NekoHomey
Purely Joyful Movie!
Murphy Howard
I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.
Derry Herrera
Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.
rightwingisevil
why the district attorney had a soft spot for this specific young man who accidentally hit a man and caused him death? why the district attorney's daughter also had a soft spot for this guy from the very beginning? why this district attorney then became the warden where this young guy was jailed? in nowadays reality, how it possible those arrangements by the new warden could favor to certain prisoners? and how convenient that the district attorney's and then the warden's daughter, an unique beautiful woman would never have a sweetheart or even got married but remained a spinster who only seemed to love the convicted man so subtly albeit so obviously? do you think that a strong-willed district attorney would have encouraged his daughter to befriend a convict felon wholeheartedly from the very beginning? well, unless his daughter was an ugly woman or a crippled woman then this could have been possible, other than that, a normal law enforcer father would never have his beautiful daughter to be near to a convicted fellow. then again, once became a warden, suddenly his home would be in or close to the prison? and he would have the privilege to allow several prisoners to be at his personal service? givemeabreak, will you? this film is just an utopia- like, completely cosmetically beautified picture to show an unrealistic and totally unlikely scenario to suit the purpose of this film. the whole screenplay was like a mirage, if you could believe it, you could believe anything is possible and a carpenter's son could walk on water other than that British street magician, dynamo.
bkoganbing
In the wake of Broderick Crawford's Oscar for All the King's Men, Columbia Pictures was having difficulty in finding properties for him. It was decided to team him with Columbia reliable leading man work horse Glenn Ford in a remake of The Criminal Code.Convicted since it is remake can't really be blamed for having a lot of cliché in the dialog and plot situations. Just about every prison film deals with the same issues. Since Hollywood dropped the Code, prison films deal far more graphically than before. Still watching Convicted, you get the feeling you've seen it all before and there's nothing really fresh in this film.Glenn Ford kills a man in a nightclub fight. A good lawyer could probably have gotten him off as District Attorney Broderick Crawford tells Ford. Ford unfortunately got pompous Roland Winters who's bag wasn't criminal law. Ford gets a 1 to 10 year sentence.Wouldn't you know it, DA Crawford is appointed the new warden of the prison where Ford is. Since he's living on the grounds his daughter Dorothy Malone moves in with him. Ford by now is a trustee and acts as the warden's chauffeur. But he's still a con, a fact he never forgets and nearly costs him his parole.Dorothy Malone for the first dozen years or so of her career played roles just like this one, good dutiful wives and daughters. No hint of that woman's talent until her Oscar for Written on the Wind.Millard Mitchell and Will Geer are Ford's cellmates and both do a good job. But the best acting in Convicted without a doubt is Frank Faylen as the prison stoolie. Convicted is not a bad film, but there's nothing real special about it in the careers of any of its principal players.
Neil Doyle
The more I see of GLENN FORD, the more I appreciate the range of his underrated talent. CONVICTED is a low-budget crime melodrama from Columbia that co-stars BRODERICK CRAWFORD with DOROTHY MALONE and ED BEGLEY in supporting roles.Ford is a victim of circumstance, landing in prison after slugging a man at a nightclub who insults the woman he's dancing with. The man dies and Ford is sent to prison for five years.Crawford becomes the prison's new warden and soon discovers that things aren't being run the way he approves of. It's nice to see Crawford in a sympathetic role as the warden who takes an interest in Ford's prison record and attempts to help him. He asks daughter Dorothy Malone to treat him respectfully when he assigns him to be her chauffeur.The dialog is terse and full of wisecracks and Henry Levin's direction is taut with suspense. There's the usual prison breaks, the prison snitch (FRANK FAYLEN), and suspense building with the usual twists and turns as a prison break is imminent and the snitch is about to get his comeuppance.Summing up: Good dialog and tense situations make this a better than average prison drama. Broderick Crawford is especially strong as the good-hearted warden and Ford is more than competent as the wrongly accused inmate.
bmacv
A remake of Howard Hawks' 1931 The Criminal Code, Convicted serves up Glenn Ford as an average Joe sent up the river for accidentally causing the death of a man in a night-club brawl. Even the district attorney who prosecuted him (Broderick Crawford) finds his crime pardonable, but a bungled defense sent him to the big house. Parole should come early, but members of the board are cronies of the dead man's father, a prominent citizen, so Ford's in for five years.In stir, Ford grows embittered and embraces the curious codes of the cell block. He tries to eschew the obvious dangers of a Draconian guard (Carl Benton Reid) and the obligatory stoolie (Frank Faylen, most vividly remembered as the sinister male nurse in the alcoholic ward of The Lost Weekend). But prison life is grinding him down and he decides to join in a break out. But he ends up in solitary after assaulting a guard minutes after learning his father has died, so escapes the destiny of his comrades, who are slaughtered.. Next, a change of regime: the new warden is none other than good-hearted Crawford, and with newfound liberties as a trusty he grows sweet on Crawford's daughter (Dorothy Malone). But the skies have not yet cleared, because there's a movement to kill Faylen for causing the deaths of the men involved in the prison break....While not so truculent a prison drama as Brute Force, three years earlier, the more staid Convicted develops with cumulative power. Burnett Guffey photographs the decrepit squalor of the prison with loving revulsion. The script, too, is well written (if lacking the edge of the same year's Caged, set in a women's penitentiary), with a streak of gallows humor shot through it the warden counts among his household staff a cook who poisoned his wife and a barber who slit a man's throat. The story gets driven by character, as well, and the characters are sharply acted: Millard Mitchell, as Ford's cellmate, and Faylen are especially memorable.Ford, on the other hand, plays the masochist a little too readily, a point that would not be so finely drawn if it didn't parallel so many of his other roles in the noir cycle. As a result, that quintessential bull-in-a-china shop, Crawford, upstages him scene after scene. Despite a wrap-up that's a bit too sunny to swallow, Convicted holds an honorable place in the long line of movies that have peered into the national psychosis we like to refer to as rehabilitation.