Contrato Para Matar

As I watched "Contract on Cherry Street", I couldn't help but think this should have been better. After all, it stars Frank Sinatra as well as many well respected supporting acts, such as Martin Balsam, Harry Guardino and Henry Silva. But sadly, the film is very slow paced and should have been much more exciting. Perhaps the actors were just too old to generate a lot of energy! After all, the actors I just mentioned all played cops and, by far, the youngest of them was 48 at the time!

Sinatra plays a Deputy Inspector in New York City that is in charge of a police unit aimed at attacking organized crime. For some reason, they are now centering solely on a car theft ring. However, over time, the unit never seems to be making any progress, so after one of the group is killed, they resort to trying to start a gang war. How? By assassinating some of the gang leaders in the hope that the gang will start distrusting each other and then start killing each other. Two wild cards in all this are two psychopathic Greek killers and a psychopathic cop.

The pacing of this film is, at times, glacial. It could easily have been done in 90=120 minutes but clocks in at over 150 minutes. There also is a huge chunk in the middle of the film where Sinatra disappears for at least 20 minutes....concentrating on other characters instead...which is pretty odd since he is the star. Because of this, you have a decent story but it's just bogged down by the pacing. It simply should have been better.

This film essentially begins with two rival mob families led by "Baruch Waldman" (Martin Gabel) and "Eddie Manzaro" (Marco St. John) in contention over the lucrative automobile theft business in New York City. At first the detective in charge of this investigation, "Deputy Inspector Frank Hovannes" (Frank Sinatra) insists that his small section abides by the rules and use standard police tactics. This changes, however, when his good friend and colleague "Captain Ernie Weinberg" (Martin Balsam) is killed in the line of duty while on a raid on one of the automobile body shops operated by one of the men belonging to Manzaro family-and things spiral out-of-control after that. Now rather than reveal any more, I will just say that this was a solid crime-drama for the most part but it suffered somewhat by some rather slow scenes along with a longer than normal running time (145 minutes). Likewise, although there were several decent actors involved, none of them really stood out in my opinion either. In any case, those looking for a basic 70's crime-drama of this sort might find this film to their liking and I have rated it accordingly. Slightly above average.

I worked for Columbia Pictures at the time and it was exciting to see Frank Sinatra starring in this TV made for movie. He made a visit to the Home Office and created quite a stir. I have to say when the movie premiered on television it fell short. It wasn't a bad storyline and actually was entertaining but Sinatra was too old for the part and given his age and short stature he wasn't believable as a tough guy detective. Even his much younger wife was not believable. He was past his prime as well as some of the other actors. It was almost like Barney Miller light. It did show a young and up and coming actor Michael Nori and a good performance by Steve Inwood. But overall the stellar cast of Martin Balsam, Henry Silver and Harry Guardian could not save this movie. The ending comes to one big thud you find yourself asking is this it?? Despite the disappointments it is still exciting to see Frank Sinatra at the age of 62 performing.

In the 1970s, the TV networks put a lot of money into creating their own collection of original films. The rationale was that they were about as cheap as a series pilot (indeed some, like "Marcus Nelson Murders" did become exactly that -- for "Kojak"; "The Night Stalker/Strangler" for the Kolchak series), and did not entail open-ended commitments like a series would.

This flick is certainly at the high-end of these (the low-end was things like "The Hard Ride" - - motorcycle-gang members with machine guns in Vietnam, in a low budget, low brow version of "Missing in Action"; the immortal "Killdozer"). Frank Sinatra shows his acting chops again (nearly for the last time, from here on there was only one episode of Magnum PI to be proud of), surrounded by the usual suspects of series TV and made-for-TV-movies (notably Harry Guardino, good as always.) The soundtrack is certainly movie-quality (as were most of this era's TV-movies.)

The movie suffers from having an enforced length -- 145 minutes to fill a 3-hour timeslot -- and thus there is painfully unnecessary padding of scenes and dialog, and long traveling shots with the obligatory shoe-leather-sound-effects. But there's a cracking good 90-100 minute movie in here.

Frank Sinatra clearly did not want Dirty Dingus Magee to be his movie career swan song. Seven years after that was released Sinatra did this made for television film Contract On Cherry Street which was good enough to have been a theatrically released film. Sad that the producers did not have enough faith in it. It's also good in that Sinatra turned in a real acting performance and did not rely on his hipster personality to walk through the part.

The Chairman Of The Board plays an NYPD police inspector who is in charge of an organized crime unit in the department. His problem is that no one really wants him to succeed because the wise guys have way too much juice and there are too many layers of underlings to wade through before the big guys could ever face justice.

Two Mafia families are currently rivals over a stolen car and chop shop racket and after a raid on a chop shop that one of them has, Sinatra's second in command Martin Balsam is killed by Johnny Barnes who is one mean psychotic button man. Sinatra then just blows him away even though Barnes wants to surrender.

No witnesses who would have talked would have blamed Sinatra or squealed on him, but Sinatra decides the only way to eliminate these people is for the cops to do their own hit on one of the Family heads and hope that starts a war. Then Murphy's law takes over and anything that can go wrong does.

Best performance in the film running slightly ahead of Sinatra is that of Harry Guardino who is one of Sinatra's cops and who hates Mafiosa from when he was a kid and saw his father forking over tribute to these people. He gets a real liking for the idea of being his own hit squad. Also Steve Inwood gets a real nice part and makes the most of it as a junkie informant that one of Sinatra's cops Michael Nouri has.

Contract On Cherry Street was filmed entirely in New York City and there are some real nice looks at the Big Apple at the time. I've heard it said that this film plays like an extended episode of Kojak. But I like Kojak.