Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Great Film overall

Wow! What a bizarre film! Unfortunately the few funny moments there were were quite overshadowed by it's completely weird and random vibe throughout.

Wow! A preternaturally cute,just past teenage, Donna Reed in her first movie, emoting with all she had. Dan Daily-of all people-playing the heavy. A real menace. In an uncredited role, the immortal Veda Ann Borg.The story is old. It had been done before and even more afterward, but who cares. It's a b-movie, but with MGM high production values. A dance hall scene seems to have hundreds of extras. So suspend critical judgment (and even basic intelligence) and sit back and have fun.My favorite scene is when Dan Daily, hiding out and in disguise so that he would not be recognized, approaches Veda Ann Borg in a dance hall and asks to dance with her. What better way to deflect any attention to yourself than to dance with the showiest blond in Hollywood history?

Viewers will recognize The Getaway as a remake of another MGM B picture, Public Hero #1. But another film along similar lines was so much better, that being White Heat.Still there's no shame in being associated with being with this solid B action film. Robert Sterling plays a youthful FBI agent who goes undercover in prison to arrange an escape for mobster Dan Dailey who heads the infamous River Gang the FBI wants to nail. Sterling is to infiltrate and find the gang's hideout.Dailey has the Cody Jarrett role here and while he's not nuts with a mother complex like James Cagney was, he's got some issues. But he's also shrewd and paranoid which is always a deadly combination. Dailey steals this film.The Getaway was also the film debut of Donna Reed who plays Dan Dailey's sister who unlike Cody Jarrett's mother is seriously trying to reform him. Sterling takes a liking to here. There's also Charles Winninger a doctor with a thirst problem who I wouldn't let near me with a scalpel. Winninger has an interesting way of collecting his fees.Good action film with a nice climactic shootout.

****SPOILERS**** Re-make of the 1935 gangster movie "Public Hero" this new and updated version has a 20 year old Donna Reed in her film debut as Terry O'Reilly-a fine Irish lass-who's brother Johnny "Dinkie" Black played by future song & dance man Dan Dailey had crashed out of prison. With a bullet in his chest and fellow convict Jeff Crane, Robert Sterling,the two head out to Chicago to lay low until the heat, law, cools off. Its then that we learn that convict Crane is really an undercover FBI Agent who got into prison and close to Dinkie so he can lead him to the notorious "River Gang" that he's the leader of. Hold out at a flophouse run by fellow but now released convict Moose Jones, Ernie Whitman, Dinkie makes more trouble for himself when in a spur of the moment he guns Moose down when he shows some interest in the $5,000.00 reward he can earn for himself in turning Dinkie in.It's when Dinkie together with Crane get back to his home, a mansion with a Chinese butler, in Scottsford Wisconsin that Crane runs into Terry who at first he didn't know was Dinkie's kid sister, small world isn't it, and falls in love with her. With Dinkie on the mend due to him being treated by part time mob doctor and full time drunk Josiah Glass, Charles Winninger, he now plans to reunite with his gang and get back into business of payrolls robberies which the gang specializes in. That's unless Crane get the word out to his boss in the FBI Jim Duff, Donald Douglas, the gangs future plans and where their hideout is located!Not all the believable in that Doc. Glass who's drunk every minute he's on the screen being able to preform a delicate and dangerous as well as successful, without anesthetic, operation on the near dead Dinkie and bring him back to health better then he ever was before he got shot. What also wasn't at all convincing is Terry who loved her gangster brother would fall and still be in love with Crane even after she find out that he's out to get Dinkie and put him behind bars or, in Dinkie knocking off Moose, even strapped into the state of Illinois electric chair!***SPOILERS*** In the end it was Terry who lead the Feds, or FBI, straight to Dinkie by having him,in disguise, meet her at her job as as a cashier at the Place Ballroom to get some hard needed cash. With the place staked out by some 30 G-Men and Dinkie taking time to have a last dance with a hot looking blond, Vanda, Ann Borg that he met there it didn't take that long for the Boys in the FBI to get the drop on him.***MAJOR SPOILER*** The ultra surgery Hollywood type ending spoiled the entire movie with Terry smooching with Crane after him breaking into her passenger train compartment just moments before she, outraged at him for setting up and having Dinkie gunned down, was going to have him thrown out of it!

This is a good little crime movie that is often overlooked. It is not even rated in the Maltin book. But, if you enjoy movies with a nice simple plot about prisons, break-outs, federal agents chasing crime gangs, sister trying to save wayward brother, etc. you will like this film. Robert Sterling does a fine job and interacts well with Dan Dailey and Donna Reed. Dailey's role is that of a hard and tough criminal who resists all efforts to go straight. Donna Reed, as his long suffering sister does her best to reform him. There's a great shoot-out scene that will please action fans and the final ending is handled very well and contains real suspense.