Die Brut des Satans

City Across the River is a 1949 film from Universal about juvenile delinquency. We are treated first to a lecture about it by newspaper columnist Drew Pearson. He appears at the beginning of the film and has a voiceover at the end.

This was Tony Curtis' first credited appearance. He played Mitch under his original billing of Anthony Curtis. He was first discovered by fans while dancing, uncredited, with Yvonne de Carlo in Criss Cross.

The story concerns a Brooklyn neighborhood gang, The Dukes. They're tough kids who take occasional jobs from goombas where they beat someone up, carry handmade guns, go to trade school and can be difficult with teachers.

On the other side is the community center, run by Stan Albert (Stephen McNally), who knows the kids and tries to get them involved in things like basketball. Frankie (Peter Fernandez) is basically a good kid who has been involved with the center, but has fallen in with the Dukes.

His hard-working parents (Thelma Ritter and Luis van Rooten) want to get out of the neighborhood. Frankie's father decides to give up his dream of a grocery store in a better area and instead use their savings to purchase a house. However, a hospital bill takes that money.

The Dukes get into big trouble with a teacher, Mr. Bannon (Robert Osterloh). He demands to see the Dukes' parents. Frankie and Benny (Al Ramsen) try later to reason with him, Benny's zip gun goes off, killing Bannon.

The cops (Jeff Corey and Al Eben) know Frankie was involved, but he won't talk.

A depressing film in a way - even though it was 70 years ago, people still work hard to attempt to better themselves, and it remains difficult. We still have bored, disenfranchised kids everywhere. Dismal.

The actors are very good. Curtis has a small part, but he makes a perfect juvenile. The rest of the gang - those mentioned, plus Joshua Shelley, Richard Jaeckel, Mickey Knox, and Joe Turkel.

The production values aren't as high as other films focusing on juveniles, but the realistic, gritty presentation is right for the subject matter. Maxwell Shane did an effective directing job. Someone commented parts of the area looked like postwar Berlin - true.

"City Across the River" is a film about a gang of young punks who are being pulled towards lives of crime by a two-bit hood, Gaggsy. At the same time, a do-gooder, Stan Albert (Stephen McNally), is trying to get through to them and point them towards becoming decent citizens. Of the young punks, the story centers mostly on Frank Cusack....and Frank and his pal end up getting in some very, very serious trouble!

During this era, there were a lot of exploitation films about 'youth gone wild', though I wouldn't place "City Across the River" in this category. It's not so much exploitation but more like a Dead End Kids movie combined with film noir. Overall, a decent picture...though the preachy prologue and epilogue was NOT necessary in the least.

By the way, if you watch the film look for young Tony Curtis and Richard Jaekel as two of the hoodlums in the gang.

I lived in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, NY and saw "City Across the River" after reading "The Amboy Dukes" when I was 13 years old, a very impressionable age. Tony Curtis was the rage and all the boys started combing their hair with the "Curtis look." At the time it seemed as if all of my contemporaries read the book, much like "God's Little Acre." The former because it described our lives in Brooklyn and the latter because of the "sexual" passages contained therein. It was a time of pegged pants, "ducks-ass" hairdos ala Curtis, stick and punch ball, athletic clubs, going to the 12 cent movies Saturdays at 12 o'clock to see a double feature, cartoons, the "chapter" (weekly serial), not getting caught with your feet on the tops of seats in front by the omnipresent white dressed matron, street gangs, zip guns and our beloved Brooklyn Dodgers. Immediately after seeing the movie, "the neighborhood" boys, from ages 13 to 16, vicariously adopted the nicknames of the characters in the movie according to their own personalities. As I recall, names were Crazy Shack, Bull Benson, etc. One of the things that sticks in my mind was the way the neighborhood kids, in order to show their machismo as depicted in the movie, would gather on street corners and lift the metal bus stop stands as dumb bell weights, with one arm and then the other. It was a great time and television was only seen if you looked in the window of the bar and grill around the corner on Flatbush Avenue and Winthrop Street.

Irving Schulman's novel The Amboy Dukes was written and being read around the time I was born. For those of you who don't know, Amboy Street is a street in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn where the street gang the Dukes hang out.

It's almost kind of quaint, but sadly so in that these kids spend time in shop class making zip guns. Very soon all kinds of weaponry would be available for street gangs right down to today.

And how things have changed. Back then one aspired like Luis Van Rooten and Thelma Ritter to move to a place like Canarsie. Now no one aspires to move to Canarsie.

Van Rooten and Ritter are the parents of Peter Fernandez and Sharon McManus and Fernandez is a member of the Amboy Dukes. Social worker Stephen McNally has some hopes of reaching him. But when he and pal Al Ramsen shoot shop teacher Robert Osterloh with one of those make it yourself weapons they become beyond the reach of social workers. And detective Jeff Corey suspects them from the beginning.

Fernandez and Ramsen had brief careers, but other members of the Dukes did a lot better. Richard Jaeckel certainly had a career of note already and Mickey Knox probably would have, but for the blacklist. And Tony Curtis stands far out in front of all of them. It was clear he was going to be star, in fact the film would have been better had he been in the lead instead of Fernandez.

City Across The River is a somewhat quaint look at Brooklyn when I was only two years old. According to Tony Curtis's memoirs some establishing shots were done there, but the cast filmed in Hollywood. It's one of the first films to deal with post war juvenile delinquency, even before West Side Story. Dated, but it holds up well.

There was a boatload of talent in this film; but not from the leads or even supporting actors, except for the incomparable Thelma Ritter. Richard Jaekel went on to a fine career in many roles. But we find a little gem for Anthony Curtis, who is Tony Curtis, of course. He shows little of the promise of his fine later acting career. but certainly fits in Brooklyn. The film could without the corny commentary by the overblown newspaper icon. On its own merit and without voiceover, the film is good enough by itself. So stop making guns in shop, kids.