Review of A Criminal Is Born

This film short has a lot in common with the anti-drug and alcohol films of the era, at times reaching melodramatic heights to impart its message. The message itself is pretty clear - stay engaged with your teenage kids and know what they're doing and who they're hanging out with, or you may abruptly find out one day that they've gotten themselves into big time trouble. One of the parents in this story inadvertently strokes his son's ego by stating that the cops are idiots as he reads about his own son's crimes in the newspaper. That only seemed to encourage Jimmy (Warren McCollum) to keep at it, figuring the 'idiot cops' would never catch up with him and his gang. I say 'gang' because that's how the boys described their relationship, not in the sense of being gangsters, but as joyriding friends who got their kicks doing small time thefts, which eventually escalated into big time robberies and the killing of a shopkeeper. With one of the trio catching a bullet and dying himself, Jimmy and Rod (David Durand) face the prospect of a twenty-five-year prison sentence following a stint at a reformatory, much to the shock of their grieving parents in a lesson learned too late to affect a different outcome.