Rent Convicted (1950)

Prison Melodrama. - Convicted review by Steve

There was a revival of prison films after WWII when the punishment of crime became a hot topic in US news. Maybe because many returning combat veterans had experienced POW camps. This isn't among the best of these. It's mainly of interest as a remake of one of the classics of the first wave of big house melodramas, Howard Hawks' The Criminal Code.

It worked better in 1931, in the wild, permissive precode days when it felt raw and strange. The realism no longer stacks up in more regulated times. And it makes exactly the same case for reform as it did in the age of prohibition. Broderick Crawford plays the liberal lawyer who becomes governor and attempts to introduce more humane strategies.

But why is his daughter (Dorothy Malone) involved in rehabilitating prisoners, as a sort of hobby? She develops an unlikely romance with Glenn Ford, incarcerated for punching a rich blowhard in a bar... who fell awkwardly and died. Familiarity eventually stifles the drama and improbable things happen to enable a good outcome for the unlucky con.

Henry Levin was a director who could make a small budget go a long way, but the elementary lighting betrays a rushed production and exposes studio sets which look phoney in an age of location shoots. It's never dull or sanctimonious, and the performances are sincere, but Brute Force (1947) had already moved the prison film onwards.