Back to Crime School

I mentioned the movie Crime School back in December 2009 when its star, Humphrey Bogart, was TCM's Star of the Month. It's airing again tomorrow morning (January 17) at 8:00 AM (and is available on DVD if you miss the Tuesday showing), but there are a few more things I don't think I said about the film back in 2009. First is that in addition to Bogart, it's got the Dead End Kids early in their careers, before they morphed into the Bowery Boys and a series of low-budget films over at Monogram. More interestingly, while I mentioned in 2009 that Crime School was a remake of The Mayor of Hell, I hadn't spotted that the story was done a third time in 1939 as Hell's Kitchen. Astonishingly, Hell's Kitchen also stars the Dead End Kids.

On a somewhat unrelated note, in doing searches, I've been tending to mix up Crime School with another 1938 picture, Girls' School. Not only that, but I was thinking Girls' School was the title of a completely different picture (albeit one slightly closer to Crime School in plot), Girls on Probation, which stars Ronald Reagan and has the screen debut of Susan Hayward.

Revisiting Crime School also made me think of the Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School, which came out all the way back in the summer of 1986. There's another one for the "Boy does that make me feel old" file.