Director John Ford's fourth full-fledged talkie, Born Reckless, premiered on May 11, 1930. In these early days of talking pictures, moviemakers, including Ford, were still figuring the new system out, and many pictures were lacking in energy and fluidity. Biographer Scott Eyman has described Ford's previous film, Men Without Women (1930), as "a patchy early talkie," but he called Born Reckless "considerably better, a giddy, energetic minor gem... one of the few Ford films of this period that's brisk and unexpected enough to hold a modern audience's interest."

The script by Dudley Nichols, drawn from a novel by Donald Henderson Clarke, is a gangster story centering around Louis Beretti, an Italian-American thief played by Edmund Lowe. After he's arrested, he is sent not to prison but into the Army and off to fight in World War I. He returns as a war hero to New York, where he opens a speakeasy but stays in the orbit of his old criminal gang, leading to murder and kidnapping.

Reviews for this atmospheric crime melodrama were mixed. Variety noted the film had originally been intended for Paul Muni (which would have made this, not 1932's Scarface, Muni's first gangster role), and the trade paper didn't find Lowe terribly convincing in his place: "It's an open question if Edmund Lowe isn't miscast. Certainly he doesn't look like an Italian gangster-bootlegger. He does well enough but his name rather than his performance will be the chief box office asset of the film." Variety also criticized Born Reckless for a "complete absence of love interest" and for a "mechanical" tone, but singled out supporting player Warren Hymer as the most dynamic and burly of the story's gangsters. The New York Times, on the other hand, deemed the picture "thoroughly entertaining... Blessed with clever acting, keen humor, and a minimum of stereotyped stuff."

Ford himself was not very fond of the film. He later told Peter Bogdanovich: "it wasn't a good story... and in the middle of the picture they go off to war, so we put in a comedy baseball game in France. I was interested in that."

Film scholar William K. Everson indicated that the movie may have originally been intended for director Raoul Walsh, whose sensibility seems more attuned to this type of story. The stiff dialogue scenes were staged by Ford's friend Andy Andrew Bennison.

Men Without Women and Born Reckless were also the first two Ford films on which Dudley Nichols worked as screenwriter. He would become a key collaborator with Ford, working on 14 Ford features in all, including the landmark Stagecoach (1939).

By Jeremy Arnold

SOURCES:
Peter Bogdanovich, John Ford
Scott Eyman, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford