Crime School

Crime School
1938 - Warner Brothers
Directed By Lewis Seiler



SYNOPSIS

After committing a brutal beating, Frankie Warren (Billy Halop) and his gang (the other Dead End Kids) are sent to reform school, where brutality reigns. The new Deputy Commissioner of Corrections Mark Braden (Humphrey Bogart) finds out about the extreme conditions and cleans the place up and tries to steer Frankie on the right path so he won't become a hardened criminal. But falling for Frankie's sister (Gale Page) may make it difficult for Braden.



MY THOUGHTS

A Broadway play premiered in 1935 that would signal a new direction for Hollywood's crime films. Dead End was a smash hit detailing the lives of young street kids who were on the path to be the next big gangsters in newspaper headlines. The story proposed that these so called 'Dead End Kids' were to become bad as a result of their environment. The squalor of the tenements of the lower east side of Manhattan were to blame for their life of crime.

Independent film producer Sam Goldwyn snatched up the movie rights to the play and released Dead End in 1937, to universal acclaim and several Oscar nominations, including Best Picture.



All this... at a time when Warner Brothers was considered the go-to studio for socially conscious films.
In fact, Warner's I Am A Fugitive From a Chain Gang actually led to widespread prison reforms across the country and a full pardon to the author who wrote the autobiographical tale.

Dead End would have been a perfect match for the studio. It even featured two Warner Brothers actors out on loan, Humphrey Bogart and Allen Jenkins, along with future contract players, The Dead End Kids.



Warner Brothers snatched up the boy's contracts after Goldwyn let them go following their reign of terror during Dead End's production, leading to thousands of dollars in damages to the studio.

The Dead End Kids largely played the same roles (though with different names) they did in the stage and film versions of Dead End. They are as likable and fun to watch as their first appearance. Their energetic and anarchic personas move the film at a brisk pace, and also offer a generous amount of hi-jinks and humor.




Bogart's role couldn't have been more different. In Dead End, he was the notorious Babyface Martin, wanted gangster, and someone the boys looked up to with awe.
Here, Bogart is a crusader for good who must win over the hearts of the boys with much effort. This was the strongest of his pre-fame 'good guy' performances, mainly because it was the meatiest part.
He played a similar role as a District Attorney in Marked Woman, but the part wasn't written with as much depth.
This was one of his first lead roles since landing at Warner's for his powerful supporting performance in The Petrified Forest, which led to countless numbers of gangster roles for Bogart (like Babyface Martin.)



Some of the themes of Crime School were previously used in the 1933 film The Mayor Of Hell starring James Cagney and Frankie Darro and this film is a partial remake of the earlier one. Cagney played a gangster who muscled his way in to change a rough reform school.

In Crime School, we see more of the kids life before reform school and it meshes perfectly with the world of Dead End, and touches on the same central themes. The boys have little to do but commit petty crimes.
Once in reform school, it matches the Mayor of Hell in its depiction of the brutality of the warden and guards... and a man looking to civilize and reform the reform school.



The script for Crime School lacks much of the freshness and bite that both Dead End and Mayor of Hell had, and that's the film's weakness... but the performances make up much of the difference. Bogart is more realistic than James Cagney's gangster-wanting-to-do-good in Mayor, and the Dead End Kids have much greater chemistry than do Frankie Darro and a collection of glorified kid-actor extras.

The next and final time Bogart and The Dead End Kids would appear in the same film would be the finest example of the gangster film merging with the socially conscious film, Angels With Dirty Faces.
Crime School pales in comparison to that film as well as Dead End, but is still a mighty fine entertaining film wrapped up with an important social message.


THE DVD

Crime School makes its home video debut as part of the new Warner Archive Collection. It is a selection of the studio's back catalog that it deemed not financially worthy of a general DVD release. It and hundreds of other films (from the silent era to the 1990's) are available at WarnerArchive.com The films are fancy pressed DVD-R's featuring an un-remastered print of the film. What you see is exactly the same copy you'd see on TCM or any TV station that would show the film. The exorbitant price of $19.99 per movie kept me from sampling Warner's new DVD line, but thankfully, a great Black Friday sale got me to buy, and I'm glad.

There are plenty of scratches, speckles and lines that appear from time to time (usually at the starts and ends of the original reels of film) but they are not so bad they detract from the watching experience.
The disc also features what it calls a trailer... but it's just a few minutes of the start of the film and it fades out. It's nothing like the trailer that appears above.

As a fan of Bogart and the Dead End Kids, I'm glad to finally see this film (in any way I could) and you should definitely seek it out.