They Made Me a Criminal

John Garfield as a prizefighter who wakes up next to a dead body and runs, ending up on a date ranch in Arizona with a bunch of delinquent boys and a social worker (Gloria Dickson) who does not believe his story until she has to. Busby Berkeley directed — not a musical, his first straight drama — for Warner Bros. in 1939, from the play The Hero. Claude Rains is the detective; the Dead End Kids are the kids. It is a Warner social picture that thinks it is about innocence and is actually about what a face like Garfield's does to a jury. The boxing is secondary. The running is the film.