moving plots where everyone talks like they have a mouthful of marbles, you should probably skip this one.

A weird mix of federal agents and fancy dinners

The movie tries to do two things at once, and it does not really succeed at combining them. On one hand, you have these serious young agents learning how to use high-tech forensics to catch bad guys.

On the other hand, there is this whole subplot about fancy rich people having dinners and complaining about their servants. It feels like two different movies got chopped up and glued together by accident.

Richard Arlen plays the main hero, and he is just... fine. He has that classic 1930s leading man face where he looks like he has never had a sad thought in his entire life.

The movie gets noticeably better once the federal agents actually start doing their jobs instead of flirting. The early scenes in the training academy have this neat, almost documentary-like feel to them.

The face-changing gangster

Let us talk about Bruce Cabot because he is easily the best part of the whole thing. He plays Hanlon, a gangster who decides to get plastic surgery to change his face so the cops won't recognize him.

This leads to a super creepy scene where he is bandaged up like a mummy, screaming at his doctors. Honestly, it felt more like a weird horror movie for a second there. 😱

"I don't want to look like myself anymore. Make me look like a gentleman."

Virginia Bruce plays the love interest, and she does okay, though she does not have much to do besides look worried. If you want to see her in something where she actually gets to show off some real charm, go watch The Richest Girl in the World instead.

Here, she is mostly just a prize for the hero to win at the end of the day. It is a bit of a waste of her talent, if you ask me.

The little things that caught my eye

• There is a dog in this movie that seems completely untrained and keeps looking at the camera. 🐶
• The sound design during the gunfights is incredibly loud, almost like they forgot to turn down the volume of the blanks.
• One of the bad guys has a mustache that looks like it was drawn on with a piece of charcoal.
• The transition effects between scenes look like a PowerPoint slideshow from 1998.

The pacing is pretty uneven, too. The middle forty minutes of the movie feels like a lot of people sitting in rooms, talking about clue files and waiting for the phone to ring.

It reminds me of how some other films from this era, like The Tenderfoot, struggled to balance comedy beats with actual plot progression. But here, the sudden jumps from goofy romance to brutal gang violence are even more jarring.

Still, the final shootout in the woods is surprisingly intense. You can tell they used real smoke pots because the actors are genuinely coughing through the haze near the end.

It is not a masterpiece by any means, but it is a neat little time capsule. If you can forgive the boring romantic fluff, the gangster stuff is pretty solid.