In the early thirties a spate of gangster films played to a perceived public desire for mob justice meted out to The Mob. Here, six masked businessmen form a vigilante group to break the back of a bootlegging gang headed by Wallace Beery ("Scorpio") and his crooked lawyer Lewis Stone. Young reporters Clark Gable and John Mack Brown are hired by the Six to do the preliminary sleuthing, and Jean Harlow is likewise employed by Scorpio to distract them from their assignment. "In its attempts to demystify the image of the criminal, The Secret Six was tough and unsentimental in a way that male-scripted films seldom were. There was little romantic distortion, and one can gather Frances Marion's attitude from the scene in which a young and brittle Jean Harlow calmly munches on an apple as the remains of a gangster are taken out in a coffin.... Marion's underworld was an assortment of misfits, mental defectives, stoolies, the vermin of society; and she let them have it." (Carlos Clarens, Crime Movies).