My Son is Guilty (1939)
Honest cop Tim Kerry struggles to keep his son Ritzy from becoming involved in a crime ring.
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Sadly Over-hyped
There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.
The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
I don't think that My Son Is Guilty would have been in any Oscar contention had it been released intact. But the editing department thoroughly butchered this film into incoherency. My Son Is Guilty was also Glenn Ford's debut film for Columbia Pictures, but fortunately for his career he wasn't the star.Harry Carey stars in this film as your kindly neighborhood Irish cop in Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan. His bad seed of a son Bruce Cabot is getting out of jail after a 2 year rap. Carey thinks a little kindness will reform him. But Cabot's got no such notions of turning straight. But he does let his father use his influence to get him a job in the police radio room where at a propitious moment the radios go bad when a gang Cabot is working with pull a large payroll holdup where a cop is killed.Glenn Ford plays a friend from the neighborhood and rival to Cabot for Julie Bishop. Later on Cabot kills Glenn Ford's mother when she recognizes the fugitive. The idea of any police department employing Cabot with a rapsheet in a police command center really boggles the mind. I was speechless at the mere concept.My Son Is Guilty was also the first time that Glenn Ford worked with Edgar Buchanan whom he became great friends with and always tried to use in his films. Buchanan plays a bartender here.Best performance in the film is that of Wynne Gibson as the widow of the former head of the gang Cabot works with and she's tough, smart, and beautiful. Too bad her performance was wasted in this film.Glenn Ford made his feature film debut in Heaven With A Barbed Wire Fence the same year for 20th Century Fox. But Darryl Zanuck passed on signing him so Ford got a contract with Columbia. He'd have to work his way up in quality of pictures so My Son Is Guilty would be the start of quite a climb.