Excellent, a Must See

Crappy film

The first must-see film of the year.

It is interesting even when nothing much happens, which is for most of its 3-hour running time. Read full review

There's always something standing in the way of honesty, and for Dennis O'Keefe, it's right in his back yard in the form of Pat O'Brien, the old family friend who becomes his greatest enemy. O'Brien wants to take back the presidency of the automobile union, vowing to eventually take over every union in every industry in every city. Nothing will stand in his way, and his naive family (including daughter Margaret Field, O'Keefe's ex- girlfriend) believes him to be framed. But son Mark Damon begins to suspect the truth, increasing violence and the animosity between the two Mr. O's.A family can fall like a house of cards, and in the case of this crime drama with noir aspects, it's fascinating to watch build and mesmerizing to watch fall. Tina Carver us very good as "the bad girl" who becomes involved with both O'Brien and Damon, a true 12:00 girl in a 9:00 town who would visit a 12:00 town and want to be up until 3. As gritty as many of the great crime dramas of the golden age, it uses the camera in very creative ways, allowing it to follow certain characters around in ways to where you realize how tight the rope it is around them. In fact, if I had to say who the real star of this film is, I would single it down to the cameraman. Margaret Field, who is the mother of a certain two time Oscar winning actress named Sally is excellent. She acts with her eyes most convincingly as she tries to deny to herself the truth about O'Brien. If there is one minor flaw, it's the little detail of O'Keefe being young enough to be O'Brien's son. Otherwise, he's excellent, and O'Brien subtle in his ruthlessness, making me glad that they cast him, not Broderick Crawford. For a low budget production produced by Sam Katz man, I would have to describe this one as top notch.

A couple of Irish film stars, Pat O'Brien and Dennis O'Keefe star in Inside Detroit, a city not known for being the location of too many films. The Robocop films and the Mark Wahlberg film Four Brothers are the only other ones that come to mind.Detroit may be still the most heavily unionized city in the continental United States due to the automobile industry. In fact the line between the United Auto Workers and the Democratic Party of Michigan is all, but erased. At the time that Inside Detroit was filmed, over half of the workers in the USA were unionized as opposed to less than 25% today. It was a different world.Racketeers moving in on unions is an old story. In New York City it was the garment industry, in Detroit its automobiles.When a bomb goes off in a union hall killing Dennis O'Keefe's brother, he springs into action. He knows the man responsible is Pat O'Brien and the rest of the film is dealing with how to bring him down.For one of the few times in his career O'Brien is a bad guy. A seemingly respectable married man, wife and two kids, Katharine Warren and Mark Damon and Margaret Field, he's also got one hush/hush mistress on the side in vice madam Tina Carver. Without saying what happens, it's on the family front that O'Keefe works to bring O'Brien down.The film is competently made with some nice shots of Detroit in the prosperous Fifties. O'Keefe's character as hero is good, but fairly one dimensional. My guess is that if you're willing to accept Pat O'Brien as an adulterous villain, you will like Inside Detroit.

John Cameron Swayze, the prominent TV newscaster from the early 1950s, ushers us in and out of this peek into mob infiltration of the trade unions. The mid-20th-century powerhouse cities like Detroit and Cleveland and Pittsburgh, now buckles on the rustbelt, would seem ideal settings for the gritty stories of the noir cycle, but precious few were set there; for both economic and esthetic reasons, coastal corruption was preferred.A cache of nitroglycerine jammed into a pinball machine at a union local, just two days before Christmas, sends flames into the sky and Dennis O'Keefe's brother to kingdom come. He knows the conflagration was the work of mobster Pat O'Brien, just released from a spell in prison but determined nonetheless to extend his empire into the auto trades. O'Brien's doting wife and his two grown kids (hothead Mark Damon and nice girl Margaret Field) are in denial about dad's brutal career and in ignorance of his involvement with a flashy entrepreneuse in the world of vice (Tina Carver). Until Damon, drunk but determined to defend his family's honor, breaks in O'Keefe's apartment and tries to kill him. (When O'Keefe roughs up his assailant, his police bodyguard stops him by warning, `You're bending his jacket!'). The rest of the movie is a pretty tight, and violent, cat-and-mouse game between O'Keefe and O'Brien – a good, old-fashioned Irish vendetta. In an Oedipal twist, Damon falls prey to Carver's lures; Field, hospitalized after a car crash, starts to see that her dad may not be the grand old blarney-bag he pretends to be. But the key to stopping O'Brien proves to be hard-case Carver....Coming late in the post-war crime-movie cycle, Inside Detroit ends up being more a civic-minded, law-and-order homily than a morally ambiguous drama. But its casting of veterans O'Brien and O'Keefe (only nine years his junior, but playing much younger), coupled with brisk pacing and a decent story, mark it as a movie that oughtn't to have been so neglected. After all, it's Motor City's only moment in the dark sun of the noir cycle.