Against the backdrop of Depression-era America, boyhood best friends grow up on opposite sides of the law: Jim (William Powell) reads books; Blackie (Clark Gable) rolls dice. A film about the traumas of youth reverberating through the ages. Will loyalty ultimately be pledged to the sanctity of friendship, or to the letter of the law? This was the film bank robber and movie-loving people's hero John Dillinger saw before he was murdered by FBI agents leaving the Biograph Theatre in Chicago, 1934.