I Was Framed

1942
5.4| 1h1m| en
Details

A reporter runs from charges by a corrupt politician only to face them years later.

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Reviews

Sexyloutak Absolutely the worst movie.
Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!
Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.
Rexanne It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny
blanche-2 As someone mentioned, this is supposedly a remake of Dust Be My Destiny which starred John Garfield. I don't know, since I haven't seen Dust, but if Warner Brothers remade The Maltese Falcon twice (actually the famous Maltese Falcon was the third film), they could certainly have remade Dust Be My Destiny. They remade just about everything else.Tod Andrews, who had a prolific TV career later, plays Ken Marshall, a reporter who discovers political corruption. If it comes out, it will ruin one candidate's campaign for governor.Ken is rendered unconscious, with booze poured all over him, and then placed in the driver's seat of a car that's sent down the highway. After an accident kills three people, Ken goes to prison. He is able to escape, however, winds up in another town, and builds a new life for himself, even getting a reporter job under another name. Then one day, an old cellmate shows up and blackmails him.This is an okay film with the big star being Regis Toomey. Someone mentioned that the wife didn't look pregnant up to the moment she gave birth. Back then, all a woman did was faint, and you were supposed to know she was pregnant. I think the censors didn't allow pregnancy to be shown, because if you look at movies like The Great Lie, the pregnant person never looked pregnant. As Lucille Ball said, "Today you can not only see that a woman is pregnant, but how she got that way."
MartinHafer According to IMDb, "I Was Framed" is a remake of the 1939 John Garfield films "Dust Be My Destiny". However, if you read the summary of the Garfield film, it pretty has nothing to do with "I Was Framed". I also saw the Garfield film and although a bit of the plot is the same, I cannot see that one is a remake of the other at all. However, for the life of me, I KNOW that "I Was Framed" is a remake (or some film is a remake of it), as I recognized so much of the film--especially the scene where the reporter is set up for a drunk driving arrest. I KNOW I've seen it...but what film?! If you know, let me know--I just know is it NOT "Dust Be My Destiny".The film is about a reporter who doggedly pursues criminals who are high officials. However, these folks are very powerful and very dangerous and Ken (Tod Andrews) is bound to get the worst of it. Yet he continues his one-man crusade until eventually the mob IS able to get him out of the way by framing him for a crime and getting him sent to jail. He makes his escape midway through the movie--and at this point the film fizzles. Instead of quickly working to prove his innocence, most of the rest of the film is a dull account of he and his wife hiding from the law...only to find out in the end that the cops caught the real criminal behind the drunk driving setup some time ago--but they couldn't find Ken to tell him until then! Huh?!The bottom line is that the film has some very good elements and is slick--since it's a B-movie from Warner Brothers. But it also is unsatisfying and the plot seems to meander--like it needs to be rewritten. Worth skipping but not terrible either.
ksf-2 Regis Toomey as "Bob", the newspaper editor, is the biggest name in this 1942 shortie. One of his reporters, Ken Marshall (Michael Ames aka Tod Andrews) gets a good photo of some shenanigans taking place, but the local mobsters catch him, destroy the photo, and try to destroy him and his career. The script and the acting are pretty cardboard and ordinary. The local cops are all on the take, so our hero can't get any help from them. It looks like Andrews did mostly television appearances. The wife, played by Julie Bishop, worked with all the biggies in numerous war-time films and westerns. Aldrich Bowker is the kindly old doctor who helps them out. Keep an eye out for Sam McDaniel as Doc Brown's servant. They gave him some of the best lines. The film devotes a whole lot of time to the couple's little daughter "Penny" (Patti Hale), and even has her sing a song. Turner Classics showed this at 3 am, which probably explains why, as of March 2009, there are only 25 votes. It's an okay story, written by Jerome Odlum, but the ending is a little too abrupt, almost as if the original ending were skipped for budget reasons. The U.S. HAD just entered the war...
Bacardi1 This COULD have been a nice tight - if poorly acted - little Grade B/C film noir piece if someone had had the brains not to devote a solid 20-30 minutes to Patty Hale, whose poetry/song/supposed-light-comedy stints brought me to the point of nausea. This entire film looks to be nothing more than a vehicle for her. How very very sad.I also found it unexpectedly funny re: the wife having her baby, although she was slim as a green bean in all her immediate before birth shots. I can only guess that it may have had something to do with the censors at that time.But still - nothing ruins this little flick more than little Patty Hale.