One of my all time favorites.

Instant Favorite.

An unexpected masterpiece

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

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.

This isn't nearly as bad as it starts out to be or as it sometimes becomes. It has to overcome a couple of weaknesses that are so obvious they cry out for attention.One is the utter absence of any local color. It's all about "New York" but we only see a minute or two of the city in some stock shots under the credits. The film is studio bound and the production design lacks any imagination. All the rooms and offices are cheap and strictly functional. Sometimes the painted backdrop outside the window is presented at the wrong angle and the effect is dizzying because the perspective is askew, as in a de Chirico painting. Speaking of painting, a gang of rival hoods takes a pot shot at the Syndicate Big Wig, Charlie Lupo (Crawford), and just wing him, though the bullet goes through a painting he "paid thirty grand for." I hope it was the one with the two Degas ballerinas because I've checked Degas' ballerinas up close and his pastels are far better than mine ever were, the swine.This was also the period in which J. Edgar Hoover, President For Life of the FBI, was doing his best to convince the public that there was no such thing as a "Mafia" because he didn't want his boys to get too close to all that money. So there is no Mafia here, only "the organization" or "the syndicate." And, Crawford aside, nobody has an Italian name. They have names like Nick Magellan and Johnny Achilles and Whitey.Richard Conte is Nick Magellan and with the revelation of his character the movie picks up pace. He's brought in from Chicago, pulls off a professional hit, and soon works his way up to a position as Crawford's trusted deputy. Crawford's trust is justified. Conte's character is a complex one. He is loyal, polite, well spoken, and plays by the rules. The rules are pretty tough. The Organization always comes first. Crawford made up the rules and suffers for it, as does Conte.There isn't room to spell out the entirety of the plot. It's a crime thriller that puts Crawford, Conte, and Crawford's daughter (Bancroft) through the wringer. Crawford himself is the barking dog that he lapsed into whenever the direction was slack, as it is here. (He was much better elsewhere, as in "All The King's Men.") Conte's character is an honorable man and he plays it with restraint.Poor Anne Bancroft as the put-upon daughter is resentful and alcoholic and is burdened with some of the worst lines. "What's the matter, Nick? TAKE me! I'm THROWING myself at you!" But Nick, a heterosexual, is still a man of honor and never violates someone else's territory. He gives Marilyn Maxwell, Crawford's main squeeze, the same treatment. Man, how she would love to have Conte stay for that nightcap. But the script isn't entirely dumbed down. Maxwell is a hardened whore, yet when Crawford finds his daughter has been killed, she is there to comfort Crawford and share his grief.It's not a "film noir," a term that seems to have lost almost all meaning. It's a crime thriller that takes place mostly in daylight and with few expressionistic effects. Maybe Russell Rouse didn't have the time, the money, or the imagination to bring any poetry to the story. There is one tense scene that takes place in an elevator descending from the top floor to the lobby -- too slowly, because it's carrying three murderers who must get out of the building before the maid discovers the fresh cadaver. (The scene is lifted from 1947's "Kiss of Death".) And there's another scene in which Conte brings off a hit and we see the victim slowly twist and fall, but only his shadow.In many ways the story isn't THAT different from "The Godfather". "New York Confidential" has the family values, the code of honor, the equivalent of the Five Families, the Italian connection, the need to kill one or two of their own, and even a consigliere. But it illustrates the difference between the work of studio hacks and the work of a talented director.

A nice bridge from the gangster pictures of the 30's to the modern day mafia flick. You can see echoes of this film in GODFATHER and GOODFELLAS and others. Going inside a crime syndicate and also the private lives of the gangsters, it's a pretty satisfying drama with a lot of facets. Richard Conte is superb as a polite but cold-blooded hit-man turned consigliere, and there are also memorable performances from Anne Bancroft and the reliable heavy Mike Mazurki. Broderick Crawford is generally quite good although he does deliver a few stiff line readings. Unfortunately, the film suffers from utterly bland cinematography, and we spend so much time in well-lit rooms that it often feels like a stage production. A very good script, but the execution only provides a few exciting moments.

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.