I Was Framed

As someone mentioned, this is supposedly a remake of Dust Be My Destiny which starred John Garfield. I don't know, since I haven't seen Dust, but if Warner Brothers remade The Maltese Falcon twice (actually the famous Maltese Falcon was the third film), they could certainly have remade Dust Be My Destiny. They remade just about everything else.

Tod Andrews, who had a prolific TV career later, plays Ken Marshall, a reporter who discovers political corruption. If it comes out, it will ruin one candidate's campaign for governor.

Ken is rendered unconscious, with booze poured all over him, and then placed in the driver's seat of a car that's sent down the highway. After an accident kills three people, Ken goes to prison. He is able to escape, however, winds up in another town, and builds a new life for himself, even getting a reporter job under another name. Then one day, an old cellmate shows up and blackmails him.

This is an okay film with the big star being Regis Toomey. Someone mentioned that the wife didn't look pregnant up to the moment she gave birth. Back then, all a woman did was faint, and you were supposed to know she was pregnant. I think the censors didn't allow pregnancy to be shown, because if you look at movies like The Great Lie, the pregnant person never looked pregnant. As Lucille Ball said, "Today you can not only see that a woman is pregnant, but how she got that way."

Forgettable crime drama with hero newspaperman framed for manslaughter (he really did not do it). Wise con tempts him to join an escape from County Jail but during execution, the confederate gets left behind and our hero actually steals a car. Our hero has obviously watched cowboy movies because he outwits the cops by pulling into a side road and watching the trailing patrol car go by.

In meantime hero encounters the nicest folks in View Point - `The City with the democratic point of view, pop. 44,176.' His wife gives birth, they stay as a guest of the town doctor (for five years), and our hero becomes the editor of the View Point News. The confederate escapes from jail, gets off a freight train, sees the hero and blackmails wife. Smart doctor suspects something, gets the con's fingerprints and the cops come in to save the day.

Wow, all in 61 minutes! Despite the breakneck speed of the story, there is time to listen to child actress Patti Hale sing and recite multiple lines of poetry. How did she learn all those lines? And why does the final scene need to have the 5-year old daughter in the room while the police discuss her father's past?

Obvious underlying themes of crime does not pay is worth at least one line of dialog. Another theme is that you can't teach an old dog new tricks - our hero gets framed initially because he is going after a politico and he repeats the behavior later in View Point.

Regis Toomey as "Bob", the newspaper editor, is the biggest name in this 1942 shortie. One of his reporters, Ken Marshall (Michael Ames aka Tod Andrews) gets a good photo of some shenanigans taking place, but the local mobsters catch him, destroy the photo, and try to destroy him and his career. The script and the acting are pretty cardboard and ordinary. The local cops are all on the take, so our hero can't get any help from them. It looks like Andrews did mostly television appearances. The wife, played by Julie Bishop, worked with all the biggies in numerous war-time films and westerns. Aldrich Bowker is the kindly old doctor who helps them out. Keep an eye out for Sam McDaniel as Doc Brown's servant. They gave him some of the best lines. The film devotes a whole lot of time to the couple's little daughter "Penny" (Patti Hale), and even has her sing a song. Turner Classics showed this at 3 am, which probably explains why, as of March 2009, there are only 25 votes. It's an okay story, written by Jerome Odlum, but the ending is a little too abrupt, almost as if the original ending were skipped for budget reasons. The U.S. HAD just entered the war...

Investigative reporter Ken Marshall is on the trail of crooked politician Gaines who is running for governor. After a series of articles, he is kidnapped and forced into a staged drunk driving incident which kills 3 people. He is sent to prison but quickly manages to escape.

This is a redo of "Each Dawn I Die" starring James Cagney. The first part is almost exactly the same which includes reusing the same car crash footage. The rest is completely different. None of it is an improvement. First, Cagney can't be replaced. Second, I'm not sure about the rewrite. I don't think I've ever encountered a redo. Maybe Rob Zombie redoing Halloween. I just can't believe the story. It turns an interesting prison drama into a dull non-dramatic life. I don't know the point of it all. The first part is a copy and the most notable about the rest is an overacting little girl.

TCM showed the two movies back-to-back this afternoon. For the first fifteen minutes or so, up through the end of the courtroom scene, the two scripts are virtually identical, even as to gestures as well as dialog. Diverged radically after that.

As others have noted, the scenes with the daughter are nauseating. Reduced the rating by at least one point.