Convicts 4 (1962) on Netflix
Approved19621h 45mBiographyCrimeDrama
John Resko wants a teddy bear for his baby daughter but has no money. The shopkeeper refuses, and the gun Resko pulls from the till fires. He is condemned to death.
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- Netflix3.3/5
- IMDb6.5/10642 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Trailer
Plot summary
At Christmas in 1931, John Resko enters a shop with no money, hoping to take home a teddy bear for his baby daughter. He asks the shopkeeper to let him pay later. The well-off man, who uses a dollar bill to clean his glasses, refuses him. Resko seizes the gun he spotted in the till and aims it; the shopkeeper lunges, and the weapon fires. A court condemns him to the electric chair at eighteen, and the governor pardons him at the last minute, commuting the sentence to life imprisonment. Life behind bars proves hard for him to adjust to.
Cast
- Dodie Stevensas Resko's Sister
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Convicts 4 (1962)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film fictionalizes the case of John Resko, who with an accomplice, Frank Mayo, killed Bronx grocer Samuel Friedberg during an attempted robbery at 885 East 167th Street on February 5, 1931, and Resko confessed to the crime.
- Both men were sentenced to death, but the jury recommended clemency for Resko, then 19 with a wife and infant daughter, and Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt commuted his sentence to life after he testified against Mayo, who was executed on July 21, 1932.
- The real John Resko served as the film's technical advisor, its prison sequences were shot at Folsom State Prison, and after filming Sammy Davis Jr. put on a show for the actual inmates.
- Resko became a noted artist while in prison and was freed shortly before Christmas 1949 by Governor Thomas E. Dewey; the film mixes fact with fiction, turning his killing of the grocer into a crime of passion.
- Although the film failed to find an audience in theaters, it was played often on late-night television and was included in the 2008 anthology 101 Forgotten Films.
