just watch it!

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

I am only giving this movie a 1 for the great cast, though I can't imagine what any of them were thinking. This movie was horrible

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

Peter Falk is Abe Reles, a small time gangster turned notorious hitman in this fact-based crime story about the East-coast syndicate and its affiliate "Murder, Inc.", a loosely organised group of killers for hire in the early 1930's. Most of the characters are historic, and the story revolves around attempts to indict mob boss 'Lepke' Buchalter (David J. Stewart) despite disappearing witnesses and corrupt cops. Stuart Whitman plays a singer indebted to Reles who gets pressured into setting up one of the victims and May Britt his lounge act wife, both of whom end up 'knowing too much'. Falk is very good as the quick tempered, street-smart killer (similar to roles played by Joe Pesci decades later) and the rest of the cast is fine albeit in not particularly challenging roles. The films suffers a bit by resembling a late 1950's TV crime show ("Dragnet" (1951) comes to mind), partly because of the occasionally expository voice-overs, partly because of the music, which was scored by Frank DeVol, remembered for many 1960's and 1970's TV themes, and partly because of a number of anachronisms (commented on elsewhere). Despite these minor weaknesses, the film is a good, tough, crime melodrama about an interesting time in the history of organised crime.

I love the urban-crime films of the '40s- early '60s. They're distinguishable from Noir in that while they focus on the seedy side of urban American existence, they do so without focusing on personal subjects- protagonists or anti-heroes. (The most famous example would be Dassin's Naked City.) This movie stands out within this largely forgotten Hollywood genre. It does not even have a collective protagonist, like most such films, such as a police force. Indeed, the only action that brings any emotional catharsis occurs off-screen, and one cannot conclusively identify its perpetrator. Society is just violent, and sometimes we identify and approve of some of its brutalities more than others.

I remember watching this movie on TV with my father in the mid-60s when I was about 10 years old.When Peter Falk was on the screen, my father said that when he was about my age (in the early 1930s), he used to set pins in a bowling alley in Brooklyn, and the real Abe Reles bowled there nearly every day.I recall what a mad dog that Falk portrayed and how it chilled me that my dad set pins for him.I will be on the lookout for this movie again, so I can piece it all back together again.

A young married couple in 1930s New York becomes dangerously involved with the mob. It gets off to an interesting start, but the script is unfocused, with the narrative rambling all over the place and going on much too long. The presentation is gritty but rather sloppy. Although it does not start with a narrator, one awkwardly pops up about a third of the way through and sporadically thereafter. Whitman is bland. Britt is blond. The only reason for watching is the impressive debut performance of Falk as a vicious hit-man for the mob. This is also the feature film debut of director Rosenberg, who achieved his greatest success with "Cool Hand Luke" a few years later.