About four years before Warner Brothers made the film Blackwell's Island, the reform LaGuardia administration made a well publicized raid on Blackwell's Island prison and exposed systemic corruption within the correctional facility. It was a high point of Fiorello LaGuardia's first term as mayor of New York. LaGuardia's Corrections Commissioner Austin McCormack is fictionalized here in the character that Victor Jory plays.
What could have been a good film based on modern headlines of the times got turned into a B movie that should have been rated lower. It was certainly a low point in the career of John Garfield who plays your typical crusading newspaperman that Thirties era films loved.
The villain if you could call him that is Stanley Fields and it's from him that Leo Gorcey and the rest of the Bowery Boys learned their impeccable diction and grammar. He's a blithering idiot who loves practical jokes like exploding cigars and squirting carnations. He's such a china shop bull that the politicians upstairs would like him to just cool it for a while. When he doesn't he gets six months in the Blackwell's Island prison until after the election.
Not that prison cramps Fields's style in the least. He turns Blackwell's Island into Club Med for he and a few select cronies, throwing out the patients from the prison hospital and setting up his own posh suite.
Garfield gets involved professionally when he writes some expose articles and it gets personal when Fields and henchmen on their own private work release program kill honest patrolman Dick Purcell who also happens to be the brother of Rosemary Lane who is Garfield's girlfriend. Garfield gets himself thrown into Blackwell's Island where he can get the lowdown.
When Dutch Schultz got out of control, Lucky Luciano had him hit with the connivance of Tammany Hall politicians, simple as that. I watched this film in utter amazement that the powers that be actually kowtowed to Fields.
As for the prison scenes, even the wise guys from Goodfellas didn't live it up half as well as Fields and his pals. Those guys based on some real characters knew the limits they could push things in the joint.
Stanley Fields was a poor man's Wallace Beery and Beery and Fields could be both sinister and oafish, but never in the same movie. What could have been a nice drama based on a true incident was turned into a mess that couldn't make it's mind up whether it was comedy or drama.
The film was a low point in the career of John Garfield during his Warner Brothers contract years. I'm not sure if Garfield did anything worse than Blackwell's Island, but I haven't seen all his films.
