You're Not So Tough (1940) User Reviews

Migrant kids

[bkoganbing · 5/10 · 5 December 2015]

Just as tough and sarcastic the Dead End Kids minus Leo Gorcey are taken out of the big city and are now wild boys of the road, itinerant young people who are hobos. Now in sunny Southern California like so many migrant souls in the day they get farm work with widow Rosina Galli and her foreman Henry Armetta.

Billy Halop who had the moniker Thomas Abraham Lincoln put on him at the orphanage he was raised since he was a foundling starts to work a con whereby he pretends he's the long lost son of Galli. For the rest of the film we are on edge as to whether he will rip her off as he originally intended or actually help her fend off some of the bigger farmers angry at her because she pays better wages than they do.

Now as the Code was firmly in place I don't think you doubt what Halop and the rest of them do. You're Not So Tough is a film set firmly in the social conscience driven Thirties. It's a museum piece but an entertaining one.

The Dead End Kids On The Farm

[boblipton · 6/10 · 22 June 2020]

Fresh on the Universal lot after losing their Warner Brothers contracts, the Dead End Kids are out in sunny California. They wind up on Rosina Galli's fruit ranch. She had lost her little boy years ago, and the sheriff never had the heart to tell her he found the body. Now Billy Halop tells her how he was raised in an orphanage, and she takes it into her mind he's her long lost son. Halop enjoys the perks, her openhandedness with money, but as the weeks go by, he begins to feel guilty, especially when the other Kids see this as an opportunity to steal.

In addition, Miss Galli's generous policy towards her workers has the other farmers upset. Labor agitators are pointing to her as an example of what they can afford to pay; the local association orders her to cut her wages, and if she refuses, she won't be able to get her produce to market.

There were two continuations of the Dead End Kids. Universal had one. Meanwhile, over at Monogram, the East Side Kids, under Leo Gorcey, were making more comic movies. The two competing series would fight it out until after the war, when the survivors would come together as the Bowery Boys.

Unbelievable sappiness is like a big barrel of rotting fruit.

[mark.waltz · 3/10 · 9 April 2024]

The Italian Rosina Galli is a widow so naive and hopeful that she allows the Dead End Kids to move onto her fruit tree ranch, believing one of them (Billy Halop) to be her long lost son. The gang uses this to take advantage of her and even Halop attempts to steal from her changing his mind at the last minute because he has a heart of gold under all that big city toughness. Basically she begins to control his life, and he helps her deal with fellow fruit ranchers who want to stop her from paying a fair wage which has threatened a strike from their workers.

The character of the widow is definitely well meeting and sweet. But she reminds me of those early sound movie melodramatic grandmothers threatened in losing their drugstore or other business always weeping, and never really thinking. Yes, Galli is completely unselfish but the writers make her seem a bit too dimwitted, and it's never realistic.

Huntz Hall and the other boys (no Leo Gorcey here) are on the outside looking in and are basically the heavies, although the real villain is Harry Hayden as the rival farmer. Nan Grey is the girl that Galli wants to set her new found son up with and before they are even dating, she's talking about grandchildren. Henry Armetta as a fellow Italian is amusing but cliched. After a while I began to feel annoyed with the whole story, realizing is the same that it was being overly sentimental and unrealistic.