The best-dressed island

Another of the movies that I recorded some months back and finally got around to watching is Blackwell's Island.

The movie starts off with a mobster, Bull Bransom (Stanley Fields), who likes to play obnoxious practical jokes on people who come to his office. But he's really much worse than that, as he runs the Waterfront Protection Asoociation, which is a shakedown for anybody who tries to moor at the port. Nice boat you've got there; it would be a shame if something happened to it. One captain is apparently new to the port, so when Bransom's goons come to make him their generous offer, he refuses, resutling in his boat getting firebombed.

Tim Haydon (John Garfield) is a reporter for one of the newspapers, and as is the case in movies like this he's a crusading reporter raging against the mob and the government that tacitly supports them, to the point that he comes to Bransom's attention. Meanwhile, Haydon goes to the hospital to try to get information from the ship's captain, which is where here meets nurse Mary Walsh (Rosemary Lane) and her cop brother Terry (Dick Purcell). While some of the goons are escaping the hospital, Terry gets shot chasing them.

That, combined with Haydon's exposés, results in Bransom getting sentenced to prison, in the jail on Blackwell's Island. Bransom, having a lot of politicians in his pocket, decides that he's going to make the best of prison, by buying off the warden (Granville Bates) and getting himself treated like royalty and able to run his business from the prison, even if he's not quite able to get off the island.

Tim and the Walshes are ticked, but what are they going to do? Write more articles? Tim knows that he's got to get the goods on Bransom somehow, and eventually comes up with an idea. He stages an incident so that he can smack the prosecutor, which gets him sent to prison... on Blackwell's Island. Perhaps he can get the goods on Bransom from inside the prison. It certainly wouldn't be the first prison movie where that happened.

Blackwell's Island is most definitely a B movie, and I was somewhat surprised to see Garfield as the star, since I would have guessed he was above B movies by this point. But even though he had made an auspicious debut in Four Daughters the previous year, this was still only his third movie, and IMDb says it was in filming already before Four Daughters was released.

Garfield is, unsurprisingly, quite good here, as the material fits him well. Warner Bros. were good at making social commentary movies, and this little B movie is no different, zipping along and never being anything less than entertaining. The one oddity, however, is Fields, with his non-stop practical jokes. To be honest, I found it generally less funny and more irritating, which I don't think was the point. He does, however, get his comeuppance at the end after an exciting escape/chase sequence.

Blackwell's Island is a fun little movie, available as a standalone DVD from the Warner Archive collection. This is another one, however, that I wish were available on a box set, since I've always found the Warner Archive price point a bit high for standalone B movies. Should it come up on TCM again any time soon, however, it's definitely worth watching.