Blackwell's Island (Warner Bros./First National, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

On Tuesday, November 18, after my husband Charles and I watched part three of The American Revolution, I showed him a film we’d watched together from an old VHS tape from Turner Classic Movies back when I used to record the channel almost literally by the yard: Blackwell’s Island, a 1939 gangster movie from Warner Bros. (though at least partially in “First National” drag). This was a 71-minute movie, essentially a “B” picture, and it was the third feature-length film starring John Garfield. Garfield had begun his career in New York on the stage as a member of the Group Theatre, founded in 1932 by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, and Lee Strasberg. According to its Wikipedia page, “It was intended as a base for the kind of theatre they and their colleagues believed in – a forceful, naturalistic and highly disciplined artistry.” The Group Theatre became famous for importing the “Method of Physical Actions” derived from the writings and teachings of Russian director and drama theorist Konstantin Stanislavsky, though when Stanislavsky himself visited the U.S. and saw the Group Theatre in action he said they had misunderstood most of what he had taught. Though at least one major actor from the Group Theatre, Franchot Tone, came to Hollywood well before Garfield did, Garfield became a star basically as the first true Method actor to achieve starring roles in films. As a result, even when he was cast as a gangster (Warner Bros. obviously thought they could wreak the same transformation on Garfield, t/n Julius Garfinkel, they had on Edward G. Robinson, t/n Emmanuel Goldenberg), Garfield played in a quietly sinister style far removed from the snarling way Robinson, James Cagney, and Humphrey Bogart had in similar roles. Garfield made his movie debut in a quite good thriller, They Made Me a Criminal, a 1938 remake of a Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. vehicle from 1933 called The Life of Jimmy Dolan in which he played a boxer who accidentally kills his corrupt manager and then has to flee to the country to escape prosecution. The director was, of all people, Busby Berkeley, who took a break from his usual mega-production numbers in musicals and turned out to be a quite effective director of suspense and action.

Garfield’s next film was an enormous breakthrough: Four Daughters (1938), adapted from a Fannie Hurst story called Sister Act and featuring Claude Rains as a music teacher whose titular four daughters (real-life sisters Rosemary, Lola, and Priscilla Lane, with Gale Page as the fourth daughter) get involved in various romantic complications. John Garfield and Jeffrey Lynn played rivals for the hand of Priscilla Lane’s character; she marries Garfield’s but they have a hard life together and ultimately, realizing she’s still in love with the other man, he commits suicide by deliberately crashing his car. Blackwell’s Island was Garfield’s third film, and it was advertised with footage of a ceremony hosted by a trade association that proclaimed Garfield “the new dramatic star of the year.” I wanted to see it again mainly because one of its major plot issues concerns gang leader Bull Bransom (Stanley Fields), who runs the “Waterfront Protective Association” and intimidates boat owners to pay him money so he doesn’t wreck their boats or injure or kill them. The hero is crusading reporter Tim Haydon (John Garfield), who is determined to expose Bransom’s gang. He gets fired from the New York Times-Dispatch but gets a new job with the Star-Sentinel and has his meet-cute with Sunny Walsh (Rosemary Lane) when she’s a nurse at the hospital where Bransom’s latest victim, Captain Pederson (Wade Boteler), is recuperating and he shows up demanding an interview. He doesn’t get one, but two members of Bransom’s gang break in via an outside window (back when hospitals still had openable outside windows) and finish the job they’d started on him. Bransom and three of his thugs go on trial (a bench rather than a jury trial, for some reason) and are sentenced to six months on the titular Blackwell’s Island prison, but because they have so much political clout with the corrupt machine running New York City they’re able to live the life of Riley even while ostensibly incarcerated.

