Incannerax What a waste of my time!!!

Develiker terrible... so disappointed.

HeadlinesExotic Boring

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

clanciai This is an early noir with Busby Berkeley coming on with many surprises on the way of the typically noir theme of an innocent, having to escape from justice and the law since all the circumstantial evidence is against him and no one believes him. John Garfield was always uncouth and rowdy but managed to make the more splendid characters for their sore trials, forcing them to extreme honesty, not seldom to self-sacrifice to prove themselves right. John Garfield was expert on such characters, especially in Hemingway stories. This is different, though. Here he is hounded by a policeman notorious for his uncompromising pertinacity, who is no one less than Claude Rains, and we know how merciless he can be. John Garfield, however, finds another life in Arizona with the Dead End Kids and a girl and creates an idyllic existence away from the world, - while Claude Rains gets the scent and comes on track.John Garfield's character is not very intelligent, he follows his impulses rather than any careful thought, and his character will keep you constantly worried, for he can't end up in anything but trouble. and his honesty must keep you sticking to him with all your sympathy. How he wins the boys on his side and finally the girl just to one day meet his fate as Claude Rains turns up at the wrong moment is a fascinating thriller all the way with many psychological moments of truth. The grandma finalizes the brilliance,It's a very enjoyable and impressing film with Max Steiner's music adding to it just discreetly enough, but Busby Berkeley's direction takes the prize. The party in the beginning of the film is a triumph for him.

OldFilmLover They Made me a Criminal is a film I never heard of until a couple of months ago. I bought the 92-minute Alpha Video print (which is quite good, by the way, except for some minor shaking in the credits) and I watched it today. What a wonderful surprise!I don't go out of my way to collect Dead End Kids movies. I really liked their first one, Dead End, with Humphrey Bogart. The next one I have is the celebrated Angels with Dirty Faces, starring Jimmy Cagney and Pat O'Brien. That is also a good film, but I actually like They Made Me a Criminal better. Angels with Dirty Faces is well executed, but the moral issue about Cagney's reputation as either tough guy or coward is, to me, handled in a loud way, as if to say, "This is a movie with a message about how to wean kids from involvement in gangs." They Made Me a Criminal is more low-key, less a message movie and more just a warm human story.It has a boxing component, with John Garfield as the boxer. It might seem impossible to find any original variant on a boxing film, since scores of them have been made, but this one has its own twists, and a clever and satisfying plot.Garfield is simply superb in the film. Ann Sheridan and Gloria Dickson are both perfect as his romantic interests. Claude Rains, despite his protests to Warner against doing the part (for which he thought he was unsuited), turns in his usual professional performance, and I quite liked it. Why couldn't an American cop be an immigrant from England and have an English accent? No reason, and Rains is effective. Not at his greatest, perhaps, but the role calls for a low-key performance and he delivers it. The usual excellent supporting and bit-part cast (drawn from Warner and other studios) is on hand to provide a delightful mix of characters: among those deserving mention (too many to list) are May Robson, Robert Gleckler, Barbara Pepper, William B. Davidson, Ward Bond, Robert Strange, and Louis Jean Heydt.The Kids themselves are in fine form, with Billy Halop as the sensitive leader and the others with their usual personalities. However, though they are important to the film and their scenes are all good, this is really Garfield's film.The ending caught me by surprise, but I liked it.The direction by Busby Berkeley is perfect for the story. Berkeley apparently had talent for directing more than musical extravaganzas. The musical score by Max Steiner is good, adding effects here and there and not intrusive. Another great Warner picture.

SanteeFats Not the best of the Kid movies by far. John Garfield is a champion boxer, Johnnie, on the run for a murder he didn't commit but thinks he did. He may not be a murderer but he is everything else. He comes to a farm in Arizona where the Kids have been sent out from New York instead of going to reform school. Here Garfield shows his style. He lies, teaches dirty boxing tricks to the kids, he even gets them to steal for him. He almost gets one killed when he gets some of them to goof off by swimming in a water tank as the farmer opens his irrigation valves. This causes the water to drop lower and lower until they can't get out. One is a poor swimmer and almost drowns before they manage to open a bleed valve, climb on each others backs and get out. The Kids run a strip poker scam on a little rich kid left alone in his car. They get all his nice clothes plus his motion picture camera. They swap this for a pair of good boxing gloves since Garfield is going to fight a barnstormer for $500 a round. However a New York cop, Claude Rains, has shown up to see the fight because he has seen newspaper photo. Johnnie hears him buy a ticket and tells the Kids and all that he is not going to fight. Well ole Johnnie has a change of heart and decides to fight after all, I mean he has fallen in love with the lady and he doesn't want to let the boys down. Trying to fool the cop he starts out in the ring as a righty since he is really a southpaw. That doesn't work out so well. He takes a beating through three rounds but in the fourth the cop tells him he knows who he is and Johnnie reverts to southpaw. He goes the four rounds needed to make the two grand the gang needs but gets knocked out in the fifth. After seeing that the boys and the women love Johnnie, Rains lets him go on the way to the train. I guess every one lives happily ever after.

mark.waltz A seemingly home-spun boxer gets accused of a murder he didn't commit and goes on the run. Fortunately for him, he's believed to be dead so he blends right in with the Dead End Kids, picking dates on an Arizona farm. Unfortunately for him, a determined detective spots him in a newspaper photo, and his cover is endangered.Another imitator of Fury, the classic early film noir with a very similar set-up, this one suffers slightly from both predictability and a generic structure. Where it succeeds is with the superb Warner Brothers technology and a dream cast of contract players. John Garfield plays a media darling, so perfect with public relations that he publicly thanks his mother, whom we never even see. His phoniness is exposed the minute the camera is off and the booze flows. Ann Sheridan is wasted as his floozy moll, the real leading lady the lesser known Gloria Dickson who works on the date farm supervising the Dead End Kids.Claude Rains is, as always, impressive as the desperate detective, a much more low-key variation of Les Miserables' Javert, albeit one with a soft touch and cynical sense of humor. He's been beaten by life and empathizes with Garfield. A true scene-stealing performance comes from May Robson who combines love, no-nonsense and a thrilling love of boxing that creates a lot of humor. Being a remake of an earlier pre-code film with elements of film noir thrown in, the result is a noble try that doesn't completely come off but isn't a dud, either. The fact that this is directed by veteran choreographer Busby Berkley without any of his famous over-the-head camera shots of chorus girls makes this even more interesting.