I texted David I was "working through the 'The's" at Movie Madness, meaning titles starting with the word The, which librarians know not to alphabetize by, as, as tokens go, "The" is too frequent to be a good hash table marker (lookup feature). Skip the "The" and go on to the next word in the title, is the rule of thumb.
Sorting by too-common features is like sorting fruits into "round" and "not round". You can do it, but it'd be a jumble. And how "round" do you have to be to count as "round"? What's a "fruit racist" gonna be like?
The Glass Key is filed under genre "Film Noir" at MMU, in the Classics section. Their filing system is interesting, and the key to it is a computer lookup service, as the filing system is mainly just a "where to go" map. Every DVD has to be shelved somewhere; here's a coherent system.
I agree: it's coherent as long as the computer is up and running (these days it seems to always be, Praise "Bob").
What I learned from this classic is (a) Samuel Dashiell Hammett was an established generator of trend-setting crime fiction (a John le Carré in his niche), his novels adapted to movies well, The Glass Key being one such and (b) Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, the pair of them, were a thing, like another Bogart-Bacall.The Glass Key makes you keep track of quite a few relationships, chiefly siblings and offspring among two families, so somewhat Romeo and Juliet in that sense. Indeed, one family is blaming the other for the death of one of its sons, the one with the gambling problem.
Alan Ladd is not actually a blood relative of anyone, but he's a main character nonetheless, and the sparks are between these two camps, the one with the murdered son, and the politically ambitious family seeking to run the town behind the scenes.
What's interesting is how characters are "on the spectrum" but by that, what "spectrum" do I mean? This film explores impulsive unthinking behavior versus planned out conniving.
The "brusque brother" as I thought of him, chief suspect in the murder, Ladd his fixer friend, is impulsive but also a planner, and therefore less extreme w/r to said spectrum than the big dope beat-um-up type who gets suckered into doing the dirty work for others.
Ladd is the epitome of a deep thinker and has a Sherlock Holmes super detective role. Veronica is starving for guys with brains (in short supply) and begs to join his thread (program). He declines pending permission from his parent process, which comes at the end (not to spoil it or anything).