They get to take over the prison’s hospital ward and set it up as a palatial private residence. They have special privileges including the opportunity to have Bransom’s dogs live with them and even eat Bransom’s specially cooked steak meals while the rest of the prisoners starve (one wonders what the prisoners who are genuinely sick have to do). They get to gamble through poker games with each other and horse-racing bets they place outside, and they organize a protection racket of their own to extort money from fellow convicts without their political pull. Haydon decides that the only way he’ll get the goods on Bransom and end his reign of terror inside Blackwell’s Island is if he gets sent there himself as an inmate, so he punches out a prosecutor named Ballinger (Leon Ames: the one degree of separation between Bela Lugosi and Judy Garland!) and ends up in Blackwell’s. The main reason I wanted to see this movie again right now is the similar level of insane privilege being granted to Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted sex trafficker and abuser of underage girls herself in partnership with the late Jeffrey Epstein. Maxwell, like the fictional Bransom, is allowed to have her dogs in her current prison and have catered meals specially cooked for her, and if any fellow inmates complain about the cushy kid-glove treatment she’s getting, they get disciplined. Bransom also has arranged to get out of prison any time he likes through a private boat he has concealed on the titular island, and he uses this to do in one of his gang’s enemies personally. He can get away with all this because the hapless warden, Stuart Granger (Granville Bates), is scared shitless that if he doesn’t give Bransom everything he wants, Bransom will use his connections to fire the warden and deny him the retirement pension he’s counting on to sustain him in his old age. The other guards are also mostly on Bransom’s payroll, and when Haydon ends up inside Blackwell’s, Bransom bluntly tells him that if Bransom says Haydon can eat, he’ll eat; if he doesn’t, Haydon will starve.

They warn Sunny Walsh’s family off doing anything by killing Sunny’s police-officer brother Terry (Dick Purcell, later the screen’s first Captain America in a 1942 Republic serial), trussing up his body (in a manner that makes it look like the crooks have seen 1931’s The Public Enemy, James Cagney’s star-making film), and leaving it in the Walshes’ home with a bomb attached that’s designed to blow all of them up. Luckily, while he was there having dinner with the Walshes, Haydon spotted the bomb and threw it out the window, so it exploded harmlessly outside. Ultimately Bransom sets up Haydon by promising to help him “escape” disguised as a guard, then tells the prison authorities that a prisoner dressed as a guard will attempt a breakout and should be shot on sight. Haydon keeps alive by hiding out in a barrel and then, when Bransom tries to get away on his speedboat, Haydon commandeers a police boat and gives chase. Ultimately, thanks to a new special prosecutor, Thomas McNair (Victor Jory), appointed by the New York state government and therefore not subject to control from the local political machine that Bransom controls, Bransom is arrested by the state police and will serve a 99-year sentence in a state facility over which he and his political friends have no influence. Blackwell’s Island is a pretty much by-the-numbers Warner Bros. gangster movie, though Stanley Fields as Bransom is a merely annoying villain thanks to his juvenile penchant for playing practical jokes. He’s got a whole lot of cigars that explode in people’s faces shortly after they’re lit (in one quirkily amusing scene, Bransom is about to give one of his exploding cigars to a person he wants to impress; he thinks better of it and reaches into his other coat pocket for a normal cigar). He also has a flower pinned to his lapel that shoots a faceful of powder into his intended victim, and he does this to his girlfriend Pearl Murray (Peggy Shannon, on her way down from the ethereal beauty she’d been in the 1933 disaster film Deluge; she was a chronic alcoholic and would die of a heart attack just two years later). All this business with the practical jokes makes Bransom come off as more of an annoyance than a genuinely sinister villain, and for that we can blame the writers (Lee Katz and Crane Wilbur) rather than Stanley Fields, John Garfield, or director McGann (who according to imdb.com had help from a much more prestigious “name,” Michael Curtiz, on some retakes). Blackwell’s Island wouldn’t be especially memorable (though it was based on a real-life scandal that took place on New York’s Welfare Island in 1934) if it weren’t for the striking parallel between the fictional Bull Bransom and the all too real Ghislaine Maxwell in terms of the super-cushy treatment both got even when they were nominally in prison!