THEY MADE ME A CRIMINAL: and they made Claude look very very silly

Plenty has been written about Warner Bros' 1939 release THEY MADE ME IN CRIMINAL in the context of what it did for the young John Garfield's fledgling film career. But considerably less attention has been paid to the monumental miscasting of one of his more established co-stars.
I refer to the suave, silken-voiced Claude Rains.

Unlike Garfield, Rains was by 1939 a known quantity to Warner Bros and cinemagoers. He'd made an immediate impact 6 years earlier in the title role of 'The Invisible Man' where his distinctive, British-accented, voice had been used to great effect in the many scenes where Rains was present but not seen due to his invisibility. Since that debut Rains had played Frenchmen ('Hearts Divided'), Russians ('Stolen Holiday') and Italians ('Anthony Adverse') all to reasonable effect and, indeed, he was destined to secure his place in movie history playing French police officer Captain Louis Renault in 'Casablanca', but the one part that was most definitely not within his range was that of a New York City born and bred cop.
What on earth director Busby Berkeley and Warner Bros were thinking when they cast Rains as Detective Phelan remains a mystery but they clearly were not thinking straight. They had a studio full of character actors capable of playing the part so why did they give it to the most unsuitable man on the lot?!
Rains, puffing furiously on a limp cigarette, tries his best with the colloquial, slangy, tough-guy dialogue but never gets anywhere close to halfway convincing. Lines like "That makes no difference to me - see - I'm a cop. I gotta do me duty whether I like it or not" and "That's a swell looking dame you're leaving behind kid. I feel kinda sorry for you" fall so unnaturally and uncomfortably from his lips that it's embarrassing to witness.
The Rains casting fiasco aside, THEY MADE ME A CRIMINAL is a solid, production and a fine example of Warners scrappy 1930s house style. In only his second film, the 26 year old Garfield radiates star quality as Johnnie Bradfield, a young boxer who goes on the run in the mistaken belief

that he's killed a man in a drunken brawl. If you're not familiar with Garfield's work this film is a fine place to start. All the elements that contributed to his 40s screen persona are already present - the tough, cocky, streetwise underdog battling against the fate that society and his own impulsiveness has preordained for him.
The film also showcases Ann Sheridan, another rising Warner Brothers' star, and she succeeds in grabbing our attention with the brief amount of screen time she's allowed. In hindsight it would have made more sense for her to have switched roles with Gloria Dickson, but perhaps the smaller (though more prominently billed) part was the only way she could cram THEY MADE ME A CRIMINAL into her schedule of six films in 1939. May Robson is also a delight as the salt of the earth Grandma Rafferty who's foster-mom to a bunch of transplanting teenage New York delinquents, played by the Dead End Kids, although their bickering, head slapping and shoving shtick was already starting to grate a little.
Not quite an A movie but considerably more than just another run of the mill Warner Bros B movie, it's Garfield's magnetic presence that makes this film a must-see for anyone seriously interested in 1930s and 40s Hollywood cinema.