So how did this teenage drive-in freak miss a title like this back in '57. Just lucky, I guess.
Apparently re-cut episodes from the Gangbusters TV show on the big screen. While this was frequently done in the 50's and 60's because people didn't have a TV or a color TV and producers wanted an increased return on their investment (big screen ticket sales or if it went to the small screen resale of a series that isn't in syndication), the results were usually less then the sum of their parts.
The history of early-twentieth-century organized crime, and the response of law enforcement, narrated on the budget of a high-school sex-ed movie. Martin Scorsese recommended this movie as the ultimate exemplar of visual storytelling on a well-worn shoestring, and he knows whereof he speaks: even Sam Fuller never had to portray a shooting death by dissolving to stock footage of a firing gun.
`Guns Don't Argue' is essentially a docu-drama about the war against crime in the 20's and 30's, with particular emphasis on the role of the FBI in that process. It is very much pro-Hoover, pro-law-enforcement, and anti-criminal, and is also quite heavy-handed (often laughably so) in its narration and its portrayals of the criminal element.
It was, just as it says at the top of the page, several episodes of the syndicated TV series, GANGBUSTERS, stitched together to make a feature-length film for the drive-in and grind-show theatres, and the producers were only interested in getting some more return on their investment...and didn't much care if some theatre patron came away miffed because he had already seen this mess for free on television, scattered across several 30-minute episodes.
TCM showed this movie in October 2016 along with other movies about the FBI. Three of the movies covered gangsters efforts to free one of their own in Kansas City.
Dizzy, Dumb, and Downright Inaccurate with just about Everything. Where to Start?
It shouldn't be too surprising that this is poorly produced, considering the era it was originally produced in as early television programming, but to be remade into a feature length movie by combining episodes and released later makes it a rather pathetic effort.There were better, similar TV shows, like Dragnet, Highway Patrol and Racket Squad that were better.
