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Looks like this movie was piggy-backing on the similar "troubled boy" film of a year earlier, Boys' Ranch (1946). This version, however, is more melodramatic than the sometimes humorous Boys' Ranch.

Here, troubled boy Danny (Murphy) is remanded to the head of Variety Ranch (Nolan) after conviction of armed robbery. At the ranch he causes trouble by refusing to reform, to the point where even the patient head, Mr. Brown, is about to turn him over to the state reform school. Just what is Danny's problem, we wonder.

Considering how quickly farm boy, war hero Murphy was thrust into the national spotlight and then onto Hollywood, he does pretty well in this his first starring role. Oddly, he seems to have the most difficulty projecting the occasional meanness his role calls for. Anyone familiar with his later cowboy roles knows how he can snarl with the best of them. Here, I gather, he is still learning, and more than anything else, comes across as a nice boy. Only the script tells us otherwise.

It's a well-meaning little film, with that fine actor Lloyd Nolan in the lead and everybody's favorite mom of the 1950's Jane Wyatt as his understanding wife. Then there's a 60-year old James Gleason as a surprisingly effective ranch enforcer. But it's the irrepressible Stanley Clements who steals the film as the goofy Bitsy—I really liked his plowboy-cowboy song and the scene that went with it.

All in all, it's an entertaining little programmer with a good positive message that you just don't see anymore. (In passing—I note that the Variety Clubs of the show- biz world produced the movie and apparently helped sponsor the real Texas boys' ranch. I wonder if they still do.)

Audie Murphy, a BAD BOY on his way to career in the pen, is sent to Lloyd Nolan's ranch for delinquents in a last effort to straighten him out. Can Nolan find out what makes Murphy act so mean before he becomes a lifer at San Q?

Audie Murphy gets a bit of a bad rap as a movie star, because his movie star career, sometimes, felt like the reward of a grateful nation for his extraordinary war heroism. It's not fair. Audie can be very good -- as he demonstrates here, in his first starring role. In this movie, Murphy personifies a nice, polite, southern boy with a dangerous streak. This is the sort of kid who, one minute, can charm (in a mother/son kind of way) Lloyd Nolan's wife with good manners and genuine sweetness, and in the next, pound the smithereens out of one of his colleagues at the ranch for no good reason. Of course -- this being the 40s -- there is a very Freudian reason for this -- but until we get the psychotherapeutic ending, Murphy plays a kid on the knife's edge of good and rotten exceptionally well. What's interesting is that there is none of the acting awkwardness found in some of his early Westerns. One wonders if Murphy's directors didn't know what they had.

All the character actors give the performances you expect (Nolan is quite good here), the story moves along crisply, and one is left wondering why this one isn't better known. And, also, why Murphy didn't get to do more crime movies -- he has the acting chops for it.

There is a reason Audie could play a troubled, haunted young man so convincingly: as a WWII veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, he suffered from headaches, nightmares and vomiting ever since leaving the service. Thus he perhaps had a chance to play himself here as he really was, more than he ever did in any Western, more than anyone really wanted to realize. Was he troubled and haunted in real life? He slept with a loaded gun under his pillow till the end of his life.

Only 24 when he made Bad Boy, Audie fools us for a bit into thinking he is just a wooden young actor: he fails to connect emotionally with anyone in the film, or with the viewer, for quite a long time; we think, is this going to work? But, stunningly, the boyish charm appears out of nowhere when he meets and interacts with Jane Wyatt. The sudden reversal is surprising, and pleasant, if too brief. But it demonstrates that he was a little more talented than many gave him credit for.

James Gleason is hilarious as the strong-arm of the boy's camp; weighing in at what I imagine to be no more than a painfully thin 110 pounds, he dominated by sheer personality. Lloyd Nolan is quite good, if a bit one-dimensional.

Finally, I have to wonder if those kids working with Audie must have been in terrified awe of this troubled young veteran; after all, he killed at least 240 Germans, confirmed, in the war; and had earned the right to wear every medal the Allies had to offer. And here he was, trading fake stage punches with teenagers. Amazing.

