Very Cool!!!

Instant Favorite.

Blistering performances.

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

New York Confidential – 1955Broderick Crawford, Richard Conte, Anne Bancroft, Onslow Stevens, J.Carrol Naish headline this violent film noir from 1955.Crawford is a New York mob bigwig who has moved the syndicate into being more like a business. He prefers to keep the violence to a minimum if possible. It draws too much attention from the media and the Police. Crawford though, has no problem putting out contracts on people who step out of line.There has been a mob killing done without an OK from the top. Two civilians were caught in the hit as well, and the Police pressure is on. Crawford calls up his boy in charge of hits, Mike Mazurki. He has Mazurki call in a hitter from Chicago to do the job. Richard Conte is the up and comer brought in to take care of business.Conte does the job, neat and clean, which impresses Crawford, who takes him in to his mob. Crawford had been a friend of Conte's father in the old days. Conte quickly moves up the ladder and into Crawford's inner circle.Besides business, complicating Crawford's life is his daughter, Anne Bancroft. Bancroft is a girl who likes the booze and is somewhat of a spoilt brat. She also hates how people treat her once they discover who her father is.Conte becomes Crawford's fixer of problems because he is so smooth and efficient at his job. He continues to move up in the organization as others are moved out. Conte is pleased with the life, flash cars, 200 dollar suits and plenty of night life.Of course things go bad when a Federal Government type on the take, William Forest, screws up a multi-million dollar deal for the mob. The Mob bosses have a vote and decide to bump Forest off. Mike Mazurki, William Phillips and Henry Kulky draw the hit.The hit goes bad and a cop is killed during the getaway. The media play up the cop's death and a big investigation is started. Crawford sends Conte to clean up the mess by eliminating the three hitters. He manages to dispose of Kulky and Phillips, but Mazurki gets away.Mazurki decides the only way to stay alive is to turn State's evidence. He offers to exchange info on his bosses for protection and a deal. The Government uses this to go after Crawford, who then goes into hiding.The Mob bosses have another vote and decide that Crawford has to go in order to take the Police pressure off. Conte is the man sent out to take care of the problem, which he does. What Conte does not know is that the Mob has also decided he knows too much as well. They have sent a man to eliminate Conte after Crawford is dealt with by Conte.The first 35 minutes is real cracker-jack noir. Then it stumbles a bit in the middle before picking up steam again at the end. The look of the film is not what it could have been. A better director of photography would have helped. Eddie Fitzgerald was best known for being the d of p on the long running LASSIE television series. But, as a whole, it is an entertaining 87 minute fun ride.

A shocking mid-town assassination results in two innocent bystanders being killed and what follows threatens to blow the lid off the ruthless big business of the organized crime world that reaches into the pockets of Washington D.C. politicians. The plot surrounds the head of one of the syndicate (Broderick Crawford) and his family life which includes his trampy mistress Marilyn Maxwell, aging mother Celia Lovsky and troubled daughter Anne Bancroft. She loves her father enormously but hates the person he is and goes into hiding to escape her legacy. Hit-man Richard Conte is assigned to find her, tame her and bring her home, but this likable killer, sympathetic to her plight, must betray boss Crawford in order to do it, choosing to romance her in hiding.As the violence of the underworld increases, so does the threat of the downfall to this Corleone like dynasty. We have learned through "Scarface" and "The Godfather" that organized crime families have a code of honor within their clans and that they are just as normal as other families are. As Conte explains to Bancroft, "the waiter rips off the boss just as fast as the boss rips off the government", so the end justifies the means and all in a day's work. (He forgets to include, "Just don't get caught.") Yet, not every killer or crook is all black or white, so the fact that these characters have two sides to them is supposed to make them o.k.It's hard to dislike a family man like Crawford (very loyal to his worried mama), but you just know that the downfall he faces will involve traitorous activity. There's an intense scene of two killers making their escape down a hotel elevator after taking care of one of the traitors that gets more and more crowded with each passing floor. Detectives are nearing the hotel and the expression on the killers' faces just gets more and more nervous.Bancroft explodes in a scene with Conte after her identity has been discovered which most of her previous films lacked. You know that inside this stage trained beauty is a star waiting to emerge and it would take just the right part to turn her from "B" film actress with much stage training into the legend of stage and screen she would become in later years. The narration by Ralph Clanton is typical of "Naked City" stories and by 1955, a film noir cliché of its own. One point of interest is the presence of pin-up girl and "Phoenix City Story" actress Meg Myles in a party sequence where her fantastic figure is given more attention than she is lines.

