Bureau of Missing Persons is a 1933 American pre-Code drama film with comic overtones directed by Roy Del Ruth and starring Bette Davis, Lewis Stone, Pat O'Brien and Glenda Farrell . The screenplay by Robert Presnell is based on the book Missing Men by former New York City Police Captain John H. Ayers and Carol Bird.

Plot

Brash detective Butch Saunders is demoted from the robbery division to the bureau of missing persons. Captain Webb, his new boss, is unsure whether Butch will fit in or is on his way out of the police department. Webb assigns Joe Musik to show Butch around. Gradually, Butch earns Webb's respect and trust.

Cases the bureau handles include a philandering husband, a child prodigy who yearns to live a normal life, an aging bachelor whose housekeeper has disappeared, and an old lady whose daughter has run away, among others. Hank Slade works doggedly on one particular case - a missing wife - throughout the film, only to discover that she has been working at the bureau the whole time, right under his nose.

When attractive Norma Roberts comes looking for her missing Chicago investment banker husband Therme Roberts, Butch takes the case, making no secret that he is attracted to her, even though they are both married. She, however, keeps him at arm's length. Butch is later shocked when Captain Webb tells him that she is really Norma Phillips and the man she claims is missing is actually the person she was on trial for murdering (before escaping) and not her husband at all. When Butch goes to arrest her at her apartment, he finds her hiding in a closet. Norma begs him to send the other policemen away, telling him she can explain everything. However, when he returns alone, she has fled.

She fakes her suicide by drowning and disappears, but shows up when Butch stages her funeral with a borrowed corpse. When Butch spots her, she tells him that, as Roberts' personal secretary, she discovered he had a mentally defective, idiotic twin brother, whom he took great pains to hide from everyone. She claims that, facing embezzlement charges, Therme murdered his brother and disappeared. Norma attended the funeral in hopes that he would show up as well. She points a man out. Butch and Norma chase him to his apartment building. Butch tells Norma to remain outside for her safety while he apprehends the man. When he returns, Norma has vanished. The man denies being Roberts, but Butch takes him to the police station. There, to his relief, he finds Norma, who had gone for help. Webb tricks him into admitting he is Therme Roberts, and when Butch learns his gold-digging wife Belle never divorced her first husband (the husband shows up at the bureau looking for her), he and Norma are free to be together.