1949's "Bad Boy" was distinguished (and duly advertised) as the first starring role for decorated war hero Audie Murphy, earning 33 medals of valor for dispatching 240 Germans before the age of 20. After a couple of bit parts it looked like Murphy had no future in front of the camera, but this role was tailor-made for the 24 year old newcomer (certain aspects of his own background built into the script), selected for his Texas heritage as the lead in this grim melodrama produced by the Variety Boys' Club in Copperas Cove, TX, though filming took place at California's Conejo-Janss Ranch north of Los Angeles as "The Story of Danny Lester." Producer Paul Short was guaranteed financing only through Murphy's casting, and judging by the results those who scoffed at his inexperience must have been dazzled by his performance. His Danny Lester is the 'Bad Boy' of the title, a huge rap sheet by age 17, whose most recent scrape, an attempted robbery in a Dallas hotel, results in his being transferred to a ranch for juvenile delinquents run by Lloyd Nolan's Marshall Brown. Eager to throw a punch at the smallest provocation, Danny remains tight lipped and unapologetic toward the other youths, but at least shows a softer side toward Marshall's pretty wife Maud (Jane Wyatt), assigned chores working for her in the kitchen and around the yard. Old habits die hard though, sneaking off into town to steal a cash payment cleverly mailed to himself at the ranch while Marshall calls on Danny's tyrannical stepfather (Rhys Williams) and stepsister (Martha Vickers), who relate an awful story of how the boy killed his own mother and struck his stepfather before setting fire to their home. Digging deeper into the tragedy, he finds out that Danny's former employer (Francis Pierlot) was coerced into blaming Danny for slipping two sleeping pills into his ailing mother's drink by his bible thumping stepfather, whose refusal to allow her any treatment (blaming her illness on the devil) resulted in her death from natural causes. By now it may be too late to save the boy, having stolen a gun and ammunition before driving off in a stolen car for the inevitable showdown with police, then another from his hospital bed with a former partner in crime. The script carefully keeps the odds in Murphy's favor by not allowing his character to sink low enough to kill, and his remarkable performance belies his own low assessment of any acting talent in keeping the viewer off guard as to how dangerous he can be. Jane Wyatt would become typecast as the perfect mother opposite Robert Young on FATHER KNOWS BEST, but for STAR TREK fans she is forever beloved as Spock's Earth mother Amanda in "Journey to Babel."

After two bit parts in other films Audie Murphy got his first starring role in Bad Boy, an Allied Artists film where the 24 year old Murphy plays a teenage kid going down the wrong path in life. It was the beginning of a film career where Audie Murphy traded in on his youthful appearance for years, mostly in westerns.

After attempting to pull off a holdup of some high rollers at a swank Dallas hotel where his partner William Leicester shot and wounded one of them, Murphy is given a break and sent to the Variety Club Boys Ranch run by Lloyd Nolan and his wife Jane Wyatt. They are assisted by the cynical James Gleason, but Nolan subscribes to the Father Flanagan philosophy that their ain't no such thing as a Bad Boy.

At the ranch Murphy's got the same problems as Mickey Rooney at Boys Town and doesn't interact well with other Hollywood juveniles like Stanley Clements, Jimmy Lydon and Tommy Cook. In fact the only one who Murphy warms up to is Wyatt.

Nolan does some digging to find the root causes of Murphy's anti-social behavior. The story line has it can he discover them and redeem Murphy before he does something that puts him way out beyond deserving to be redeemed?

Two people I wish had gotten more screen time were Murphy's stepfather and stepsister Rhys Williams and Martha Vickers. Williams is what you would now call a motivational speaker and quack psychologist and his attitudes are the root causes of Murphy's problems. Also Selena Royle who would shortly have blacklisting problems plays a sympathetic judge who goes way out on a limb for Audie.

Given that this is a cheap B film from Allied Artists, Bad Boy is surprisingly good. Murphy shows what a natural he is before the camera and the rest of the cast supports him well.