Best Crime Movies of 1930

Convicted of manslaughter for a drunken driving accident, Kent Marlowe is sent to prison, where he meets vicious incarcerated figures who are planning an escape from the brutal conditions.

After young Robert Graham commits a murder while drunk and defending his girlfriend, he is prosecuted by ambitious Mark Brady and sentenced to 10 years. Six years later, Brady becomes the prison warden and offers the beleaguered Robert a job as his chauffeur. Robert cleans up his act, but, on the eve of his pardon, his cellmate drags him back into the world of violence, and he faces a difficult choice that could return him to prison.

A vicious crime lord decides that he has had enough and much to the shock of his colleagues decides to give the business to his second in command and retire to Florida after marrying his moll. Unfortunately, he has no idea that she and the man are lovers.

When a woman is convicted of murder, one of the jurors selected to serve on the murder-trial jury believes the accused, an aspiring actress, is innocent of the crime and takes it upon himself to apprehend the real killer.

Daily life at men and women's prison units where baseball and the marching band are serious business. Two prisoners escape in order to help paroled Steve from being blackmailed by his girlfriend's ex-partner-in-crime.

John Nelson, a well-to-do businessman, is escorting a woman he knows as Ethel Barry to the door of her apartment suite when a man steps out of the shadows and angrily demands to know where she has been. The embarrassed Nelson excuses himself and goes to his rooms in the same hotel. The woman rushes into his apartment followed by the man who met her in the hall. The man threatens her with violence and Nelson comes to her defense. In the ensuing fight, the man is knocked out of the window and falls to his death to the pavement many stories down. He is charged with the killing and his only witness that can prove self-defense for him has disappeared, and can not be found.

Ma Delano runs a penny arcade in Coney Island, living upstairs with her sons and daughter. Story involves rum-running, accidental murder and a frame-up.

Mike (Phillips Holmes) is a popular college track star, but with a terrible secret. His father John (Grant Mitchell) is in prison for murdering the person who murdered his brother. The story leaks out, Mike loses a class election and he withdraws from school and heads home in shame. The town's old timers admire Mike and his father, while younger ones think Mike is probably no good. Before long, John is pardoned and heads back home. Can they all live in peace?

In order to use the publicity to get re-elected, a judge sentences a notorious gangster to fight in the war.