Blackwell's Island

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 is one of those movies which are jammed packed with actors who's names we don't recall but who's faces are very familiar because they appear in so many of these great B movies. About the only well known actors are John Garfield and Victor Jory. This film is about a New York protection racket boss, played by Stanley Fields as somewhat menacing yet also a comic figure. He and two of his henchmen get sent to a local prison on a Hudson River island, where they end-up taking control and have the warden and his staff do their bidding. Garfield plays a crusading crime reporter who arranges to become a prisoner on the island so as to get the goods on the mob. It's great fun with lots of action, laughs, and good solid performances by all parties. You won't take this picture very serious but you will have a lot of fun while watching it.

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.

As incredible as it may seem, much of the details of the main criminal is this film is stolen "straight from the headlines" about Joseph/Joeyrel Rao, a racketeer who was convicted on conspiracy charges related to a seltzer racket in the Bronx.

Once jailed, he literally took it over, with the help of crooked Tammany Hall politicians, and ran more rackets then they could list or even discuss in the film (e.g. drug dealing, prostitution, etc.).

This Rao was related to the same Rao family as the famous restaurant and yummy tomato sauces you can get in your grocery store.

You can research him by going to the NYTimes.com. It is hard to find general data about him on the web.