An excellently acted social drama about a kid who makes a pathetic effort to escape the drudgery of his home and work-weary parents and winds up a hunted criminal. Frankie steals a harmonica, is sent to reform school, grows up to be Wallace Ford, steals automobiles, becomes involved in a murder...and escapes prison in order to return to the small town where it all started. Sixteen years before Rebel Without a Cause, the film was not appreciated by the press, but it was obviously a project close to the heart of William K. Howard, who wrote the original story and produced the film, in addition to directing it. The New York Times' pan gets the point all right: “It is the most arrant poppycock, predicated on the conception of the law as an instrument of persecution and governed by...fatalism. Mr. Howard's social enemy never had a chance...a gray figure against a gray philosophy.”