AMERICA'S TWO-FISTER ANSWER to the Gun-Mad Rats Who Rule the Underworld!
1939-03-23
N/A
89 min
Johnnie learns crime from petty thug Frank Wilson. When Wilson kills a pawnbroker with a gun stolen from Johnnie's sister Madge's fiance Fred Burke, Fred goes to Sing Sing's death house. Wilson uses all the pressure can to keep Johnnie silent, even after he and Johnnie themselves wind up in the big house.
Even though the star of the piece was Humphrey Bogart, the best performance here belongs to the young Billy Halop ("Johnnie") who falls in with petty criminal "Wilson" (Bogart). The latter man pinches a gun from the younger man's soon-to-be brother in law, and when it is used in a killing, it's the fiancé "Fred" (Harvey Stephens) who faces the chair... Shortly afterwards, our two aspiring hoodlums are incarcerated for another crime, and this is where the story gets a little more interesting: the young man knows "Fred" is innocent and must wrestle with his conscience, and his dubious friend and maybe do the right thing. There is a lot of clutter with the screenplay, the story takes too long to get going but once it does, young Halop (only 19 here) puts in a decent effort, well complimented by "Pop" (Henry Travers) and Gale Page as his on-screen sister "Madge". Bogart is really just going through the motions, he excelled at these gritty crime noir films but this one is all just a bit too formulaic; it has too much of a beginning, a middle and an end to really get particularly exciting. Worth a watch, but not a film I expect to remember.
