Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

The movie was pretty good minus the Dead End Kids - once they were brought into the picture it went down hill. It wasn't a focus on Johnnie's story anymore but an outlet for the Dead End Kids to act up on camera.The studio, director and writers - someone - should have kept the focus on Johnnie and police. Once Johnnie left town, they only showed the police one time and that was briefly around the middle of the film and finally got back to the police at the end of the film.OH don't expect to see a lot of Claude Rains in this one - he's in the film as a tough cop - did well with the role handed to him - but he's not in the film all that much.Anyway - I would like this film much more if the Dead End Kids were NOT in the film and would have most likely rated the film higher!! They put way too much focus on them and not on the what the story is about: Johnnie being framed for a murder he didn't commit.4/10

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.

It's a Warner Bros. production, in spades—from Garfield to the gritty subject matter to the seedy surroundings. If MGM was the glamour studio, Warner's was the no-nonsense Plain Jane. Here boxing champ Johnnie (Garfield) hobos it to the California desert to escape a New York murder rap. There he hooks up with tough blonde (Dickson) and her juvenile delinquent date pickers (Gorcey, et. al.). Trouble is that Detective Phelin (Rains) won't give up the chase, and now Johnnie's in a pickle he can't fight his way out of.Okay, nothing unusual about the plot, except maybe the setting. Nevertheless, director Busby Berkeley manages to blend the elements into a good gritty little tale. Well, that's except for the fight scenes, which prove Berkeley was better at arranging dancers than boxers. Even so, he makes maybe the best use of that ragamuffin outfit that would become the Bowery Boys that I've seen. Even the usually buffoonish Huntz Hall is under firm control. But maybe the biggest challenge was getting aristocratic Claude Rains to impersonate a street wise New York cop, of all things. Fortunately, that excellent actor pulls it off better than expected. And, of course, there's the great Garfield showing why his brand of feisty urban grit was so perfect for the times. Then there's the one scene that still has me sweating. Johnnie and the boys are cooling off inside a big water-filled irrigation tank. Okay, no problem. Except, farmer somebody decides his date trees need water, and before they know it, the boys are clawing at the bare metal sides, trying to escape the ten feet of water he's left in the bottom. Sure, they're okay, but only so long as they keep swimming and swimming, trapped like flotsam in a fish bowl. It's a sweaty doomsday setup that comes out of nowhere.Anyway, this is the type of film that made me a fan of hardscrabble Warner Bros. of the 1930's. So catch up with it if you can.

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 ****