Jacques Tourneur's They All Come Out (1939)

All in all, Tourneur's career represents a triumph of taste over force.
--Andrew Sarris

I have not written much yet about Jacques Tourneur, a director I much admire, though I have recommended his films when they have been shown on Turner Classic Movies.  Tourneur's career followed a fairly common path in its time:  shorts to B movies to A movies, ending with some strange American International films and, eventually, television.  His masterpiece is Out of the Past (1945), a terrific film noir, but he also did superb horror films (I Walked with a Zombie,1943), Westerns (Wichita, 1955) and even political films (The Fearmakers, 1959).

They All Come Out (a rather strange title, referring not to zombies or gays but to those sentenced to prison) was originally a short but was so liked by MGM boss  Louis B. Mayer that he asked Tourneur to stretch it our to feature length.  Some of the seams show but it a fairly effective piece of apprentice dated didacticism, suggesting that some criminals can be rehabilitated if they are treated well and with understanding. Star Tom Neal is a hobo on his way to California (shades of Neal's great starring role in Edgar Ulmer's Detour, 1945) who is given a ride by Rita Johnson, who introduces him to a criminal gang of bank robbers, for whom Neal becomes the driver.  The first third of the film is mostly kinetic bank jobs, with the final two-thirds about the gang members in prison, some of whom --Neal and Johnson-- respond to rehabilitation and some of whom do not.  There are effective prison locations and even officials at the beginning and the end of the film bragging about the great job they do for those who exhibit good behavior in prison.

One irony is that star Tom Neal spent six years in prison for manslaughter and died in 1972, the year after he was released, so we don't know how successfully rehabilitated he was after more than a decade of violence that led to his blacklisting.