My Son Is Guilty

Police Officer Tim Kerry (Harry Carey) is a great cop...but he has a huge achilles heel...his son, Ritzy (Bruce Cabot). Ritzy is just no darn good and has just gotten out of prison but Tim thinks his son has seen the light and has changed. In fact, Tim helps Ritzy get a job...a job which he wants so he can help his gang with a robbery! About the only one who can see right through Ritzy is Barney (Glenn Ford)...a childhood acquaintance who knows he'll never change.

The acting is pretty good in this one though the film itself is yet another formulaic B-movie from Columbia. This doesn't mean it's bad...but it's also not particularly good because it's all pretty predictable. One of the few surprises is seeing Glenn Ford in one of his earliest roles (despite one reviewer saying it's Ford's first film, it isn't). The other is the message that cops sometimes just have to ignore civil rights and beat the truth out of suspects!! A decent time-passer that seems to promote occasional police brutality and not a lot more.

From the magic year in films, 1939, except the fairy dust didn't land on this movie.

My Son is Guilty is a B film starring Harry Carey as Tim Kerry, a 61-year-old cop still walking a beat in Hell's Kitchen. It didn't look like Hells Kitchen, and people seemed to walk aimlessly up and down the street.

Kerry's son Ritzy (Bruce Cabot) is released from prison after a two-year stint. He promises his dad he's going straight, but he's lying. One problem might stem from naming him Ritzy.

Ritzy joins a gang planning a heist. Since he's a radio expert, they suggest he talk to his dad about working the police calls at the department so he can delay the all cars notification when the robbery occurs. Most police departments definitely want an ex-con handling this so they hire him.

Twenty-three year old Glenn Ford plays a neighborhood kid in competition with Ritzy for the affections of Julie Bishop.

Despite a fine cast, not a good movie.

Look for Edgar Buchanan in a small role as a bartender.

It's Hell's Kitchen. Tim Kerry (Harry Carey) is an honest cop trying to do good in the neighborhood while watching out for the bad apples. His son Ritzy (Bruce Cabot) is getting released after two years in prison. It's hard to stay on the straight and narrow.

This story would be more compelling if Ritzy is younger. He's in his mid-30's. He is who he is by this point. If he's a twenty year old, he would have his whole future ahead of him. It would be a more dire struggle to save the boy. As it is, I'm surprised that he is still coming home to his pop. I'm just not that into him and I stop caring about his drama. There is an early twenty-something Glenn Ford. He would be a better Ritzy.

Tim Kerry (Harry Carey), a beat cop in Hell's Kitchen, welcomes home his son Ritzy (Bruce Cabot) after he finishes his two year prison sentence. Ritzy tells his dad he'll go straight, and he may even mean it to some degree. But then his old gang gets in touch with him, now headed by the widow of the old gangleader, Claire Morelli (Wynne Gibson), and Ritzy decides to go for the easy money. Ritzy gets his dad to get him a job as a technician working on the police radio system so that he can get the radio to malfunction when the gang does a payroll robbery and thus give them time to get away before patrol cars can arrive or even know about the robbery. Ritzy does this in return for half of whatever the gang's take is. In a secondary plot, Ritzy is trying to take up where things left off with Julia, a girl from the neighborhood, but her budding relationship with a novelist, Barney (Glenn Ford) may get in the way.

This is not a boring film, because there are some good actors in it and because the plot is so simple that the plot holes and bad direction don't make it incomprehensible. Plus some of the plot holes are just howlingly funny. For example, the police are staking out a place prior to raiding it, and rather than have plain clothes officers acting nonchalantly or being out of sight there are half a dozen of them in uniform stuffed behind a staircase, and they are all visible. Who do they think they are fooling? After a robbery, cops are on stakeout again, this time in plain clothes, waiting for Ritzy to appear. When he does show up the police make their move. Why wait until now? Since in the previous scene they don't even seem to know who the robbers are, how did they find their hide-out to stake it out? Why did they not just arrest the rest of the robbers prior to this? Is Frank Drebbin of Police Squad the police commissioner?

Robbery scenes are alluded to and not shown taking place, because that would require time and resources. And Harry Carey, Wynne Gibson and Bruce Cabot must have fallen on very hard times for them to agree to star in this turkey. Do note the presence of a teenage looking Glenn Ford (he is actually 23) as the novelist in just his second credited film appearance and also Bruce Bennett as a member of the gang before going to Warner Brothers and becoming a serviceable supporting actor there.

I personally wouldn't bother with this one unless you want some laughs. In case you do, there are plenty of plot holes I did not mention in this review.

I don't think that My Son Is Guilty would have been in any Oscar contention had it been released intact. But the editing department thoroughly butchered this film into incoherency. My Son Is Guilty was also Glenn Ford's debut film for Columbia Pictures, but fortunately for his career he wasn't the star.

Harry Carey stars in this film as your kindly neighborhood Irish cop in Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan. His bad seed of a son Bruce Cabot is getting out of jail after a 2 year rap.

Carey thinks a little kindness will reform him. But Cabot's got no such notions of turning straight. But he does let his father use his influence to get him a job in the police radio room where at a propitious moment the radios go bad when a gang Cabot is working with pull a large payroll holdup where a cop is killed.

Glenn Ford plays a friend from the neighborhood and rival to Cabot for Julie Bishop. Later on Cabot kills Glenn Ford's mother when she recognizes the fugitive.

The idea of any police department employing Cabot with a rapsheet in a police command center really boggles the mind. I was speechless at the mere concept.

My Son Is Guilty was also the first time that Glenn Ford worked with Edgar Buchanan whom he became great friends with and always tried to use in his films. Buchanan plays a bartender here.

Best performance in the film is that of Wynne Gibson as the widow of the former head of the gang Cabot works with and she's tough, smart, and beautiful. Too bad her performance was wasted in this film.

Glenn Ford made his feature film debut in Heaven With A Barbed Wire Fence the same year for 20th Century Fox. But Darryl Zanuck passed on signing him so Ford got a contract with Columbia. He'd have to work his way up in quality of pictures so My Son Is Guilty would be the start of quite a climb.