THEY MADE ME A CRIMINAL (1939)

Directed by: Busby Berkeley

Based on the stage play "Sucker" by: Bertram Millhauser, Beulah Marie Dix

Starring: John Garfield, Claude Rains, Gloria Dickson, Ann Sheridan, Barbara Pepper, May Robson, Ward Bond, William B. Davidson, Robert Gleckler, The Dead End Kids (Billy Halop, Bobby Jordan, Leo Gorcey, Gabriel Dell, Huntz Hall, Bernard Punsley)

92 minutes

(NR - adult themes)

PLOT:

A southpaw with a distinctive boxing style, New York based Johnnie Bradfield has just won the world boxing champion title. While he, to the public, portrays himself as wholesome, doting on his mother, he, in reality, lives a hard and fast life in stark contrast to that public persona. While passed out in a drunken stupor, a reporter, poised to expose Johnnie's true lifestyle, dies in Johnnie's apartment. Knowing that he did not kill the reporter but that he is implicated in doing so, Johnnie, with a few hundred dollars of his several thousand dollars amassed wealth in his pocket, goes on the run in learning that the authorities also believe that he died in a fiery car crash. Not by plan or choice but rather circumstance and need, Johnnie, using the alias Jack Dorney, ends up at the Rafferty Date Farm in Arizona run by elderly, widowed Grandma Rafferty, whose husband, before his passing, took in a group of six reform school kids from New York City to give them a better chance at life in that reform. Despite initial animosity between Johnnie and Grandma, the six reformees and Peggy, the sister of one of the reform kids who accompanied her brother to the farm in feeling she may be a grounding influence for him, all end up having a reciprocal positive influence on the other, especially Johnnie and Peggy, who start to fall for each other. There are two problems potentially to upset Johnnie's new life. First, he may turn to the only way he knows how to earn a living, namely boxing, which may expose him as still being alive. Second, NYPD Detective Monty Phelan, whose career took a nosedive ten years prior in a grave error of judgment, believes Johnnie is indeed alive and will do anything to prove his case in needing to restore some legitimacy to his career.

ACTUAL MOVIE: