My Son Is Guilty

Harry Carey is the cop on the beat in Hell's Kitchen. It's a tough neighborhood, but it's home. His son, Bruce Cabot is coming home.... from prison. Carey thinks he can help him go straight, and so does young Julie Bishop. But he's a smart guy, tempered by two years in prison, and he gets involved in a scheme to rob a payroll. He might have gotten away with it, but a cop died in the stickup, and the police have him followed.

It's an interesting thesis for a cheap Columbia second feature, with some nice fillips. Glenn Ford plays a plainclothes detective in his third movie, and there are plenty of well-remembered supporting actors, like Wynne Gibson, Don Beddoe, Bruce Bennett and Edgar Buchanan. The Nicholas Brothers have a specialty number. It's not one of their eye-popping performances, but as always, it's good to see them.

If the movie lacks something, it's a focus. Are we following Carey, Cabot, Miss Bishop, or Ford? At various times, each of them looks to be taking front and center, and then it's over to someone else. Sll, it's good to se them working, particularly Carey.

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.

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.

I have had fun reviewing a number of films here at IMDb and I try to stay consistent in what I look for or take note of in evaluating a picture. I find that reviewing a film adds a deeper appreciation for the film. I enjoy all motion pictures, from the finer tried and true greats and classics to lesser ones, including B-pictures like "My Son Is Guilty." I rarely bother to offer thoughts on the great films, or even most of the class-A features, as usually many --if not dozens-- of reviews have already been offered on them.

My overall enjoyment from viewing a film is what I am looking for when evaluating, or reviewing, a film. It really comes down to assigning a value as to how much I "enjoyed" the viewing. Yes, I may expect just a little more (or maybe considerably more) polish and sophistication from a big studio, high-budget picture with valued star players than I do from a smaller B-picture, but as far as enjoyment is concerned, I can get just about as much enjoyment from a B-picture as I can from an A-picture.

"My Son Is Guilty" is a good case in point. Sure, it is obvious from the production values and editing that it was made on a lower budget, but I absolutely and thoroughly enjoyed and appreciated this little film. I loved the sets and the players and the economical pacing. The story was indeed fanciful, what with Harry Carey being so singularly naive, but it is easy to get wrapped up in the program and all the disruption and reactions that the return to town of the bad son engendered. Bruce Cabot played the unredeemable son smoothly and convincingly. Seemingly many raters of this film have given it five stars, and some even fewer, but I happily give it seven because I got a lot of enjoyment from watching it.