Sorry, this movie sucks

Fresh and Exciting

Brilliant and touching

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Reading the comments on "Paper Bullets" (aka "Gangs Inc.,) readers are disappointed that it didn't make more sense. But what did you expect? It's a PRC film and they were churned out in a few days. At least, it's a chance to see a very young Alan Ladd who had his cool charisma down pat before he became a star. On the other hand, if you're baffled by Joan Woodbury's rise from prison inmate to gangland queen, you're probably ahead of the writers whose job was to knock out something resembling a script, then go one to the next low budget thriller. As a return to the days when small neighborhood movie houses were shut out of the films from the major studios -- and forced to rely on Monogram and PRC -- it's a colorful bit of history. And as a movie, it really isn't that bad.

Nothing in this movie's title (um, either title), in the casting, in the script, or in the direction suggests this movie is about a criminal moll. The most accurate title for this would be 'Lady Gangster.' The audience for it? Who knows? My head hurt after trying to figure out who the protagonist was ...after trying to figure out where the plot was going ...and after trying to figure out why characters would do the insane things they do so naturally in this movie. And it has the perennial problem of most 'Chick Noirs': What is the genre? It's a girl's aspirational movie... It's a revenge picture... It's a political corruption movie... It's a melodrama... it's a romance... etc. It's all over the place.Not one line in the movie suggests how Rita (the eventual main character) transforms from gullible sap to mob Queenpin. Psychology? That's for suckers, pal. The only way this movie might have worked is if they had cast a pushy, contemptible, low-class, gum-smacking harlot in the lead role. Rita's behavior as written in the script? Predatory! Desperate! Rita's behavior as performed by Joan Woodbury? Sweetness and sunlight. Woodbury's Rita is waaaay too intelligent and polite (and cheerful, and well-adjusted) to be anywhere near this scenario.I'm with everyone else who asked more than once during this goofy movie, 'Wait... what did she just do?'. But I think I'm in the minority in that I began to find its utter incompetence more than a little funny, and sort of charming. Rita's sociopath/crimespree made me laugh out loud. It's completely out of left field. Just put on a wig, go out to your own street corner, and look for someone to hold up! Oh yeah, she's a criminal mastermind. Or when Rita's sister sings a cut-rate song in a nightclub; then sits down to some smoothy telling her "You'll never have to worry in life" ha ha ha.No two scenes in this movie are headed to the same destination. But it's still more entertaining than the inept noirs D.O.A., and 'The Man who Cheated Himself.' Obtuse, screwy, unintentionally funny. Jack LaRue looks quite a bit like Tony Shaloub.

Although Alan Ladd has a supporting role in Paper Bullets and in fact gives the film its title, the star here is Joan Woodbury who plays a girl done wrong by the worthless guy she loves and then starts taking it out on a lot of people.In a brief prologue to the story Woodbury as a child sees her gangster father gunned down for being a stool pigeon. She then spends the rest of her childhood in an orphanage where she meets two of the men who would later play critical roles in her life.This woman learned not a thing from her tough upbringing however. She stupidly agrees to plead guilty to a vehicular homicide that her drunk date Philip Trent committed and she goes to prison for it. That gives her a far more cynical attitude and for the rest of the film, Woodbury is giving as good as she gets as she rises in the gangland underworld.Woodbury developed one interesting character, it's a pity that it is attached to a muddled story which drifts off on tangents. The two men in her life are aircraft designer John Bryant and gangster Jack LaRue who also were in that same orphanage. LaRue has a similarly interesting character, but he's also defeated by the script and horrible editing.As for Alan Ladd he's the only reason this PRC B feature is remembered. He also shows something of what his tightlipped screen persona would be like when he became a star. Ladd plays an undercover cop.As for the title Ladd tells one of his associates that the gangsters now use Paper Bullets to control a city which are votes. Now that's something today's audience can identify with.

Right out of the box, this had the makings of a pretty good revenge flick, but that plot got slowly frittered away with off tangent events that didn't move the story forward satisfactorily. I saw the film under the reissue title "Gangs, Inc.", part of a 4 DVD/sixteen film 'Mobsters' movie set well worth it's ten dollar price tag. This one falls slightly below average against the rest of the ones in the collection, a shame because it could have been a lot better.I guess the main problem with the story is that even though Rita Adams (Joan Woodbury) ultimately gets her revenge against the crime syndicate that rubbed out her father, she wound up going the same route as the bad guys by sharing the same fate with a guilty verdict. The goon that she took the rap for in a fatal hit and run accident wound up written out of the story in an off screen auto accident, so there was no way for her to exact revenge on him directly. The job of infiltrating the crime combine fell to Alan Ladd's character Jimmy Kelly, but don't blink or you'll miss his connection to the story. Kelly's girlfriend Donna (Linda Ware) has a couple of singing numbers in the film, but other than being friends with Rita, there's no other reason for her being there as she plays no role in the outcome either.What you have here is a movie that on the surface looks like it's actually going somewhere but never arrives. The ending closes on a dedication sign for a playground, presumably on the grounds of the orphanage that took in the young Rita Adams left fatherless in the early part of the story. This viewer was left surmising that the sign was paid for with Rita's share of her ill gotten mob money.