Anonima delitti

A nice bridge from the gangster pictures of the 30's to the modern day mafia flick. You can see echoes of this film in GODFATHER and GOODFELLAS and others. Going inside a crime syndicate and also the private lives of the gangsters, it's a pretty satisfying drama with a lot of facets. Richard Conte is superb as a polite but cold-blooded hit-man turned consigliere, and there are also memorable performances from Anne Bancroft and the reliable heavy Mike Mazurki. Broderick Crawford is generally quite good although he does deliver a few stiff line readings. Unfortunately, the film suffers from utterly bland cinematography, and we spend so much time in well-lit rooms that it often feels like a stage production. A very good script, but the execution only provides a few exciting moments.

Broderick Crawford borrows a great deal from his Academy Award winning Willie Stark from All The King's Men in playing underworld boss Frank Lupo in New York Confidential. Crawford is a combination of Stark and Don Corleone and he doesn't get the best of it.

Like Corleone and Stark, Lupo has trouble with his children, but unlike Stark, Lupo has a daughter played by Anne Bancroft. Now if Bancroft was content to be Connie Corleone she could have any number of willing suitors who are in the family business working for dad. She aspires to more and her father's reputation kills off any chance she can marry respectably.

Not that respectability guarantees honesty. When old line money WASP William Forrest pulls the rug out from under a multi-million dollar deal the Syndicate is bankrolling they decide to take care of him in the true Syndicate manner. Crawford though he opposes the idea gets the contract and from their the dominoes start to fall.

One thing however when the fires threatens, organized crime knows how to start backfires to make sure the organization itself is not touched. A whole lot of dead bodies start to pile up before the film ends.

Also starring in the film is Richard Conte playing an out of town hit man who Crawford takes a shine to and has him stay in New York. Conte was always great in noir films and he certainly is here.

New York Confidential touches upon a lot of the issues involving systemic corruption much the same way The Godfather films do. Of course it does not have the budget those blockbusters had nor an unforgettable music score, still New York Confidential makes it point. It's still a valid film for today's audience.

That's the third or fourth time I see this authentic and unfortunately underrated film noir from the fifties. A true fierce, brutal, and so realistic tale of gangsters where the mob is presented as a big company and their members normal family men, such as Broderick - machine gun talking - Crawford, who is here at his best. So is Richard Conte, here as a cold, ruthless but also attractive killer. Many movie buffs speak of the GODFATHER when they present this feature. Yes, they are not wrong. If you compare with the other gangsters films made before, this one is rather close to the Francis Coppola's films. This movie is for me a little masterpiece, far better than more known gangster movies. Russel Rouse was also a damn good director. I have seen all his films, which I also have in my huge library. I confound this movie with Ken Hughes's JOE MACBETH, made at the same period, and starring Paul Douglas who, a long time ago, I confounded with Broderick Crawford. This another film noir was also a gangster family tragedy. Like this one.

NEW YORK CONFIDENTIAL is a perplexing film noir entry. Among its many merits is the astonishing cast: Broderick Crawford (who spits out his dialogue in Howard Hawks-rapidity as if he were on amphetamines), Anne Bancroft (astonishing) and the always reliable Richard Conte. But it never shakes the feeling of being two films in one, sitting uneasily side by side: a stern "semi-documentary" expose of the "syndicate" on one hand, and a bleak and brutal pre-Godfather mafia family saga on the other.

As such, it is wildly and tragically uneven. The leads all turn in brilliant performances, but the screenplay has all the earmarks of a committee job; fascinating ideas and characterizations butt up against terribly overwrought clichés. The main cast is on fire with weighty dialogue, but the supporting cast flounders about as if they were in the most pedestrian B-noir instead of a star-driven studio picture. For the most part, the design is static and lifeless, shot with little flair by Eddie Fitzgerald. Director and co-writer Russell Rouse's previous noir entry was the chancy THE THIEF, also an uneven experiment.

But the film has its scenes of incredible power, usually those revolving around Conte, as a cold and calculating hit-man for hire, and Bancroft, as the put-upon mobster's daughter who can't crawl out from behind dad's shadow; Conte dispatching with "hits", his gunshots creepily muffled by a silencer; Crawford's repeated near-meltdowns; murderous planning done completely straight in a corporate boardroom, just big business as usual.

A puzzler of a film, leaving the viewer to wonder what could have been, had it been shot by John Alton and penned by, say, Dalton Trumbo. Still, it's an extremely valuable entry in the film noir canon, strangely almost impossible to see.

Richard Rouse's New York Confidential is a fine movie. It feels realistic and genuine. It's portrayal of the mafia seems more sophisticated than the movies that came before it. It's a very good screenplay, easy to follow but plausible and with plenty of twists. It is a real pleasure watching the three stars at work. Broderick Crawford is great playing ... Broderick Crawford, showing power, bluster, urgency and frailty all at the same time. Richard Conte and Anne Bancroft are possibly even better, Conte exuding confidence, charm and self-control and Bancroft making us feel the desperation of being trapped inside a mafia clan. I applaud the producers and director for choosing to use only a few Italian American actors in a film about the mafia - only Conte, Bancroft and a few minor players - as it shifts the focus from the ethnic aspects to the business itself and the individual choices each of the criminals makes.