THEY MADE ME A CRIMINAL (1939)

It was startling enough to discover that John Garfield's first starring role was in a movie with the Dead End Kids, but I was even more surprised to find that it's quite an enjoyable little movie. Garfield is a boxer who has the public persona of a pure and innocent mama's boy but in reality is something of a low-life who drinks and hangs out with thugs and sluts. After celebrating a win in the ring, Garfield gets in a drunken fight, passes out, and wakes up the next morning believing he is responsible for a killing. He is presumed dead in a car wreck and hightails it out of the big city, changing his name and winding up as a drifter out West on a "reform school" farm run by Gloria Dickson and her aging mother, May Robson. Dickson's kid brother (Billy Halop) and his fellow ruffians (the Dead End Kids) idolize Garfield as he becomes a stabilizing older-brother figure to them. Garfield enters an amateur boxing event to win money so Dickson can buy a gas station to supplement the income from her struggling farm, but a picture of him is published in the newspapers and a cop from back East (Claude Rains) who all along never believed that Garfield was really dead comes nosing around, ready to nab him on murder charges if he steps into the ring. Will Garfield skip out on the kids and a chance to be a good guy, or will he do the noble self-sacrificing thing and risk arrest? From the above plot outline, you can easily see the potential for cliche situations, but the characters are given interesting shades by the writers and actors and the film keeps moving along nicely. As the leading lady, Dickson is a bit of a letdown, but Garfield is sexy, as is Ann Sheridan who has a criminally small role as Garfield's tart in the opening scenes. Halop and the other kids (including Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall) are all quite convincing and Robson is her usual fun "spunky old lady" self. Bizarrely, the weak link in the proceedings is the usually top-notch Claude Rains--he is terribly miscast in his relatively small role as a rumpled cop and seems to have just given up on trying to give any color at all to his character. Also with Ward Bond and Warners' supporting stalwarts John Ridegly and Louis Jean Heydt. Highlight scenes include a strip poker game aimed at getting money out of a rich kid and a long sequence in which Garfield and the kids, who have gone swimming in a giant irrigating water tank, are stranded when the water level falls. [TCM]