Gladys Snyder Movies

The all-black Gang War was originally designed for the "colored" movie houses which thrived in segregated communities throughout the 1930s and 1940s. The plot concerns the deadly rivalry between gangsters Killer Meade (Ralph Cooper) and Lou Baron (Lawrence Criner). The object of their war is the control of Harlem's jukeboxes, a plot device that allows for the logical interjection of a few musical numbers. Heroine Mazie (Gladys Snider) falls in love with one of the crooks, only to be left in the lurch when he's cut down by a hale of bullets. The film's overreliance upon newspaper montages as a narrative device suggests that several important plot points were forgotten in the haste of completing the picture within its near-nonexistent budget. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi