MY DVD Collection - 09 Feb 2007

(Zum Verbrecher verurteilt [de])

USA 1939
d: Busby Berkeley
Internet Archive (Region 0 us)

>> The Cast & Crew [click to show or hide]

John Garfield, a boxer, kills a reporter who threatened to besmirch his all-American-boy image with the truth; on the lam, pursued by detective Claude Rains, he lands out West, on a farm in Arizona, playing hero to none other than the Dead End Kids. "Claude Rains gets to play Javert to Garfield's Jean Valjean, and does it beautifully...This is a sentimental sucker punch of a movie, but one with a straightforward recognition of man's inhumanity to man. And great scenes with Garfield running from a railroad bull on the tops of boxcars with the train moving, bloody boxing matches, and the usual Dead End Kids' antics. Fast-moving, Depression-era melodrama with credit to Victor Hugo."
— Barry Gifford, PFA
•••••
They Made Me a Criminal is an unusual movie, as well as an unusually good movie, on numerous counts. For starters, it is, along with John Huston's version of The Maltese Falcon, one of a handful of Hollywood remakes that are better than the original movies that they followed. Mostly, this comes from John Garfield's excellent performance as Johnny Bradfield/Jack Dorney, the vain, self-centered opportunist who finds a better side of himself at the lowest point in his life -- Garfield is good throughout the movie, but he is brilliant in the scenes in which he is staring adversity and then doom right in the face. He is supported by an excellent cast, including some of the best work ever done by those resident Warner Bros. delinquents the Dead End Kids, with a top-notch performance by Billy Halop as their leader. Along with Angels With Dirty Faces, this was the best of the Warner Bros. movies in which they appeared. Also notable were a pair of fine, earthy, lusty performances by Gloria Dickson and May Robson, as the two women who come to believe in Garfield's character. For most viewers the only weak link was Claude Rains as Detective Phelan -- most viewers find it hard to accept Rains as a tough New York detective, but he is sincere in his performance and suppresses his accent sufficiently to pull off the portrayal, despite some apparently awkward moments with the role. The movie was also extraordinary as the final Warner Bros. film of Busby Berkeley, who had begged and cajoled the studio for non-musical projects and so they gave him this film, a remake of the 1933 drama The Life of Jimmy Dolan. Berkeley ran with it, turning the movie into a showcase for more than half a dozen actors and even making room for a notably sympathetic performance from Louis Jean Heydt, playing a would-be boxer who is even more desperate for money than Dorney. Berkeley applied his skills at visual presentation, acquired in numerous musicals, to the fight sequence at the movie's climax with memorably brutal results. The movie was also one of the last of the major Warner Bros. movies to deal with the consequences of the Great Depression -- by 1940-1941, in the wake of the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe, and the gradual move toward re-armament of the United States, the lingering traces of unemployment would be forgotten; seen today They Made Me a Criminal offers a last look back at an impoverished but still resourceful America of the late '30s.
— by Bruce Eder, AMG