Each Dawn I Die (1939)

Directed by William Keighley. Starring James Cagney, George Raft, George Bancroft, Jane Bryan, Stanley Ridges, Willard Robertson, Maxie Rosenbloom, Victor Jory, John Wray, Alan Baxter, Edward Pawley, Emma Dunn.

Prison melodrama with Cagney as an ambitious reporter investigating the crooked district attorney when he gets framed for murder and thrown in prison. There, he makes the acquaintance of a gangster (Raft) who hatches a tit-for-tat deal with him involving a prison break and clearing Cagney’s name of wrongdoing. Raft is better than usual as the cynical but altruistic inmate, but he’s still no match for Cagney’s combustible, stir crazy crusader (even on two or three occasions of overacting, he’s still electrifying). Always watchable, with some tougher-than-average scenes of prisoner abuse and the psychological effects of solitary confinement, but the picture takes too many wholly unbelievable turns in the final act (“Hey, it’s Stacey!”), glaring enough to make Raft’s earlier leap from a courtroom window seem like gritty docudrama realism. Screenplay adapted from a Jerome Odlum book.

60/100