People are voting emotionally.

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

I like film noir--you know, told old gangster films from the 40s and 50s. This Damon Runyan story has almost all the earmarks of a good film noir movie...most. However, it also involves a cute kid and a schmaltzy storyline--something you'd NEVER find in a true example of noir.When the film begins, two hoods, Cory (Wayne Morris) and Martin (Pat O'Brien) chase down a guy who stole $50,000 from them. In the process of getting it back, they are forced to shoot the guy. Years pass and the two crooks have gone separate ways. Martin has an aura of respectability about him and Cory is still a hood--a hood with a girlfriend who has a kid, Elsie. When someone goes to the police with information about the killing which occurred at the beginning of the film, Cory decides to rat on his old friend and offers to testify against him to save his butt. Not surprisingly, Martin is furious and is out to kill Cory when he finds out he's being betrayed.All this sounds like perfect noir--a killing, betrayal and revenge. However, Elsie soon becomes involved in the case and the dopey kid thinks that Martin is Santa...yes, Santa. She tries to help him-- not only because of this but because her soon to be step-daddy is a sadist who beat her cute little dog. Even Martin isn't cold enough to do that and soon takes the pup under his care. What's next? Well, it ain't exactly kid-friendly and is interesting but the whole subplot involving the kid tended to take away the hard edge from this one--and I WANT a hard-edged story! All in all, not a bad film but also one that isn't exactly the best from the two stars. Without the kid and the dog, the story would have been a lot better.

Everybody was far past their prime when director Robert Florey made "Johnny One-Eye" with Pat O'Brien and Wayne Morris as former associates turned sworn enemies in "Wild Weed" writer Richard Landau's grim but purposeful adaptation of a Damon Runyon story. This gritty saga of ruthless criminals in New York City who rise to prominence before they topple as a consequence of their old crimes is razor sharp stuff. Meaning, this is not a happy, cheerful yarn about colorful characters with a sugar-coated finale. The eponymous character turns out to be a little doggie, and the story concerns two career criminals who corner a thief on a ferry and kill him after a brief shoot-out. Nobody saw them commit the crime and the body wound up at the bottom of the river. Martin Martin (Pat O'Brien of ") and Dane Cory (Wayne Morris) corner the nervous Dutchman on a foggy morning in the Big Apple who tried to steal $50-thousand from them. Dane watches as his partner Martin swaps lead with the Dutchman and guns him down. Years later when New York has grown too big for them, Dane spills his guts to a District Attorney with presidential aspirations. It seems that the authorities fished the Dutchman's body out of the river and enough evidence to indict Martin. Martin goes down to the theater where Dane watching a rehearsal of a show for his latest squeeze, Lily White (Dolores Moran), and they have a brief conversation. Another gunfight erupts with Dane escaping the slugs meant for him from Martin's revolver, while Martin catches a .38 in the shoulder and has to go into hiding. Earlier, Martin had been a big man. In a scene that it is difficult to believe that the censor allowed, Martin is judging a number of beauties who are in reality prostitutes that he has arranged from his high-flown dinner guests. Anyway, Martin holes up in an abandoned apartment where he meets the title character. Just to hammer home the villainy of Dane Corey, Florey and Landau have him disfigure a poor, harmless pooch. Dane doesn't like either the dog (he puts out one of its eyes off-screen while Lily's impressionable little girl, Elsie (Gayle Reed) watches. Florey doesn't pull any punches in this unsavory epic where our two protagonists eventually shoot it out. Donald Woods has a sturdy supporting role as a sympathetic vet who patches up Martin and informs him that Johnny One-Eye's days are numbered. Initially, I didn't care much for this drama, essentially because the Alpha DVD version is so pictorially dark, but it improved with a second viewing. Some of the symbolism may strike you as a mite heavy-handed but it is nevertheless effective. Lyle Talbot has a minor role as a representative of the District Attorney's office.

Despite the film's original storyline, director Robert Florey, who was well past his prime when this low-budget programmer was made, does injustice to a very original Damon Runyon's plot idea. An innocent but plucky young girl naively believes that a criminal fugitive (Pat O'Brien) who's hiding out in a deserted building in her neighborhood, is really Santa Claus. She keeps his presence secret and does her best to help him. Florey fills the story with bathos and saccharine sentimentality involving the title character, the girl's little dog, and the film ultimately becomes mired in its own mawkishness.More than a decade later Bryan Forbes would direct a critically-acclaimed film based on a similar premise. In 1961's WHISTLE DOWN THE WIND, youngster Hayley Mills mistakenly believes fugitive wife-murderer Alan Bates, who is hiding out from the authorities in the barn on her father's isolated British farm, to be Jesus Christ. The tact and taste with which Forbes handles the material is a paradigm of understatement and restraint. Although Mary Hayley Bell's (mother of Hayley} narrative was lauded at the time for its great originality, the plot premise appears cribbed from this unpretentious Damon Runyon B-film programmer.

The title character is a mutt, and the story comes from the flamboyant pen of Damon Runyon. That's hardly the recipe for a moody, offbeat crime story, but Robert Florey, perhaps drawing on his French roots, adds that little je ne sais quoi and comes up with a casserole a cut above the ordinary. It's not quite a success but an honorable and occasionally arresting try.Runyon is best remembered for his sentimental yarns about Broadway, that garish gulch that disrupts Manhattan's tidy grid - stories of gold-diggers and raffish sportsmen, of old silver-tongued sots and big bruisers with 24-karat hearts. But he told more downbeat tales as well, as evidenced by Johnny One-Eye, where Florey more skillfully modulates the movie's dark tonality than did Irving Reis in The Big Street, with Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda, another of Runyon's more shadowed stories (perhaps Reis was overruled by Runyon, who acted as producer).Save for Pat O'Brien, Florey's smallish cast is nowhere near the caliber of The Big Street's (its next most recognizable member is Wayne Morris). Partners in petty crime years ago, O'Brien and Morris whacked a double-crosser and tossed his body off the Staten Island ferry. Since then they've drifted apart and gone legit, with O'Brien now occupying a pinnacle not only on Park Avenue but in the city's power structure as well. We get only a brief glimpse of his affluence and influence, however, in a scene where he brings hookers to his penthouse to pair off with politicos. An epicene blackmailer (Lawrence Cregar) working for Morris cuts short the festivities by calling down a police raid. O'Brien flees out into the city's meaner streets with only one mission - to find Morris and exact his revenge. He catches a bullet along the way, and holes up in a condemned brownstone in the Village, where he meets up with the poor mutt, Johnny One-Eye.Here the plotting plummets into the, well, Runyonesque. The dog belongs to the little girl of Morris' mistress (Dolores Moran), thus becoming the canine link which fatally reunites the old partners. Enough said, except to note that the tot (Gayle Reed) will harden the warmest of hearts, suggesting the least endearing attributes of Shirley Temple as Little Miss Marker, another of Runyon's creations.Florey can't quite toss out all the aggressively poignant slop - if he had, there would have little left to work with - but he accentuates the noirish elements (he had just directed John Payne in The Crooked Way, one of his more solid credits). During O'Brien's wounded, nocturnal flight, the skyscrapers loom like jagged black precipices. And the scenes in the abandoned town house, where he's visited by the little girl, bring to mind, in their sense of menacing isolation in the middle of a teeming city, Ted Tetzlaff's The Window, a hit of the previous year. (There's also a freighted scene with a boozing veterinarian that looks forward to a similar one in Andre De Toth's Crime Wave four years later.) Sad that Florey was relegated to nothing better than the Bs (even to the Bs among the Bs); given better material and looser budgets, his distinctive touch might have grown into a major talent.