Review: "Cry of the City" (1948)

As a big fan of the noir genre, I've often griped about how most NYC noir movies are nowhere as good as LA noir movies -- and that's still true. But recently I saw a NYC noir movie that was really good -- Cry of the City from 1948.

It concerns a professional criminal named Martin Rome who has recently been arrested for killing a cop during a robbery gone wrong. He escapes from a prison hospital and tracks down a crooked lawyer who wanted to get him to plead guilty to another crime he didn't commit (in exchange for representing him and preventing him from "getting the chair") while he also tries to get help from his family and find "his girl", the beautiful Teena. Meanwhile a cop named Candella who grew up in the same neighborhood as Rome hunts him relentlessly, his pursuit turning into a obession. The movie is set in the grimy world of post-war Little Italy and downtown Manhattan, back when it was still a working class place, where cops and hoodlums co-existed and were even related. 

It's a dark, brooding movie, a story about people trying to be more than they were born into, more than they are, the world conspiring to keep them exactly in place.

This is noir at its finest. 

Victor Mature plays Candella, the cop on a mission. He's a handsome but troubled soul, and Mature fills him with complex humanity -- you get that there's more to the man than what we see on the screen. He also has the movie's best line: "There won't be any shooting in this house so long as momma's here." Richard Conte plays Rome -- the anti-hero of this story -- and he's intense, scary, and disturbingly likeable. I honestly hadn't seen these actors in anything except for Conte -- 24 years after this movie, he'd appear as Barzini in The Godfather. This movie also marked an early appearance of the actress Shelley Winters who would go on to have a huge career.

So, if you're in the mood for a real NYC noir flick, check it out.