City Across the River

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.

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.

No matter how depressing this film appears to begin with, it's a great film and much ahead of its time. It's like a documentary probing the gang mentality of youngsters getting brought up to become good fellas and worse, and there are many aspects to the drama, one being that of the teachers, who really have a hard time and sometimes can't control their own classes. It's a social drama as well, Thelma Ritter has a poignant part as the worried mother, and Frankie's little sister has an important part also. Everything about the film is professional, and they are all convincing, from the poor people of the shabby back streets of Brooklyn to the policemen, the gangsters, and most striking of all is perhaps the character of "Crazy" whose real name is Theodore (Joshua Shelley), a fantastic clown with a penchant for cruelty. Tony Curtis has only a small minor part but is already Tony Curtis - it's like a hint at a prelude to his later great appearances. The final great dancing hall scene when things are getting really hot is a masterpiece in itself of polyphony bringing out all the true colours of the major actors including the leading gangster, fabulously contrasted against the fervent musicians and their frenzied music. Although I hesitated if I would see it through at all because of its dark depressive elements, I was finally deeply impressed - a great documentary film like all those "Naked City" films.

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.

While the noir cycle sensed, in its oblique way, most of the tremors affecting America in the post-war years, one subject that remains conspicuous in its absence is juvenile delinquency. Though alienated youth cropped up now and again – in The Big Night, in Moonrise, in Talk About A Stranger and even, arguably, in The Window – they were viewed as individual cases, not as a social phenomenon. (It wasn't until the cycle had largely petered out that such films as The Blackboard Jungle and The Wild One emerged in the mid-1950s.)

One exception was City Across The River, based on Irving Shulman's novel The Amboy Dukes. Though noirish in its look and urban setting, it's probably safe to call it a social-message movie (as was Nicholas Ray's Knock On Any Door, of the same year). It takes us to the slums of Brooklyn at a time when slums were slums and when conventional wisdom held that the root of juvenile delinquency was the turn-of-the-century tenements themselves – the physical plant, not the inculturated attitudes that perpetuate the culture of poverty and crime.

Peter Fernandez plays the central character of the story, a teen-ager whose parents work holidays and double-shifts to make ends meet (his mom is Thelma Ritter). But he hangs around with members of a `club' called The Dukes (among them `Anthony' Curtis), whose older members seem to be rising lieutenants in the world of petty crime. Of course, in accordance with the official idiom of the times, the toughs caper and cavort like The Dead End Kids, and the worst epithet they hurl at one another is `you crumb.'

Fernandez and friend confront a shop teacher who's responsible for their suspension and accidentally kill him with one of the zip-guns that seem to be the main enterprise of the school's industrial-arts program. In fear and panic, they not only raise suspicion but burn most of their bridges behind them. The movie ends unsentimentally – even harshly.

The task of directing fell to the unlikely Maxwell Shane, whose most polished credits in the noir cycle are Fear in The Night and its remake Nightmare, oneiric cheapies that created a fantasy world. Yet he does surprisingly effective work in City Across the River, putting together a plausible neighborhood of vegetable peddlers, candy shops and pool halls. Despite the dated and bowdlerized street argot, the movie stays involving and humane without retreating into cliche (Fernandez' fall isn't assigned an easy scapegoat) or crocodile tears.