There’s one very noticeable problem with George Hill's The Secret Six, and that is that the finished film is far less interesting than all of its elements.

First is the title – The Secret Six. Who are the secret six? What secret they could hold? Look elsewhere and see Wallace Beery's mug. Is he a member of the six? What's his gang up to?[...]

The film is ostensibly the story of a man named Scorpio's rise from working in a slaughterhouse to being the top of the underworld. But it's also the story of a girl, and two men, and how those men fell in love with the girl, but one got her, but he's a reporter and he crosses a gangster and realizes the girl set him up, but the girl was really in love with him all along and the other reporter nobly tries to help the other reporter not get murdered but then the other reporter…[...]

The main plot, which gets pushed further and further into the background, is far more enjoyable even if it becomes thinner and thinner. Scorpio is the kind of charming brute that Beery could play in his sleep. He starts off as the person who kills the cows in the slaughterhouse, until one day he meets up with his pal, Johnny, who tips him off as how to triple his income by bumping off the competitors for his bootlegging business.

Ralph Bellamy plays Johnny with a wicked grin and a fake scar that makes him a chilling, nasty creature. Once Scorpio starts becoming too productive in the gang, he decides to frame him for the murder of a rival boss’s kid brother. This results in a showdown that ends the film’s first act. It’s too bad; the slimy Bellamy is one of the movie’s strongest assets.

We still have lawyer Newton around, though, and his upper class alcoholic snobbery plays well against Scorpio’s blue collar grasps at respectability. The two are uneasy partners, and while Newton tries to guide Scorpio to follow a stratagem, while Scorpio simply applies the rules of the slaughterhouse to the rules of crime: be dull, blunt, and painful.[...]