What a waste of my time!!!

Such a frustrating disappointment

Great visuals, story delivers no surprises

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Not the best of the Kid movies by far. John Garfield is a champion boxer, Johnnie, on the run for a murder he didn't commit but thinks he did. He may not be a murderer but he is everything else. He comes to a farm in Arizona where the Kids have been sent out from New York instead of going to reform school. Here Garfield shows his style. He lies, teaches dirty boxing tricks to the kids, he even gets them to steal for him. He almost gets one killed when he gets some of them to goof off by swimming in a water tank as the farmer opens his irrigation valves. This causes the water to drop lower and lower until they can't get out. One is a poor swimmer and almost drowns before they manage to open a bleed valve, climb on each others backs and get out. The Kids run a strip poker scam on a little rich kid left alone in his car. They get all his nice clothes plus his motion picture camera. They swap this for a pair of good boxing gloves since Garfield is going to fight a barnstormer for $500 a round. However a New York cop, Claude Rains, has shown up to see the fight because he has seen newspaper photo. Johnnie hears him buy a ticket and tells the Kids and all that he is not going to fight. Well ole Johnnie has a change of heart and decides to fight after all, I mean he has fallen in love with the lady and he doesn't want to let the boys down. Trying to fool the cop he starts out in the ring as a righty since he is really a southpaw. That doesn't work out so well. He takes a beating through three rounds but in the fourth the cop tells him he knows who he is and Johnnie reverts to southpaw. He goes the four rounds needed to make the two grand the gang needs but gets knocked out in the fifth. After seeing that the boys and the women love Johnnie, Rains lets him go on the way to the train. I guess every one lives happily ever after.

John Garfield is a promising but dissolute boxer in New York. He gets boozed up at one of his parties, takes a swing at a guest, and passes out. His treacherous manager hits the offending guest with a bottle and kills him. Then he arranges things so that it looks as if Garfield has killed the man in a drunken rage. The manager takes off and is killed in a car accident. Result, Garfield is about to be arrested for the crime and instead takes to the road with only $250 in his pocket, with a police detective, Claude Raines, keeping a keen lookout for his whereabouts.Garfield becomes a bum, riding the rails, looking for work, hiding the fact that he's a boxer because any popularity along those lines might lead to Raines' attention.He winds up at a cozy reform school for boys in Palm Desert, California, run by a warm blond, Gloria Dixon, and her oh-so-Irish mother. Their only consignment is half a dozen kids from the New York slums, the Dead End Kids, who pick dates from the groves and sell them to the few passers by in this isolated little farm.The problem is that the place is going broke and they're cut off from any outside financial help. One of the kids has a dream of opening a gas station. They are the only house on a 60-mile stretch of empty road so the prospects are good, but a gas pump costs $2000. They don't have $2000. Dixon, grandma, and the kids have barely enough to live on.Then, through the seasonable interposition of a gracious Providence, a big brute of a fighter, Gaspar Rutchek by name, comes to town offering a couple of grand to anyone who can stay in the ring with him for three rounds.At first, Garfield is excited because, after all, he's a professional fighter himself, though far outweighed by the much larger Rutchek. He signs up for the contest and goes into training, but a photo of him alerts Claude Raines and brings him to Palm Desert.Garfield knows this, but gets into the ring anyway. He's clobbered by Rutchek but gets through three rounds and wins enough to buy the pump and open the gas station. The moment he recovers, he's placed under arrest, but Garfield's parting scene with Dixon convinces Raines that Garfield is kewl and Raines lets him go back to his sere paradise and his juicy blond.Well -- "they" didn't make him a criminal. He made himself a criminal by acting like one after having been labeled a "murderer" by Claude Raines. After all, instead of running away, he COULD have gone to the police and hired a good defense counsel. In real life, I expect he would have been convicted anyway, but not in movies like this.It's a near-perfect illustration of labeling theory in sociology. Anybody interested can Google it, but I'll give one example taken from a study of wounded veterans. Many were in pain and given morphine, to which they became somewhat addicted. Their withdrawal was distressing. Some were never told the reason for their distress, and they went on to normal lives. Those who were told that they were addicted to morphine went on to careers as drug addicts because they'd been "labelled" as such by the authorities. (I'm simplifying, but you can understand why.) The general idea is that if everyone treats you as a rat, then eventually you come to believe that you're a no-good skank and you act appropriately. We derive our identities from the way others treat us. That's what happens to Garfield in New York, with his manager and Raines telling him he's a murderer. So he acts like one and becomes a fugitive. I'll skip any further details.Garfield is as good as he usually is, which is to say he's professional. I understand there are viewers who like him a lot, and indeed he was in real life a stand-up guy, but as an actor he's no better and no worse than most others in the Warner Brothers' stable -- Alan Hale, George Raft, Edward G. Robinson, and the rest. Gloria Dixon doesn't make much of an impression. Grandma is a comic stereotype. The Dead End kids still were integral to a serious plot -- not yet part of a formula -- and aren't bad, especially in a scene in which they're about to drown in a water tank in the desert. Busby Berkeley, of all people, is responsible for the direction of this depression-era story. He's pretty much functional, no more than that. His innovative impulses seem to be reserved for expression during fantasmic shots of multitudes of girls shaping themselves into roses and signs displaying the benign features of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.It's an interesting story, though, without much in the way of ambition or style. Not memorable, but not insultingly corny either.

