Le Bataillon des sans-amour

Racketeer James Cagney takes over a reform school that's being run like a prison. With help from pretty nurse Madge Evans, he turns the place around and helps the boys get back on the right track. But the scummy guy that used to run the school is determined to destroy all the good work they've done, no matter what harm it does to the kids.

Intense, gritty drama that tackles the issue of juvenile crime and how to deal with it. Strong writing with some good characters. Cagney's excellent in one of his best and probably most underrated films. The kid actors are all terrific and believable. Dudley Digges is a particularly evil villain. Backed up by a typically solid WB stable of supporting actors. Jaw-dropping climax is one of the best finishes to any movie of this decade. Remade as Crime School, with Humphrey Bogart and the Dead End Kids. That one's not bad but it's not nearly as powerful as this one.

Jimmy Smith leads a group of thieving kids. Jimmy and five others are caught in their hideout and sent to reform school run by the heartless superintendent Thompson. Dorothy, the nurse, is concerned about the conditions. Well-connected street gangster Patsy Gargan (James Cagney) had been appointed deputy commissioner as a political payoff. With no particular interest in the political work, he is tasked to write a report on the school. After witnessing Thompson's brutal treatment, he decides to take an interest in the kids.

This is Cagney playing his good guy gangster. It's solid. The kids are solid pre-Dead End Kids. The morality is pretty simple. My only complaint is nurse Dorothy would never quit. She needs to be outright fired and be carried out kicking and screaming. She's basically abandoning the boys. The guard who gives the boy his coat should be replaced with Dorothy. Patsy's call to Thompson should be replaced with a call to Dorothy. That way the story could still end the same way. This is a very simple moral gangster film.

James Cagney, racketeer and political ward heeler, get to become a Deputy Commissioner of Corrections and visits a boys reform school. The catch is that Cagney is not in it for the graft, he genuinely wants to make a difference in the lives of the kids there because he comes from a background like their's.

The villain of the piece is Dudley Digges who is a grafting chiseler and a sanctimonious hypocrite to boot. One of the subtexts of the plot of The Mayor of Hell is that these kids are mostly immigrants and those that judge them and are in positions of power are those who are here a few generations. Note in the mess hall scene as Digges offers a prayer of thanks for the food they are about to receive, Digges is eating well, but the kids are getting quality you wouldn't feed to your pet.

Cagney has his own troubles back in the city with some of his henchmen and he has to take it on the lam. That puts Digges back in charge and setting up the film for it's climax.

The Mayor of Hell was a typical product from the working class studio. And because it was pre-Code it gets pretty gruesome at times. A later version of this, Crime School, with Humphrey Bogart and the Dead End Kids, was a more sanitized remake.

Although Cagney is fine in the lead role as is Madge Evans the school nurse, the acting honors go to Dudley Digges. Hard to believe that the same man could portray the drunken, but kindly, one legged ship's surgeon in Mutiny on the Bounty. But Digges is a fine player and a joy to watch in every film he's in.

This film is not shown too often because of the racial and ethnic stereotypes it portrays. A whole lot of minorities would be offended today. Still it's a fine film.

Interestingly enough a few years ago the film Sleepers came out and it touched on some of the same issues. I guess films about reform schools don't change in any time.

JAMES CAGNEY gets top billing in THE MAYOR OF HELL but it's really little tough guy FRANKIE DARRO who has the central role of a boy from the slums who lands in a reform school run by a ruthless warden (DUDLEY DIGGES) interested only in punishing the boys while he cooks the books. Darro makes quite an impression with his hostile looks, locking glances with the warden at every turn with eyes blazing with hatred.

It takes the entrance of Cagney to change things around, an ex- gangster who has been deputized to help run things at the reformatory and who sympathizes with the plights of the boys, especially Darro who reminds him of his own tough days as a street punk. JAMES CAGNEY puts all of his usual energy into the role of the do-gooder who changes things around, along with cooperative Nurse Griffith (MADGE EVANS), and is there when the going gets tough and things revert back to their nasty ways during his brief absence.

The last half-hour of the film gets a little too melodramatic as the kids take matters into their own hands after the warden causes the death of one of their fellow inmates. There's a climactic scene where they put him on trial. When he escapes their clutches by jumping out a window, a chase follows and a barn is burned down forcing him to jump to his death. The plot contrivances that follow are hard to swallow, but for Jimmy and Madge Evans at least there's a happy ending.

ALLEN JENKINS is a welcome presence for comic relief but the tone of the film borders on heavy prison melodrama almost all the way.

DUDLEY DIGGES plays the unsympathetic role of the sadistic warden fairly well, but I still think of him as the befuddled detective who has a hard time pinning down RAFFLES (Ronald Colman) in that Scotland Yard yarn.

For Cagney fans, this is a glimpse of him at his talented best in an early role. Archie Mayo directs the project in his brisk, no nonsense Warner style.

Five years before the film Dead End hit theaters, this film was produced. This was definitely a film that tried to show what reformatories were really like. In most cases, the kids who were sent there didn't become reformed, they only came out harder and moved on to bigger crimes. James Cagney is great in this early role as Patsy, the racketeer who tries to keep the kids from making some of the same mistakes that he did by making conditions better for the boys in the camp. Dudley Digges played the perfect villain in Thompson, the warden of the school. He pretty much showed how when the odds were against Thompson and his cronies that he was nothing more than a coward. Also Allen Jenkins, who ironically would appear a few years later in the aforementioned Dead End, provided a lot of the humor as Patsy's stooge "Uncle Mike". Too bad this little gem is rarely shown on television anymore or that it is currently not out on DVD.