Blackwell's Island

This is like a lot of crime movies from Warner Brothers and RKO. In some ways, it seems a vehicle for John Garfield. And Garfield is extremely appealing as an honorable reporter.

The fascinating part is Stanley Fields, though. He plays the vicious mob boss who is an overgrown kid. He plays practical jokes. He is barely literate but love the funny papers. His two dogs are as nasty as he is and they accompany him to jail. In jail, he sets himself and his cronies up in the infirmary, throwing out all the legitimately sick people. There he plays with a model train set.

The plot is plausible. Garfield is Good. The Lane sister who gets high billing has only a few lines so who can judge. But Fields's character is the shocker here.

It's 1932 and the government is trying to restart the economy. 'Bull' Bransom is a mob boss running protection racket on the Manhattan waterfront. His men blow up a boat after the captain refused to pay. Reporter Tim Haydon (John Garfield) has been writing articles calling him out. Haydon goes to the hospital to interview the captain and becomes taken with nurse Mary 'Sunny' Walsh.

I really like the start or even the first half. I like the prankster gangster. He's a different kind of gangster and a very effective one. His pranks really keeps me off-balance in a good way. As for John Garfield, he's a great actor with real charisma and presents a great possible foil against Bull. As the story keeps going, there is a miscalibration somewhere along the way. Being off-balance early on with Bull, one eventually finds one's balance and he's not as threatening as one expects. He should track down Haydon down a back alley and beat him to a pulp. With Haydon in the same prison, he should have the guy beaten to an inch of his life. That brings me to Haydon. Garfield is too cool. He's too gangster. He plays it too casual. His character should be in fear for most of the movie. I still really love the first part. When Haydon is brought into Bull's office, the movie started to drift in a wrong direction.

This was my first John Garfield film, and it has him in the first of many tough-guy roles, this time as journalist Tim Haydon, who's out to bring down city mob 'Bull' Bransom. I found it a rather enjoyable movie, and it's not too exhaustingly long, lasting only 75 minutes. John Garfield also puts in a stellar performance - his dialogue delivery and everything is spot-on, but the screenplay lets the actors down. Watched today, it seems more like a run-of-the-mill prison/gangster film, and a little dated, but if you haven't seen a lot of Warner Brothers or John Garfield films, this is an okay time-pass film. Now I'm off to watch some more of his other (supposedly better) films!

It will not be on anyone's Top Ten list, nor should it be. It's not a great movie.

But it's certainly a good one, and downright exciting at the end.

It also falls into one of the categories of movies that Hollywood really doesn't make anymore, at least in the same way.

Are some of our prisons as corrupt as this one? It wouldn't surprise me, though the corruption is probably not as visible as in this movie.

What makes this movie work for me is John Garfield's energy and determination. Once he gets himself arrested and sent to prison, things really start to take off.

No, the end is not surprising. You know that his character is unlikely to be killed. He is likely to break the story he went after and break the criminal's hold over the prison. But the way he did it held me.

You could do worse than to watch this movie.

As incredible as it may seem, much of the details of the main criminal is this film is stolen "straight from the headlines" about Joseph/Joeyrel Rao, a racketeer who was convicted on conspiracy charges related to a seltzer racket in the Bronx.

Once jailed, he literally took it over, with the help of crooked Tammany Hall politicians, and ran more rackets then they could list or even discuss in the film (e.g. drug dealing, prostitution, etc.).

This Rao was related to the same Rao family as the famous restaurant and yummy tomato sauces you can get in your grocery store.

You can research him by going to the NYTimes.com. It is hard to find general data about him on the web.