City of Shadows

This movie is so low-budget, and the cast generates so much goodwill, that you have to be kind to it. Plot is nothing special, but told with enough of a twist, and with enough smiles, that it deserves notice. Victor MacLaglen is marvelous as an aging thug, and Nicholas Coster makes a striking debut as a young law student. Nothing special, but it moves fast, and you'll have a bit of fun with the production values and stock footage.

Victor McLaglen is a marginal operator, about to be put out of business by the big-time crooks, when he catches a kid raiding his slot machines using slugs. He cuts a deal with the boy to do that to his competitors. Fast forward a dozen years later, and now McLaglen is the big man, and the kid, grown into John Baer, is about to graduate from law school, and already keeping McLaglen out of prison. But Baer meets Kathleen Crowley and her nice family, and decides he wants to be an honest man. McLaglen loves him, so he lets him go, and starts running into real trouble.

It's a role tailor-made for McLaglen as the big, sentimental slob of a crook, and under William Witney's efficient direction, it's a lot of fun in a stereotyped way, mostly due to McLaglen's hammy performance. With Anthony Caruso, Richard Travis and the voice of Art Gilmore.

One only has to get about five minutes into the film before realizing that it is derivative of about two-dozen other films----low-ranking gangster adopts and educates a young street hoodlum only to have his protégé turn against him.

Dan Mason (Jimmy Grohman), a twelve-year-old newsboy, is an expert at figuring all the angles; so, when Kink (billed as Kay Kuter), veteran bartender at Billy's Steak House, catches him winning a big jackpot in the battered old slot machines that belong to seedy Tim Channing (Victor McLaglen), he not only defies them to do anything about it but shows Tim how he can corner the slot-machine racket and, at the same time, put his big-racketeer competitors Tony Finetti (Anthony Caruso) and Angelo Di Bruno (Richard Reeves) out of the running.

Thusly begins a partnership between the larcenous---but big-hearted---Tim and the precocious newsboy that lasts and prospers while he is growing up. (A plot premise not new then and still being used today.) Reaching college age Dan (now John Baer)studies law, showing a greater aptitude for finding loopholes in the law than an inclination to uphold it, despite the advice of his law-school Dean (John Maxwell) and the wholesome companionship of his roommate Roy Fellows (Nicolas Coaster), whose father (Charles Meredith) is a retired judge.

But Dan meets Roy's sister Fern (Kathleen Crowley)and his family, and the sincerity and friendliness of Roy's parents and the open adoration of Fern make him begin to work on the right side of the law instead of against it. So, after graduating from law school, Dan agrees to go to work for his old friend Tim...but only if it is honest work.

Tim promises him it will be, but then Finetti and Di Bruno show up from the old days and Tim is put into a compromising position..and things aren't going just exactly as Dan planned and Tim promised...oh, you've seen it several times and can finish it from here? Thought so.

Victor McLaglen has a ball as Big Tim Channing in this forgotten, yet enjoyable, 1950's gangster movie. With all the stand-by's (Frank Ferguson as crusading D.A., Paul Maxey as crooked lawyer, Anthony Caruso as a two-bit thug), this "B" actioner delivers what you would expect, and a bit more. It probably was intended to elevate the career of its lead, John Baer. As such pretty boys go, he's not too bad, but I never heard of him again. Still, it's a good way to kill an hour and change.

Basically a reworking of the James Cagney early-1930's crime vehicle G-MEN in which he's funded by a mentoring, business-minded old gangster to become a lawyer in the big guy's pocket...

In the Cagney flick, he chooses to work for the FBI instead... and here youngster-turned-twenty-something Jack Baer gets in a relationship with full-lipped b-movie beauty Kathleen Crowley, both seeing the shady errors in endearing crime-boss Victor McLaglen's ways, far too soon...

With greedy henchman Anthony Caruso backed by muscular goon Richard Reeves, the misleadingly titled CITY OF SHADOWS... never really involving a particular city while mostly taking place in the bright shadowless daylight... could have been a walloping 1950's classic-gangster-throwback film-noir...

And while the villains mostly spout their planning-stages dialogue behind closed doors, and the couple never have to deal with flirtatious secretary June Vincent's abandoned potential, the 70-minute programmer-length potboiler (feeling rushed and edited-down from the usual 90-minute runtime) is still an effective little ride.