NEW YORK CONFIDENTIAL is a perplexing film noir entry. Among its many merits is the astonishing cast: Broderick Crawford (who spits out his dialogue in Howard Hawks-rapidity as if he were on amphetamines), Anne Bancroft (astonishing) and the always reliable Richard Conte. But it never shakes the feeling of being two films in one, sitting uneasily side by side: a stern "semi-documentary" expose of the "syndicate" on one hand, and a bleak and brutal pre-Godfather mafia family saga on the other.As such, it is wildly and tragically uneven. The leads all turn in brilliant performances, but the screenplay has all the earmarks of a committee job; fascinating ideas and characterizations butt up against terribly overwrought clichés. The main cast is on fire with weighty dialogue, but the supporting cast flounders about as if they were in the most pedestrian B-noir instead of a star-driven studio picture. For the most part, the design is static and lifeless, shot with little flair by Eddie Fitzgerald. Director and co-writer Russell Rouse's previous noir entry was the chancy THE THIEF, also an uneven experiment.But the film has its scenes of incredible power, usually those revolving around Conte, as a cold and calculating hit-man for hire, and Bancroft, as the put-upon mobster's daughter who can't crawl out from behind dad's shadow; Conte dispatching with "hits", his gunshots creepily muffled by a silencer; Crawford's repeated near-meltdowns; murderous planning done completely straight in a corporate boardroom, just big business as usual.A puzzler of a film, leaving the viewer to wonder what could have been, had it been shot by John Alton and penned by, say, Dalton Trumbo. Still, it's an extremely valuable entry in the film noir canon, strangely almost impossible to see.

In Russell Rouse's New York Confidential, Broderick Crawford plays a darker extension of his Harry Brock character in Born Yesterday. Brock was a corrupt businessman, a wheeler-dealer with senators in his pocket, but the movie (a comedy, after all) never went so far as to label him a mobster, much less a killer. But five years later, in the wake of the televised Kefauver hearings which brought the scope of organized crime to a rapt public, Crawford has become a cog in a vast `syndicate' or `cartel' - an important cog in its Manhattan headquarters, yes, but only one piece of its unstoppable machinery.When one of his vassals stages an unauthorized hit, Crawford calls in some talent from Chicago (Richard Conte) to enforce discipline. The widowed Crawford warms to Conte as the son he never had, though he does have a handful of a rebellious daughter (Ann Bancroft) as well as a high-maintenance mistress with a platinum chignon (Marilyn Maxwell). Maxwell has eyes for Conte, but his eyes stay affixed on the unstable, hard-drinking Bancroft, who wants nothing to do with her father's business - or with any of his minions.The triangulated romance, however, takes second place to the mob's tangled business interests. When a recalcitrant lobbyist scuttles a scheme to profit from government shipping contracts, he's ordered killed. In the movie's best orchestrated sequence, torpedo Mike Mazurki accomplishes the hit but botches his escape from a hotel; wounded, he decides to flip and sing.With the big heat now on, the executive board decides Crawford must take the fall; he, however, decides to join Mazurki in singing a duet. So the board contracts Conte to eliminate the now dangerous Crawford....The gangster movies of the early 'thirties endure as character studies of flamboyant but flawed figures played by the likes of Edward G. Robinson, Jimmy Cagney and Paul Muni. This spats-and-tommyguns genre, however, fell out of favor in the 'forties (given global upheaval, bootleggers became small fry). When mob pictures reemerged in the 1950s, their difference in tone was palpable. From 711 Ocean Drive in 1950 to Phil Karlson's 1957 The Brothers Rico (also starring Conte), crime had become corporate, with formalized hierarchies, far-flung interests, and strict, if ruthless, rules for doing business. That's the thread that runs through New York Confidential: that no there's no individual who's indispensable, that the survival of the organization remains paramount.