Convicted

Joe Hufford kills a powerful man's son by accident in a bar fight. The district attorney, George Knowland, wins the case and sends him down, and keeps a doubt of his own: the sentence does not fit what happened. Years later Knowland arrives as warden of the same prison and finds the man he convicted inside it. Henry Levin's 1950 film comes from Martin Flavin's 1929 play, the third time it had been filmed. The question is not innocence but the measure of justice: how the right decision can still produce the wrong outcome. Glenn Ford and Broderick Crawford face each other across it, and the prison scenes are where the film is hardest.