Admirable film.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

The acting in this movie is really good.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

"Port of New York" is the sort of film noir picture I like. It's tough, violent and very exciting...and it does this with a small budget and mostly no-name actors. The only 'big' actor is Yul Brynner but this was his first film and he was hardly a star.The film begins in a semi-documentary style--with a narrator and film footage of a drug dealer being murdered and the discovery of a box of pharmaceuticals that is instead filled with sand. Federal agents get involved and the trail eventually leads to a very tough criminal boss (Brynner) who doesn't mind leaving a long trail of dead bodies.What I loved about the film was how heartless it was. Folks are murdered in cold blood--nothing pretty about this. Brutal and tough...as well as well written and exciting throughout. Despite its being a cheap film there is nothing second-rate about it!

Good gritty docu-drama of the procedural sort made popular by The Naked City (1948). Here we follow a Customs agent (Rober) and a Treasury agent (Brady) as they track down a gang of narcotics smugglers headed by a hirsute Yul Brynner in his first film. Unlike most docu- dramas of the period, this one is not overly diverted by procedure. Instead, the drama plays out in pretty tense fashion. Happily, the rather complex storyline is fashioned smoothly by director Benedek, despite the many segues. Then too, the live shots of New York are especially revealing to a non-New Yorker like myself, even if they are decades old.The faces in the movie also furnish a boost. There're the three gimlet-eyed hard cases (Challee, Stevens, Kellogg), the exotic looking Brynner, and the two meek-looking fall-guys (Blake, Carter), while Rober and Brady are appropriately clean-cut and strong-jawed. Brynner, of course, is particularly notable for his effortless accent and Euro-Asian appearance. The latter seems appropriate for a time when the Cold War was heating up. Thus Hollywood's lauding law enforcement at a tense time comes as no surprise.Except for Brynner and a couple jarring scenes as when Brynner turns on the disloyal Stevens, there's nothing particularly memorable here. Just solid entertainment done in highly competent fashion.

This effective noirish crime drama was Yul Brynner's film debut in which he demonstrates star quality as a debonair, brutal crime boss engaged in drug trafficking. Brynner was born in Vladivostok and his oriental features and full head of wavy hair (!) are perfectly suited to this role. In particular, his facial expressions and body language when he gets busted are superbly acted and well worth watching. Scott Brady and Richard Rober deliver generally good performances as federal agents whose goal is to track down a shipment of narcotics. Although they are portrayed as heroes, neither has star quality and their acting is occasionally hammy. The rest of the cast plays a convincing ensemble of feds, thugs, dealers, and dames.The direction and cinematography are excellent with some beautifully composed classic noir scenes where Brady and Rober explore a dark warehouse. The plot is predictable without major twists or sharp dialog, although the stentorian narrator gives the movie an interesting fascist undertone as war-on-drugs propaganda. The print (Classic Film Noir, Volume 2) is quite good although the sound track is scratchy. Despite its flaws, this is a well-crafted fast-paced minor film noir worth adding to your collection.

Sporting a head of dark, wavy hair that paradoxically emphasizes his Mongol heritage, Yul Brynner plays a debonair drug runner bringing heroin into the U.S. (We know he's a monster from the 78s of dissonant, avant-garde piano music -- Prokofiev? Shostakovich? -- he's forever playing.) When a bribed purser from a luxury liner surfaces in New York harbor with his throat slit, Brynner's fiancee/accomplice (K.T. Stevens) starts running scared and meets up with a narcotics agent (Scott Brady). Bad mistake, which Brynner swiftly and coldly corrects. The investigation heats up both on shore and on water, taking a creepy, and unexpectedly Bohemian, turn toward a cabaret emcee called Dolly (Arthur Blake) who cracks jokes and does Charles Laughton impressions with a monkey on his back. His mistakes, too, prove unpleasantly fatal. Moving closer to the heart of this particular darkness, Brady poses as someone in the drug racket, and comes close to bringing it off.... Even though, despite Russian-born Brynner's playing the villain, there's not a whisper of Soviet conspiracy in Port of New York, it eerily foreshadows both the black-and-white brutality and the smug self-righteousness of the Red Scare cycle. (In the minds of the public and elected officials, during this springtime of McCarthyism, narcotics and Communism were pretty much the same thing.) Though it lacks the ambiguity of fully developed characterizations, the movie succeeds fairly well on its own, straightforward terms -- especially in turning an over-romanticized New York into the raffish port city it essentially is, or was.