New York Confidential (1955)

Perfect cast and a good story

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Expected more

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

In the early 1950s, television coverage of the Senate Committee hearings on organised crime (chaired by Estes Kefauver) generated a huge amount of public interest and movies such as "The Enforcer" (1951) and "New York Confidential" (1955) capitalised on this brilliantly. The latter movie is essentially a low-budget, semi-documentary expose of the culture of a nationwide organisation that makes its money from murder, vice and corruption but is also in the process of blurring the lines between itself and legitimate business. In order to achieve an appearance of respectability, however, the organisation has to operate by strict rules and ensure that, as far as possible, it doesn't attract any adverse publicity.New York City crime boss Charlie Lupo (Broderick Crawford) has to take action when a mobster in his territory kills another hoodlum purely for personal reasons and so hit-man Nick Magellan (Richard Conte) is imported from Chicago. Nick is the son of one of Charlie's old friends and the two men get on well. So after Nick kills the rule-breaking mobster, Charlie keeps him on as his bodyguard and steadily promotes him to a top position in his organisation. Nick is smart, confident and very efficient and Charlie admires his coolness and the fact that he's considerably more polished than any of the other men he has working for him.Widower Charlie has three women who are important to him. His mother, who's very demanding and warns him of trouble ahead, his spoilt daughter Kathy (Anne Bancroft) who despises his line of work because it impacts badly on her ability to move in society circles and Iris (Marilyn Maxwell) who's his mistress. For some time, the organisation had been working with some corrupt politicians and lawyers to set up a highly lucrative oil-shipping contract but the whole deal suddenly falls through when a lobbyist they were relying on double-crosses them. A board meeting of the crime bosses from all of the cities where the syndicate is active follows and it's unanimously decided that the lobbyist should be eliminated for his betrayal and that Charlie should take responsibility for ensuring that the hit is carried out.Charlie appoints three of his men to assassinate the lobbyist and although they achieve their goal, they also leave clues behind and kill a cop in the process. In order to cover his tracks, Charlie assigns Nick to kill the three men. Nick succeeds in eliminating two of them but a third eludes him long enough to turn state's evidence and in so doing, threatens to expose Charlie's involvement and by extension, that of the nationwide syndicate. Predictably, the consequences of this are enormous.Richard Conte is astonishingly good as Nick in a performance that outshines everyone else in the movie and Anne Bancroft is extremely intense, feisty and contemptuous as she portrays her character's feelings about what her father does to make a living. Fast-talking Broderick Crawford successfully exudes all the toughness and power that one would expect of a crime boss of Lupo's stature but also displays the vulnerability that his character feels because of his health issues and the degree to which he's hurt by his daughter's angry condemnation of him."New York Confidential" is hard-hitting, rich in realism and provides a fascinating insight into the world of organised crime at a time when its involvement in business, politics and everyday life was extensive. The simplicity of the rules under which everyone operated were clear-cut and anyone who stepped out of line knew exactly what to expect. In this movie, Nick's character provides the clearest illustration of someone who conforms to the rules as he's unerringly loyal to the organisation, carries out all the orders given to him (regardless of his own feelings) and resists the attentions of both Kathy and Iris because of his respect for Charlie. Having been brought up as the son of a gangster, he knows better than anyone that the interests of the organisation always come first.

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.