John Garfield...The "Dead End" Kids...Claude Rains...and a wrong-man-fingered theme. Not likely ingredients for director Busby Berkeley, the master of the gaudy musical showstopper. Still, this Warner Bros. remake of 1933's "The Life Of Jimmy Dolan" is satisfying on a minor scale, despite the feeling these disparate talents could have certainly come up with something more intriguing than your average "B" programmer. Prize-fighter takes the fall when his weaselly manager accidentally kills a reporter; hiding out on a date farm in Arizona, one doesn't have wait too long before the good guy tips his hand (to a morgue worker playing amateur detective!). There are interesting asides (Garfield and the Kids finding trouble while swimming in a water tank), dumb/funny ones (the Kids bilking a twelve-year-old cadet out of his clothes and movie camera), as well as excruciating scenes (all of which involve Rains' detective with his meathead boss back in New York). The romance subplot between Garfield and rancher Gloria Dickson just squeaks by, and Garfield's wise-guy cadence is tiresome to listen to (probably because it's so artificial). However, the film looks handsome enough, is given a lively pace, and the general overacting is agreeable within this context--the slim plot being so preconceived, all we have left to respond to are the characters. **1/2 from ****

I wasn't expecting a great deal from this film, so I was pleasantly surprised when I watched it and found it to be most noteworthy. It's noteworthiness is mainly due to the talent and appeal of it's star, John Garfield.Garfield plays Jack, a boxing star who is framed for murder. He must go on the run, and ends up out in the sticks with Gloria Dickson and the Dead End Kids. Here is offered a chance for redemption, yet will the past catch up with him yet? Garfield was an actor ahead of his peers. Before the term 'Method' was even coined and before Brando ever screamed 'Stella!' he brings 'natural' to the screen. His earthy quality and amazing acting talent dominate this production. Also interesting is that his role here as a boxer has shades of that 'Golden Boy' role he so desperately wanted to covet on screen. Garfield looks the type and goes the distance as a boxer, proving his acting worth.Ann Sheridan is here in a small role at the beginning as Jack's trampy girl Goldie. I haven't ever thought much of Sheridan, but I liked her here. She plays well off Garfield. Dickson's' performance is a little tired and she does not share good chemistry with Garfield. The Dead End Kids are here, and Garfield seems their natural idol (even more so than Cagney). Claude Rains is miscast, and he looks uncomfortable in the role in many a scene. Strange, as he always was such a reliable actor.Also interesting to note is the director- Busby Berkeley, best known for his early musicals with dancing girls and kaleidoscope images, directs a different genre here with remarkable ease. He maintains a gritty atmosphere throughout admirably.A very good film that deserves greater attention 8/10.