"Beery's back!" heralded the trailers for this semi-remake of MGM's The Champ (1931), which had earned star Wallace Beery his only Academy Award. Nearly two decades after the fact, Beery plays The Mighty McGurk (1947), a celebrated boxer reduced by hard times to keeping the peace in Edward Arnold's turn of the century Bowery saloon. Cameron Mitchell costars as Berry's former protégé, who has turned his back on the ring to wear the uniform of the Salvation Army. Beery's simple life gets complicated when reformer Mitchell falls for the unscrupulous Arnold's college-educated daughter, Dorothy Patrick, and by the arrival of English orphan Dean Stockwell - whom Beery takes under his wing in hopes of wringing a reward from the boy's legal guardians. One of only a dozen films helmed by veteran Hollywood assistant director John Waters (not to be confused with the man who gave us Pink Flamingos, 1972), The Mighty McGurk is entertaining blarney, cut with equal parts bravado and sentimentality. The underrated Aline MacMahon appears as Beery's pawnbroker paramour and check the background for Irish actor Joe Yule as an Ellis Island émigré; when the film opened at New York's Lowe's State Theater in the spring of 1947, the accompanying stage show was headlined by Joe Yule, Jr. - better known as Mickey Rooney.

By Richard Harland Smith