Dust Be My Destiny

I've mentioned before that Warner Bros. seemed to make the most interesting social commentary movies back in the 1930s. Recently, I had the opportunity to watch another one, but this time I felt it had a surprising lack of punch: Dust Be My Destiny.

John Garfield plays Joe Bell, a man who was wrongly convicted of a crime he didn't commit, and spent 16 months in prison for it before the truth came out and was was released. He gets the hell out of town, and in hopping the trains, runs into two of the Bowery Boys, brothers Hank and Jimmy played by Billy Halop and Bobby Jordan respectively.

At one of the rail yards, these three get involved with another set of vagrants. Again, the only thing Joe's done wrong is to hop those trains without paying, but one thing leads to another and after getting into a fight with one of the other vagrants, Joe gets sent to the work farm while Hank and Jimmy ultimately wind up going west.

At the work farm, Joe meets Mabel (Priscilla Lane). She's the stepdaughter of the farm's foreman, Garreth (Stanley Ridges), and he somewhat understandably doesn't want Mabel hanging out with the criminals, even if we know that Joe isn't really a criminal to anywhere near the extent of the other guys in the farm. So of course Joe and Mabel fall in love and somehow get to keep seeing each other. Garreth generally doesn't treat Mabel so well, and now that she's seeing Joe surreptitiously, he gets even angrier, trying to hit Mabel to the point that Joe defends himself and Mabel and knocks out Garreth, who eventually dies of a heart attack.

Joe and Mabel have to flee, although they don't know yet that Garreth died. They don't have enough money for two rooms, which is a problem, because they're not married, which was of course a thing in those days. But they're in luck. A wacky promoter named Caruthers (Frank McHugh) needs a promotion for the traveling stage show, and decides to pack the audience in by having a real wedding live on stage! He needs a couple and they need a valid license since city hall is closed until morning, so this'll have to do.

Of course, the couple's pictures get taken, which means their location will be known to the general public. And since they also learn about Garreth's death and the obvious assumption on the part of the authorities that it's at the very least manslaughter if not murder (and who can blame them), Joe realizes the couple is going to have to go on the run and stay on the run. Mabel naïvely believes that if only Joe turns himself in, he'll get a fair hearing at the trial. Yeah right.

After running to another town or two, Joe gets an important photo in a bank robbery, one that a newspaper would pay big bucks for. And shockingly enough, the local editor, Mike Leonard (Alan Hale), could use a good photographer and doesn't care so much about Joe's past. But Joe's past is going to catch up to him anyway, leading to a trial and Mabel's character defense of Joe.

Dust Be My Destiny is a movie that I found I had a hard time suspending my disbelief over. There seem to be way too many coincidences here, and things that I wouldn't expect to happen in real life, such as finding Hank and Jimmy for the big trial at the end. Garfield does the best he can with the material he's given, but this stuff is second-rate material and Garfield would be in much better movies.

Dust Be My Destiny has received a standalone DVD release courtesy of the Warner Archive, but I think it's another of those movies that would really be better served as part of a box set.