Chicago Confidential

The "Confidential" part was meant to piggy-back on the popular appeal of the lurid magazine of the same name, while the labor racketeering theme tied in with headline Congressional investigations of the day. However, despite the A-grade B-movie cast and some good script ideas, the movie plods along for some 73 minutes. It's a cheap-jack production all the way. What's needed to off-set the poor production values is some imagination, especially from uninspired director Sidney Salkow. A few daylight location shots, for example, would have helped relieve the succession of dreary studio sets. A stylish helmsman like Anthony Mann might have done something with the thick-ear material, but Salkow treats it as just another pay-day exercise. Too bad that Brian Keith's typical low-key style doesn't work here, coming across as merely wooden and lethargic. At the same time, cult figure Elisha Cook Jr. goes over the top as a wild-eyed drunk. Clearly, Salkow is no actor's director. But, you've got to hand it to that saucy little number Beverly Garland who treats her role with characteristic verve and dedication. Too bad, she wasn't in charge. My advice-- skip it, unless you're into ridiculous bar-girls who do nothing else but knock back whiskeys in typical strait-jacketed 50's fashion.

The film shows the evils of unions, but it's no "On the Waterfront". It's more like a TV movie, probably because the film's director, Sydney Salkow, was busy making TV crime and western films at the time.

Dick Foran (the singing cowboy from the 30s) plays an honest Union President, and sexy Beverly Garland plays his girlfriend. Brian Keith gets top billing as an ambitious DA (this is his first starring role in a film) and there are plenty of competent character actors including Elisha Cook Jr. (the "gunsill" from Maltese Falcon), John Hamilton (Perry White from TV's Superman) and big Douglas Kennedy ("Steve Donovan, Western Marshall").

This isn't a terrible film, but when you think about what else came out in 1957 - "Bridge on the River Kwai", "Sayonara", "Three Faces of Eve", "Pal Joey", "Funny Face", "Witness for the Prosecution" - it's clearly weak.

One of several late-noirs about Union corruption, for a basic seventy-five-minute programmer, CHICAGO CONFIDENTIAL has just about everything, from murderous thugs to their sophisticated bosses to courtroom drama involving a wrong man to all heavies eventually being hunted down, Brian Keith stars as a lawyer fighting to get wrongly-accused union boss Dick Foran off the hook from an ON THE WATERFRONT style rudimentary stool-pigeon murder (care-of usual Noir torpedo Jack Lambert) that happens right off the bat...

Giving CONFIDENTIAL a tight, edgy and at the same time breezily entertaining pulse where the best sequences take place beyond expository offices and into the shadowy streets or else inside a smoky nightclub that harbors sultry and experienced b-girls led by an equally vulnerable Beverly Tyler (along with alcoholic Linda Brent), stealing scenes not only from Keith's picture-pretty housewife and lead ingenue (Foran's secretary) Beverly Garland, but the men as well.

I'm really glad that crime movies of the B or lower grades are showing up. Hence the six stars. But this movie felt flat. It never drew me in.

It's one of those in which an unseen narrator tells us about the crime that was sweeping big cities and the police/government officials/fill in the blank who were wiping it out.

Brian Keith could be a fine noir hero but his performance feels uninspired. The movie boasts some great actresses of the tough-girl school. They too seem underused.

The narration is almost a self-parody. It is so stern and humorless it presages the announcer on "Laugh-in" and some later intentional funny movies.

I didn't buy this movie. Not sure why. But thanks for bringing it out of the vault, anyway. And keep 'em coming!

Union corruption serves as the McGuffin for Chicago Confidential, but the movie's really a big-city cops-and-robbers story with some stalwarts and set-ups left over from the noir cycle that had just about run its course by 1957 (and it shows).

A union official about to sing winds up shot and sunk in Lake Michigan; the honest union president (Dick Foran) is framed for the murder, stands trial and is convicted. That's quite a feather in the cap of District Attorney Brian Keith, who has gubernatorial yearnings.

But Foran's girlfriend Beverly Garland, discredited on the witness stand by means of fabricated evidence and suborned perjury, wins over Keith through her persistent loyalty. But as Keith begins to unravel the skein of lies that helped him win his case, the union's ambitious and corrupt vice-president (Douglas Kennedy) grows more desperate, and the body count starts to look like the city's in the roaring ‘20s. Among the victims is a stumblebum called Candymouth (Elisha Cook), used as a cat's paw in incriminating Foran, but even Keith and Garland find themselves in jeopardy....

The plot involves a bigwig lawyer left over from the Capone organization, `B-girls,' an impressionist, and oscilloscopes. But it moves quickly enough that the loose ends don't matter much (Why wasn't the tape recording analyzed before the trial? Why are the B-girls being shipped to Manila?). Director Sidney Salkow gets some of locales right (a sleazy bar called Shanghai Low among them) but doesn't bring much of an eye or an ear to the enterprise. Still, he keeps the movie jumping from one thing to the next, and that's at least something.