Cinema Revisited: You Can't Get Away With Murder (1939)

The bread and butter for Warner Brothers during the 1930s was its gangster dramas, and You Can't Get Away With Murder is a quintessential example. Humphrey Bogart was a popular tough guy actor in 1939, but hadn't quite hit real stardom. That would happen a few years later as he owned the 1940s with films like High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, and Treasure of the Sierra Madre. However, in 1939, Bogart was working his way through tough guy roles in standard fare, but it is the sort of movie that holds up over time and. generations most effectively.

Bogie is Frank Wilson, a criminal whose rebellious ways are considered exciting by a young neighborhood punk named Johnnie Stone (Billy Halop). Despite the efforts of his long-suffering sister (Gale Page), teenaged Johnnie is talked into nabbing her law-abiding boyfriend's legally owned firearm and giving it to Frank to pull a job. When Frank uses the gun to kill a man, the murder is traced to the boyfriend, Fred Burke (Harvey Stephens). Frank and Johnnie go to prison for a short term for robbery, but the murder is pinned on Fred, who is set to go to the electric chair. Johnnie is upset and wants to clear Fred. Frank isn't about to let that happen.

Of course, it can be argued that You Can't Get Away With Murder is a formulaic film and the characters are standard ingredients within that formula. But it is so well acted, so utterly compelling, that its entertainment value overrides the fact that this aggressive crime drama does not fall under the pretentious category of academically great cinema.

Humphrey Bogart snarls through his role as the baddest bad guy, his cold stare a stunning visual that is sufficiently intimidating. Billy Halop, one of the Dead End Kids, nicely balances between the streetwise punk and the guilt-ridden adolescent. At once he can either growl or grumble to the authorities, and then be trembling and stammering over his circumstances.

Director Lewis Seiler’s career went back to the silent era (he directed the Tom Mix classic The Great K&A Train Robbery) and he became effective at directing Warner programmers like this and other Bogart features like Crime School (in which Halop also appeared with the Dead End Kids), King of the Underworld, and It All Came True. This is one of Seiler’s better Warner efforts, as he maintains a rhythm with his actors and keeps the film compelling and suspenseful with his brisk pace and his careful lighting of Bogie to appear especially menacing.

By 1939, Warner Brothers was able to produce a movie like this with little effort, but it still burns through the screen with passion and power. The source material is the play Chalked Out by former Sing Sing warden Lewis Lawes whose books were made into other Warner movies like 20,000 Years in Sing Sing and Invisible Stripes (this one also featuring Bogart). The original play tanked on Broadway after only 12 performances, but it continues to resonate nicely via its screen adaption, mostly due to icon Bogart’s presence. To offset Bogart's menacing presence in the Halop character's life, Henry Travers, best recalled as the angel Clarence in the yuletide perennial It's a Wonderful Life, anchors his scenes as a philosophical prison lifer who quietly works in the library, having seen it all. Warner dots the cast with its stable of bad guy types, including Harold Huber and George E. Stone. Joe Sawyer in particular is positively heartbreaking as a prisoner excited about his impending parole, only to find it thwarted at the last minute. Gale Page effectively weeps through her decidedly thankless role as Johnnie's sister. Her talents warranted a more layered role.

Humphrey Bogart was later to go on to movie stardom, and eventually achieve legendary status after his 1957 passing, a true icon of vintage cinema. And although You Can't Get Away With Murder was made while he was toiling as a studio contract actor in B movies, it is films like this that live on most effectively as solid, compact entertainment vehicles of their time. Peeking out over the epics produced during one of American film's most celebrated years, You Can't Get Away With Murder is strongly recommended.