Septième district

This film is about an above the board policeman who learns that having a little heart along with the necessity to do what is right goes a long way. Bogart is playing a small but significant role as the well meaning every day Joe that gets caught up in the circumstances of poverty. Still the show is all O'Brien's as we see him go through a range of emotions from start to finish. Worth watching.

"The Great O'Malley," directed by William Dieterle, was Bogart's second film with Pat O'Brien, a man he deeply respected as a person and as an actor… In this very predictable movie, O'Brien was a too zealously cop whose attachment to the letter of the law alienates friends as well as enemies…

Bogart was an honest family man who was forced to turn to crime in order to provide for his family after O'Brien arrested him for a minor offense and caused him to lose a job opportunity…

Bogart had an excellent chance to show some versatility by turning from his earlier carefree attitude into one of frustration and bitter hatred, and he carried it off rather effectively

Pat O'Brien plays John O'Malley, a New York City beat cop who thinks that enforcing the law is all mechanics and no heart. He tickets businessmen for having awnings that are inches too long, threatens to cite his own mother for spreading debris when she feeds bread to the pigeons from her kitchen window, and cites John Phillips (Humphrey Bogart) for a loud muffler when he is on his way to the first job he has had in years - remember this is the Great Depression. This sets off a string of tragic events starting with Phillips being late to his job and thus losing it, then being too proud to tell his wife and crippled daughter (Sybil Jason) that he lost the job, and finally an altercation at a pawn shop where Phillips was trying to pawn his gun and WWI medals that turns into a robbery. Philips goes to prison, and O'Malley becomes the laughing stock of the force and a target of the press as an example of law enforcement abuse.

All the while, O'Malley holds tight to his belief that he is just doing his job by enforcing all the law the all the time by the book. His captain wants his resignation, and when O'Malley won't give it, he has him assigned to public school crossing guard duty. The captain believes this will break or make the man. Did I mention that Phillips' little daughter goes to the same elementary school where O'Malley is assigned, and they strike up a friendship, neither one knowing who the other is? A romantic and humanizing interest comes in the person of Ann Sheridan as a schoolteacher at the elementary school.

This is a pleasant little early production code era entry, with O'Brien playing the same kind of hard boiled egg he played before the code, but this time donning a policeman's uniform. The only negative in the film, in my opinion, was a common device in films of the mid 30's - a child that is sickly-sticky sweet (Sybil Jason's character) over-sentimentalizing matters and sucking the adult cast into more than a few silly situations. However, at least here the child star is central to the plot. All in all, recommended especially for fans of Pat O'Brien and Ann Sheridan and anybody that is interested in a film in which Sybil Jason is actually billed above Humphrey Bogart - an odd sight indeed some 75 years later.

A first-rate movie in every sense. I recently watched it for the first time in decades and was I was every bit as impressed with it as I was the first time I saw it. Pat O'Brien was great, and you very seldom see a young child turn in a performance that's nearly as good as the one by Sybil Jason in this film. It's a shame that more people aren't aware of this movie, but, of course, a lot of great films, such as this 1937 gem, become forgotten about over time. Let's just hope that more people get to see it. It's on You Tube. And I don't mind saying that I got pretty emotional at times. I highly recommend it!

Thinking about The Great O'Malley put me in mind of an episode of NYPD Blue in its final season. Andy Sipowicz has been just appointed sergeant and the point of the whole series was watching Dennis Franz as Sipowicz grow as a human being. There's a scene in this particular episode where Sipowicz as sergeant mediates out a dispute when a young rookie cop collars a truck driver who was trying to make a delivery on a crowded street and was double parked. The driver protested the ticket and the cop arrested him and we see the driver in handcuffs.

Sipowicz basically tells the young patrolman to enforce the law, but with a little discretion, after all this is some poor working stiff, not serial criminal. And in the end the driver is cut loose and presumably the patrolman will use a little more tact in the future.

In the title role in The Great O'Malley is Pat O'Brien who's a walking rule book, so much so no one can stand being around him. But one day just like in NYPD Blue, he stops some guy for speeding on his first day to report to a new job. He detains him so long that the man loses that job.

Which leads to Humphrey Bogart just plain losing it and committing a robbery just to gain enough money to feed his wife and daughter. Of course that results on wife Frieda Inescourt and daughter Sybil Jason staying on relief which is what welfare was called back in the day.

None of this makes any impression on the officious Great O'Malley, but O'Brien happens to make the acquaintance of Inescourt and Jason and between the two of them, manage to soften him up a bit. Even O'Brien's girlfriend Ann Sheridan likes the change in him.

Later on he gets a chance to really make it up to Bogart, going quite a bit above and beyond in his job as a policeman.

The Great O'Malley is a typical Warner Brothers Depression era product from the working man's studio. Both Pat O'Brien and Humphrey Bogart do fine jobs, especially Bogart who at that time was playing mostly gangsters. Here he's a decent, but desperate man and really registers in the role that was a change of pace for him.

This film is not run too often, hopefully TCM will broadcast it and soon.