ThiefHott Too much of everything

Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Helllins It is both painfully honest and laugh-out-loud funny at the same time.

Melanie Bouvet The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

MartinHafer I like film noir--you know, told old gangster films from the 40s and 50s. This Damon Runyan story has almost all the earmarks of a good film noir movie...most. However, it also involves a cute kid and a schmaltzy storyline--something you'd NEVER find in a true example of noir.When the film begins, two hoods, Cory (Wayne Morris) and Martin (Pat O'Brien) chase down a guy who stole $50,000 from them. In the process of getting it back, they are forced to shoot the guy. Years pass and the two crooks have gone separate ways. Martin has an aura of respectability about him and Cory is still a hood--a hood with a girlfriend who has a kid, Elsie. When someone goes to the police with information about the killing which occurred at the beginning of the film, Cory decides to rat on his old friend and offers to testify against him to save his butt. Not surprisingly, Martin is furious and is out to kill Cory when he finds out he's being betrayed.All this sounds like perfect noir--a killing, betrayal and revenge. However, Elsie soon becomes involved in the case and the dopey kid thinks that Martin is Santa...yes, Santa. She tries to help him-- not only because of this but because her soon to be step-daddy is a sadist who beat her cute little dog. Even Martin isn't cold enough to do that and soon takes the pup under his care. What's next? Well, it ain't exactly kid-friendly and is interesting but the whole subplot involving the kid tended to take away the hard edge from this one--and I WANT a hard-edged story! All in all, not a bad film but also one that isn't exactly the best from the two stars. Without the kid and the dog, the story would have been a lot better.

wes-connors In New York City, rich and respectable Park Avenue ex-gangster Pat O'Brien (as Martin Martin) finds out guttery ex-partner Wayne Morris (as Dane Cory) is planning to go straight to the D.A. and squeal about the events surrounding the film's opening. As this would put Mr. O'Brien behind bars and get Mr. Morris off easily, the two men have a nasty confrontation. O'Brien takes a bullet in the shoulder, and goes on the lam. A "WANTED" man, O'Brien makes his way into the Greenwich Village neighborhood where Morris keeps an apartment for busty blonde Dolores Moran (as Lily White)...Ms. Moran lives with her illiterate - but smartly talkative - daughter Gayle Reed (as Elsie) and their dog "Skipper". Morris likes to make time with Ms. Moran, but loathes little girl cuteness and furry animals; he wants the kid sent to school, then kicks and wounds "Skipper". The disabled canine meets O'Brien, who names him "Johnny One-Eye". Next, O'Brien meets little Miss Reed. O'Brien tells the gullible girl he's really "Santa Claus". This was based on a story by Damon Runyon, but hacks out his whimsy. Highlights include authentic New York locations and a velvety-voiced supporting cast.**** Johnny One-Eye (5/5/50) Robert Florey ~ Pat O'Brien, Wayne Morris, Dolores Moran, Gayle Reed

classicsoncall With one of the cooler sounding film titles going, I was surprised when the title character turned out not to be a gangster, but a down and out mutt belonging to a little girl. Johnny One-Eye gets his name from Martin Martin (Pat O'Brien), victim to a former partner's bullet, and holed up in a run down alley where young Elsie White (Gayle Reed) discovers his presence. Martin concocts a story claiming to be Santa Claus, which seems off the wall at the time, but winds up making some sense to set up the picture's finale.It's always interesting to see Pat O'Brien in one of his villainous roles, so diametrically opposed to the haloed characters like Father Jerry from "Angels With Dirty Faces" that one is more accustomed to. Here however, he's outdone by co-star Wayne Morris, who endears himself to the audience by kicking Elsie's dog out of the house. That pretty much establishes that Dane Cory (Morris) deserves whatever he's got coming.With apartments in New York City going well north of a million dollars these days, that Park Avenue penthouse Martin bought for five grand sounded like a pretty good investment.As for Johnny One-Eye, his real name in the story was Skipper, which must have been a popular pet name in the 1950's; my first dog was Skipper too, a fox terrier. The thing that puzzled me though was that after the dog's first appearance in the alley with that lame eye, subsequent scenes showed him with what appeared to be two good ones under all that facial hair. But then Johnny Two-Eyes wouldn't have summoned the proper pathos for a story like this.Yes it does get a bit melodramatic at times, especially when it comes time for the wind up. You might want to have a box of hankies around for the death of Santa Claus scene, maybe two if you have a youngster watching with you.

bmacv The title character is a mutt, and the story comes from the flamboyant pen of Damon Runyon. That's hardly the recipe for a moody, offbeat crime story, but Robert Florey, perhaps drawing on his French roots, adds that little je ne sais quoi and comes up with a casserole a cut above the ordinary. It's not quite a success but an honorable and occasionally arresting try.Runyon is best remembered for his sentimental yarns about Broadway, that garish gulch that disrupts Manhattan's tidy grid - stories of gold-diggers and raffish sportsmen, of old silver-tongued sots and big bruisers with 24-karat hearts. But he told more downbeat tales as well, as evidenced by Johnny One-Eye, where Florey more skillfully modulates the movie's dark tonality than did Irving Reis in The Big Street, with Lucille Ball and Henry Fonda, another of Runyon's more shadowed stories (perhaps Reis was overruled by Runyon, who acted as producer).Save for Pat O'Brien, Florey's smallish cast is nowhere near the caliber of The Big Street's (its next most recognizable member is Wayne Morris). Partners in petty crime years ago, O'Brien and Morris whacked a double-crosser and tossed his body off the Staten Island ferry. Since then they've drifted apart and gone legit, with O'Brien now occupying a pinnacle not only on Park Avenue but in the city's power structure as well. We get only a brief glimpse of his affluence and influence, however, in a scene where he brings hookers to his penthouse to pair off with politicos. An epicene blackmailer (Lawrence Cregar) working for Morris cuts short the festivities by calling down a police raid. O'Brien flees out into the city's meaner streets with only one mission - to find Morris and exact his revenge. He catches a bullet along the way, and holes up in a condemned brownstone in the Village, where he meets up with the poor mutt, Johnny One-Eye.Here the plotting plummets into the, well, Runyonesque. The dog belongs to the little girl of Morris' mistress (Dolores Moran), thus becoming the canine link which fatally reunites the old partners. Enough said, except to note that the tot (Gayle Reed) will harden the warmest of hearts, suggesting the least endearing attributes of Shirley Temple as Little Miss Marker, another of Runyon's creations.Florey can't quite toss out all the aggressively poignant slop - if he had, there would have little left to work with - but he accentuates the noirish elements (he had just directed John Payne in The Crooked Way, one of his more solid credits). During O'Brien's wounded, nocturnal flight, the skyscrapers loom like jagged black precipices. And the scenes in the abandoned town house, where he's visited by the little girl, bring to mind, in their sense of menacing isolation in the middle of a teeming city, Ted Tetzlaff's The Window, a hit of the previous year. (There's also a freighted scene with a boozing veterinarian that looks forward to a similar one in Andre De Toth's Crime Wave four years later.) Sad that Florey was relegated to nothing better than the Bs (even to the Bs among the Bs); given better material and looser budgets, his distinctive touch might have grown into a major talent.