Blackwell's Island

This is like a lot of crime movies from Warner Brothers and RKO. In some ways, it seems a vehicle for John Garfield. And Garfield is extremely appealing as an honorable reporter.

The fascinating part is Stanley Fields, though. He plays the vicious mob boss who is an overgrown kid. He plays practical jokes. He is barely literate but love the funny papers. His two dogs are as nasty as he is and they accompany him to jail. In jail, he sets himself and his cronies up in the infirmary, throwing out all the legitimately sick people. There he plays with a model train set.

The plot is plausible. Garfield is Good. The Lane sister who gets high billing has only a few lines so who can judge. But Fields's character is the shocker here.

It will not be on anyone's Top Ten list, nor should it be. It's not a great movie.

But it's certainly a good one, and downright exciting at the end.

It also falls into one of the categories of movies that Hollywood really doesn't make anymore, at least in the same way.

Are some of our prisons as corrupt as this one? It wouldn't surprise me, though the corruption is probably not as visible as in this movie.

What makes this movie work for me is John Garfield's energy and determination. Once he gets himself arrested and sent to prison, things really start to take off.

No, the end is not surprising. You know that his character is unlikely to be killed. He is likely to break the story he went after and break the criminal's hold over the prison. But the way he did it held me.

You could do worse than to watch this movie.

Blackwell's Island (1939)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Interesting if not totally successful Warner film that mixes their gangster pictures with their prison films of the time. A gangster gets sent to prison but he's having an easier time calling the shots there so a reporter (John Garfield) enters to try and see what's going on. There's a strange mixture of laughs and thrills in this picture that comes off pretty strange. The gangster in the picture is played for nothing but laughs and this includes him constantly playing pranks on people. The film's screemplay is pretty weak and doesn't offer too much that we haven't seen in countless other Warner dramas. The one big bonus is the terrific performance by Garfield.

Jovial, practical-joking gangster Stanley Fields gets sentenced to 5-14 at Blackwell's Island and starts running the joint because warden Granville Bates doesn't care. Reporter John Garfield slugs an Assistant District Attorney and gets sent there himself.

It's a bizarre, dead-end in the "let's reform the reformatories" subgenre. While Robinson was moving his gangster persona into comedy efforts like LARCENY INC, and director Raoul Walsh was beginning to revive the shoot-em-up with Cagney as a good guy, Bryan Foy's B division at Warner Brothers was offering stuff like this. Elsewhere, crime dramas were made palatable by using the Damon Runyon formula of making the leads seem like gangs who couldn't speak straight. Here, Fields is childish. He plays with electric trains, he has a squirting boutonniere, he offers exploding cigars, all of which hint at violence while remaining harmless. He may knock down Garfield with his fists, but in the end, it's Garfield who has the Tommy Gun. With Rosemary Lane, Dick Purcell, Victory Jory, Peggy Shannon, Charley Foy, and Leon Ames.

This was my first John Garfield film, and it has him in the first of many tough-guy roles, this time as journalist Tim Haydon, who's out to bring down city mob 'Bull' Bransom. I found it a rather enjoyable movie, and it's not too exhaustingly long, lasting only 75 minutes. John Garfield also puts in a stellar performance - his dialogue delivery and everything is spot-on, but the screenplay lets the actors down. Watched today, it seems more like a run-of-the-mill prison/gangster film, and a little dated, but if you haven't seen a lot of Warner Brothers or John Garfield films, this is an okay time-pass film. Now I'm off to watch some more of his other (supposedly better) films!