Cry of the City

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Cry of the City

Directed by	Robert Siodmak
Produced by	Sol C. Siegel
Written by	Henry Edward Helseth (novel The Chair for Martin Rome) Richard Murphy Ben Hecht (uncredited)
Starring	Victor Mature, Richard Conte, Fred Clark, Shelley Winters
Music by	Alfred Newman
Cinematography	Lloyd Ahern
Distributed by	Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.
Release date(s)	September 29, 1948 (U.S. release)
Running time	95 min.
Language	English
IMDb profile

Cry of the City is a 1948 black-and-white film noir directed by Robert Siodmak based on the novel by Henry Edward Helseth, "The Chair for Martin Rome." Veteran film noir-writer Ben Hecht worked on the film's script, but is not credited. The film was shot partly on location in New York City.

1 Plot
2 Critical reaction
3 Main cast
4 External links
5 References

[edit] Plot

Victor Mature and Richard Conte play men who both grew up in the same tough inner-city neighborhood (New York's Little Italy). One became a cop; the other a ruthless, intelligent killer. Conte plays the wounded gangster on the run, and Mature the cop who is after him.

[edit] Critical reaction

The film receives mostly critial praise by reviewers and film fans. Time Out Film Guide praises the realistic look and feel of the city:

"Rarely has the cruel, lived-in squalor of the city been presented in such telling detail, both in the vivid portrayal of ghetto life and in the astonishing parade of corruption uncovered in the night (a slug-like shyster; a monstrous, sadistic masseuse; a sleazy refugee abortionist, etc)"

Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton writing in A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-1953 comments that director Siodmak had better noir efforts but the film does have one lasting image:

"Siodmak will rediscover neither the brilliance of The Killers nor the "finish" of Criss Cross in the over-rushed, too uneven, Cry of the City: for all that, one will remember the figure of a forever famished masseuse, a real "phallic woman" who, with a flick of the wrists, has a "tough guy" at her mercy."