This boring film hasn't got anything going for it, except for John Garfield. The story is supposedly taken from real events but I find that to be rather incredulous. "Warner Bros" hardly went out of their way in providing a great actor like John Garfield, an opening film which should have been more tailor- made for him. "Blackwell's Island" is a transparent film with no entertainment value at all. Even the action scenes are poor. The film stays relegated as a programmer but I've seen better ones than this!

It will not be on anyone's Top Ten list, nor should it be. It's not a great movie.But it's certainly a good one, and downright exciting at the end.It also falls into one of the categories of movies that Hollywood really doesn't make anymore, at least in the same way.Are some of our prisons as corrupt as this one? It wouldn't surprise me, though the corruption is probably not as visible as in this movie.What makes this movie work for me is John Garfield's energy and determination. Once he gets himself arrested and sent to prison, things really start to take off.No, the end is not surprising. You know that his character is unlikely to be killed. He is likely to break the story he went after and break the criminal's hold over the prison. But the way he did it held me.You could do worse than to watch this movie.

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.

This is like a lot of crime movies from Warner Brothers and RKO. In some ways, it seems a vehicle for John Garfield. And Garfield is extremely appealing as an honorable reporter.The fascinating part is Stanley Fields, though. He plays the vicious mob boss who is an overgrown kid. He plays practical jokes. He is barely literate but love the funny papers. His two dogs are as nasty as he is and they accompany him to jail. In jail, he sets himself and his cronies up in the infirmary, throwing out all the legitimately sick people. There he plays with a model train set.The plot is plausible. Garfield is Good. The Lane sister who gets high billing has only a few lines so who can judge. But Fields's character is the shocker here.