Cry of the City

A two-bit wise guy from Marty Scorsese's old neighborhood at Mott and Vine lies in the hospital, riddled with bullet wounds.  He's gunned down a cop and will certainly be sent to the electric chair.  A beautiful young girl visits him just before surgery and pledges her love.  A couple of homicide detectives badger the wounded man -- they want him to confess to the torture and murder of an old woman named de Grazie; she was killed for her cache of jewelry.  The cop-killer (Richard Conte) is lots of things, all of them bad, but he doesn't torture and kill old ladies and so he indignantly denies the rap. After his surgery, the cop-killer is released to a prison-hospital.  He escapes, although his wounds torment him and, periodically, cause him to pass out.  (He's limping on a leg that's festered and rotting.)  The hoodlum is searching for the girl who kissed  hlm before his surgery and, in a desultory way, trying to clear his bad name with respect to the torture-murder.  A virtuous cop from the same Italian neighborhood, Candella (Victor Mature), fanatically pursues the escaped killer -- he's appalled that the wise-guy is admired in the old neighborhood and runs the risk of corrupting kids living there.  In particular, the cop-killer's kid brother admires the older man as a kind of Robin Hood.  The film tours the underworld for about 90 minutes exhibiting some vivid supporting players. Like the wounded IRA man in Carol Reed's The Informer, no one really wants to hide the badly injured criminal on the lam -- he bounces from one villain to another, becoming increasingly delirious and desperate.  In the end, the obsessed Candella gets shot, but, he too escapes from the hospital to hunt down the bad guy with an obligatory scene in a Catholic Church where the girl appears (and won't flee with the wise-guy) and where the wounded cop confronts the equally wounded criminal with predictable consequences.  Thus, the premise for Robert Siodmak's Cry of the City a 1948 film noir with an intelligent and complex script, good acting and, generally, forgettable. 

Siodmak shot the picture on location in Little Italy, but most of the scenes (with a couple notable exceptions) could have been produced on a Hollywood back lot.  In fact, once I toured Paramount's soundstages and outdoor sets and there is, in fact, a city alley and street ensemble that looks like most of the movie.  (Exceptions are a couple of grandiose city-scapes with streets slanting into neon-lit intersections and the climax in the church and, then, the street oozing with mist where the final shoot-out occurs.)  There are semi-documentary style subway scenes and some interesting interiors of tenements in Little Italy dripping with religious icons and memorabilia, but. by and large, the scene-setting isn't too memorable.  Siodmak, a alumnus of the late phases of German expressionism, directs capably, but, except for a couple of brilliant set-piece suspense scenes, most of his work is perfunctory.  He doesn't use shadows for expressionist effects, but instead deploys them as part of the narrative -- shadow-images actually advance the plot.  The two best sequences in the film are a thrilling if low-key escape from the prison hospital full of false starts and apparent perils and a scene in which the cop-killer menaces a seedy lawyer and ends up stabbing him death (and, also, participating in the shooting of the man's secretary -- it's the attorney's gun that goes off).  The film is populated by a savage rogue's gallery of crooks -- the nasty lawyer stands out as does a pathetic Viennese or German doctor who can't practice medicine (he has no license) but, nonetheless, offers his services to the wounded criminal.  This guy, with his poached- egg eyes is particularly memorable -- it's the kind of part that Udo Kier would have been given in a quarter of a century later -- and the corrupt doctor, who has a sick wife at home is both sleazy and sympathetic.  (Apparently, New York was full of European doctors without licenses after World War Two providing abortions, I suppose, and other useful services -- the cops know them all and round them up as "the usual suspects" in the film.)  A giantess, a hulking ugly masseuse, is particularly startling -- she's the woman who, in fact, tortured the old woman and delivers an excellent speech about her detestation for her elderly, wealthy female clients.  The vicious masseuse, the terrifying Hope Emerson, is twice the size of the poor cop-killer and three times as brutal.  Siodmak stages her first appearance with real flare:  the wounded hoodlum rings her doorbell and she approaches, moving toward the door through about four different glass ante-rooms, each time looming larger and larger - it's an ineffably weird and scary visual effect.  I have no idea why the shot is staged in this way -- each anteroom is differently lit and so we see the monstrous Amazon in different ways as she approaches -- but it's really remarkable and the best thing in the movie.  The picture has a nightmarish aspect and it works a subtle kind of ju-jitsu on the viewer -- at first, we admire the brazen arrogance of the criminal and are rooting for him to makes his escape.  But, as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly obvious that the man is vicious and that the true hero is the indefatigable (literally, many scenes take place early in the morning at diners and on the empty streets) Candella His partner says:  "This is becoming a vendetta for you" -- and it's obvious that Candella is dangerously obsessed with the chase, becoming, in a way, a mirror for the wounded criminal.  At the film's climax, both characters are so badly hurt they can barely stand.   Mature generally played bad guys until this feature and his heavy-lidded eyes make him odd-looking -- he blinks at the camera like a drowsy iguana but he's good in the film.  Siodmak detested filming on location:  "you've got no control," he lamented.  Shelley Winters has a small, but pivotal, role as a dame who procures the services of the corrupt doctor -- this was her first Hollywood role.

This sort of picture reminds me of Ozu's string of domestic melodramas, films with names like Early Summer, Late Spring, An Autumn Afternoon -- the names are all alike becomes the films are all closely similar.  Cry of the City is just a place-holder name; all of these late forties film noir are essentially the same -- they're all mildly entertaining but without a scorecard you can't tell them apart and they're uniformly lurid, but abstract names don't help in distinguishing them.