Watch Convicted For Free

To me, this movie is perfection.

Terrible acting, screenplay and direction.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

No need to repeat the plot. Prisons are by nature hothouses of repressed emotion. People locked up in unnatural conditions are grist for strong melodrama. When done right, as in Brute Force (1948) or Riot in Cell Block 11 (1953), the results are powerfully memorable. The trouble with this prison film is that it presents the look but none of the feel of hothouse melodrama. Thus, we get actors hitting their marks and speaking their lines, but with one notable exception, without the needed emotion. For example, the movie's dramatic climax is the anticipated revenge killing of the prison stoolie Ponti. It should be fraught with fear and mixed emotion. Now, Faylen as the stoolie delivers fear in spades and is the exception to the generally colorless performances. However, watch killer Mitchell and how the scene is staged—he's expressionless, minus the satisfaction that avenging his friends should arouse. Moreover, he's filmed at an impersonal distance, suggesting that this is simply one more set-up on a tight shooting schedule. Thus, what should be a very personal act causing our imagination to both leap and recoil as the door closes on the stoolie, fulfills only half of the equation.On a less mixed level, there's guard honcho Carl Benton Reid. He speaks his lines well enough and is otherwise an excellent actor. But here his character exhibits none of the intense features the stereotype implies. Now, there's nothing intrinsically wrong with stereotypes. It's really a matter of how well you do them. In Reid's case, his killing at the end again arouses no particular feeling beyond that of one more plot device. At the same time and on a bigger scale, when warden Crawford walks among the yammering convicts in the yard, the protesters look nothing like angry mob of the earlier stock shot, but more like well- fed extras standing around on a set. The point is (without going on) that the movie fails to rise above strictly programmer status, despite some clever dialogue, Frank Faylen, and a civilized dust-up between attorneys Crawford and Winters— and also, a sparkling, but largely wasted, Dorothy Malone.The problem, as I see it, lies with the director (Levin) who's responsible for staging the scenes, rehearsing the actors, and creating moods while pinpointing emotions. Mitchell, Reid, Doucette, and Ford are all fine actors, capable of rising to an occasion when called upon. However, they're not called upon here. I'm afraid Levin's preference for frothy comedy shows up in this situation where the material is comedy's polar opposite. So, my guess is that he took the film as simply another studio assignment and coasted through.In passing—I sympathize with Columbia studios and Broderick Crawford. Someone once pointed out that Crawford's probably the worst actor ever to win a top Oscar, and I think that person's right. He's a car with basically one gear—a blustery fast-forward-- and it does get tiresome. As a result, here he is in 1950, suddenly a big name commodity but without the skills to back it up. He's in an embarrassing spot while the studio wonders how best to cash in. Fortunately for both, serial TV is just around the corner. He makes a game try in this film, but unfortunately his pudgy car is just not geared for nuanced emotions. But then, neither is the movie.

Convicted (1951) ** 1/2 (out of 4) A war hero (Glenn Ford) gets into a drunken fight when he punches a guy, which eventually leads to his death. The local D.A. and future warden (Broderick Crawford) believes the man when he said it was an accident so he quickly tries to help him get paroled and adjust to prison life. The two leads offer up very good performances but that's about the only original spin in this film as the screenplay is held down with cliché story lines that we've seen in countless other movies. We get the normal stuff of an inmate who hates one of the guards, the big escape and of course you typical fights. All of this stuff comes off rather standard but Ford and Crawford deliver performances that keep the film going strong through the rather silly ending. I was really impressed with the performance by Ford as I haven't seen him give this type of performance before. I think it's also worth noting that his performance here seems to have had an influence on Charles Bronson and especially his films of the 1970s.

While Glenn Ford played the lead in this film, in so many ways this was co-star Broderick Crawford's film. Ford's character mostly reacted to events over which he had little control, while Crawford comes off as very thoughtful, tough and has some of the greatest one-liners I've heard in films. While not exactly a Film Noir movie, Crawford's lines are often pure Noir--especially during his first meeting with Ford after Ford's character accidentally killed a man. Crawford is the district attorney who must prosecute Ford and while Crawford is a decent guy and feels sorry for Ford, he must do his job and gets a conviction--even though Crawford tried his best to lose the case.Later, after Ford is in prison, there's a new warden and oddly it's Crawford. This is the first of several very improbably occurrences during the film--the other being when Crawford first arrives at the prison. He is able to quiet a near-riot just by walking through the crowd of convicts in a maximum security prison--while in real life, he would have no doubt been torn apart by the thugs.However, despite all this, the film has many great twists and turns, juicy performances (particularly by the guy playing the squealer, Ponti, who delivers a magnificent performance of a guy who knows he's about to die). This film is never dull nor is it terribly predictable--making it one of the better prison films I have seen. I heartily recommend it.FYI--In a brief scene, you see that one of the inmates is none other than Jimmy Dodd--you know, the leader of the Mouseketeers on the original MICKEY MOUSE CLUB. In addition to this bit part, he also played a convict in the film BIG HOUSE, USA (though he oddly was not credited--maybe his role was too small to bother in this film). Considering Dodd's violent and checkered past, it's surprising they let this ex-con hand around Cubby, Annette and the other kids! ;-)

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.