Best Crime Movies of 1933

Prohibition is ending so bootlegger Bugs Ahearn decides to crack California society. He leases a house from down-on-her-luck Ruth and hires her as social secretary. He rescues Polly Cass from a horsefall and goes home to meet her dad who sells him some phony stock certificates. When he learns about this he sends to Chicago for mob help.

Members of a teenage gang are sent to the State Reformatory, presided over by the callous Thompson. Soon Patsy Gargan, a former gangster appointed Deputy Commissioner, arrives and takes over the administration to run the place on radical principles. Thompson needs a quick way to discredit him.

An ex-gangster tries to resist his old cohorts' criminal activities after he accidentally becomes a movie star.

A young woman is on trial for murder. In flashback, we learn of her struggles to overcome poverty as a teenager -- a mistaken arrest and prison term for shoplifting and lack of employment lead to involvement with gangsters. In a brothel, she meets a young lawyer, scion of a wealthy and prestigious family, who falls for her and helps her turn around her life. But her past catches up with her, and she must face the music rather than cause him scandal.

The coquettish granddaughter of a respected small-town judge is stranded at a bootleggers’ hide-out, subjected to an act of nightmarish sexual violence, and plunged into a criminal underworld that threatens to swallow her up completely.

Philo Vance, accompanied by his prize-losing Scottish terrier, investigates the locked-room murder of a prominent and much-hated collector whose broken Chinese vase provides an important clue.

Butch Saunders has been transferred to Missing Persons because he was too brutal in other police work...

A moll, imprisoned after participating in a bank robbery, helps with a breakout plot.

Dr. Gorman is a millionaire adventurer, traveling the world in search of dangerous game. His bored, beautiful, much younger wife entertains herself in the arms of other men. In turn, Gorman uses his animals to kill these men. When a New York City zoo suggests a fundraising gala, Gorman sees a prime opportunity to dispatch the dashing Roger and anyone else who might cross him.