Jeunesse triomphante

John Garfield (Joe) is released from prison after being found innocent and now has a chip on his shoulder thanks to the penal system finding him guilty in the first place. He goes looking for work but gets caught jumping trains and his insolent manner does not help with his sentencing. He's back inside a corrective institution, this time a jail/work farm where he comes across Priscilla Lane (Mabel). Together, they make a break and try to live under the radar whilst being hunted for murder.

This film is a series of episodes which keep you watching until we get to a court case at the film's end which descends into sentimental claptrap and shoves Moroni Olson into the picture as a defense lawyer who is atrocious in his part. His monotone delivery is so off that his name becomes a true description (just drop the "i" from his first name) of his acting ability. It's a shame they had to change the original ending which would have left us with a better film. As it is, smiles all round.

There is a segment in which Garfield and Lane get fed up with each other along a road and decide to split up, even though they are newly married. The way the scene is filmed is tense and fraught with the realism of a relationship that will hook you into the sequence and have you rooting for them to stay together. Then a hitch-hiker stops to give Lane a lift. The behaviours and emotions during this sequence are spot on for anyone who has ever had a row and doesn't really want things to go the way they are going.

A few soppy moments (why does Ferike Boros always turn up as a sickeningly kind older lady - aaarrggh!) but an engaging film to watch.

A routine John Garfield film that Garfield really didn't even want to do. It starts out with Garfield serving thirteen months in jail for a crime he didn't commit and as soon as he's back on the streets, he gets on a train with two of the dead end kids and winds up getting in a fight with Ward Bond, who is hiding out from the cops. The cops arrest all of them and Bond says Garfield helped him when he committed the crime and he's sent up again for a crime he didn't commit. He's given 90 days on a work farm and he and warden take a disliking for each other immediately. That's when he meets the warden's daughter and there is a lot more plot to the movie but you can find that out for yourself.

Garfield is excellent as falsely-accused Joe Bell escaping to try to prove his innocence. Priscilla Lane is excellent in a character type she repeated three years later, virtually word-for-word, in Saboteur with Robert Cummings. But, this film stands on its own merits, even without the Hitchcockian camera angles or the Statue of Liberty. It is soulful, well-scripted, and tense.

I highly recommend it.

Down on his luck John Garfield finally sees his fortunes improve, and I do mean improve, when he teams up with Priscilla Lane. But the bad luck returns and the two end up on the lam for what turns out to be a pretty good movie.

A few scenes shot on location spice things up a bit and there are some very nice supporting performances as well.

The lead actors, John Garfield and the beautiful Priscilla Lane, work well together, as evidenced in their previous work on Four Daughters and Daughters Courageous.

The reputation of John Garfield has suffered somewhat on account of his being accused of Communism by that bigoted lunatic Joseph McCarthy. It changes nothing in that John Garfield was a fine actor, one of the best of his generation. He was an actor who could modify his style of that from the theatre, so that he could be natural and convincing on screen. "Warner Bros" didn't really appreciate the value of such a talent and the films Garfield was forced to do, were not worthy of him at all. However, "Dust Be My Destiny" is a very watchable movie. Even though Garfield is playing the kind of character he was stuck with for a while, he is nevertheless very good. For years, he was always cast as those people who found themselves on the wrong side of the law, usually down to bad luck rather than being criminally inclined. In this film, Garfield is a man on the run with a young lady by his side. Her drunken stepfather is dead due to an accident and Garfield has been innocently implicated. He and his girlfriend take to the countryside, barely staying one step ahead of the authorities. They hop onto freight trains, hitchhike along the highway. It is a tense yarn where you don't know what is going to happen next and I found the experience exciting. Frank McHugh is totally wasted in a cameo appearance as a rather insistent wedding photographer but Alan Hale does well as a newspaper editor who takes the wanted youngsters under his wing. Two of the Dead End Kids make an appearance but they are written out quite early on. Very enjoyable.