AllMovie

At 62 minutes in running time, and with lots of room for comic relief vignettes and portrayals, even as it tells a story of murder, suicide, espionage, and sabotage, Let's Get Tough! is brisk entertainment. It contains myriad characterizations that reflect some of the ethnicity, and script elements that do recall the texture of life in New York's poorer neighborhoods on the eve of World War II, particularly as embodied by Glimpy (Huntz Hall) and his long-suffering mother, and Robert Armstrong's brusk yet friendly portrayal of the veteran police officer. Even more important, it's briskly entertaining and has a message that's relevant 60 years later, as the United States faces a new national emergency, a war overseas, and the aftermath of another Pearl Harbor-type sneak attack. The first half of the movie captures the basic feelings of patriotism that motivated millions of people in the days after Pearl Harbor, as well as some of the changing racial sensibilities of the time -- Sammy "Sunshine" Morrison's Scruno, the black member of the East Side Kids, is treated with far more dignity and care than he would have been just a couple of years earlier. Additionally, the gang's attempted assault on Kino, whom they erroneously believe to be Japanese, is depicted as intrinsically wrong even if he were Japanese (which, as they discover, he is not). The film's messages about race and national heritage are somewhat mixed; the gang discovers that people who appear to be Japanese, or of Japanese ancestry, may well not be, and could even be friends, allies, and heroes. They also learn that as unfriendly as one group of Asians (the Japanese) might be, there are others (the Chinese) who are our allies; but there is no German-American character to balance the presence of Fritz Heinbach (Gabriel Dell) and his father (Sam Bernard) as spies and saboteurs.