Michael O'Keefe A provocative drama, directed by Philip Leacock, set in Chicago's notorious South Side in the 1950's. Shelley Winters stars as Nellie Romano, a waitress working in a bar hoping to do the best for her young son Nick(James Darren). Nick will grow up on the dirty streets dodging bums, drunks and drug addicts. Nellie and Nick live in a dirty tenement apartment, where there is more than an abundance of losers trying to look out for them. Nick practices on piano, while his mother does her best to hide the fact that Nick's father died in the electric chair.Nick often dons a black leather jacket, but is not the worst young man in the neighborhood. Albeit he gets a jail sentence for helping a friend victimized in a gang fight. Nick avoids jail by way of a "special favor" from his mom's boyfriend Louie(Ricardo Montalban). Things get dark when Nick finds out that Louie, a bookie and drug pusher, plies Nellie of any virtue with dope.A story of shame, squalor, poverty, addiction and survival. Besides Winters' stellar performance, Burl Ives turns in a strong job of acting as a former judge turned drunk. And jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald is solid as a junkie piano player. Other players include: Jean Seberg, Rodolfo Acosta, Walter Burk, Phil Ober and Bernie Hamilton.

marcslope Kind of a cross between "West Side Story" (though it's Chicago's West Side) and "Golden Boy" without Clifford Odets' lyricism, this sleaze-obsessed melodrama benefits from location filming that shows how awful the Chicago slums looked in 1960 and a motley, oddball cast. James Darren is the sensitive hood/concert pianist (and though he's proficient at the keyboard, he's hardly the prodigy the script makes him out to be), being raised by Shelley Winters at her Shelley Wintersiest, screaming and sobbing and unhinging easily. She and an assembly of longtime slum pals, including an uninteresting Burl Ives as a drunken ex-judge, are trying to give the kid a decent upbringing amid all the squalor. There are also Ricardo Montalban, excellent as an insidiously evil-charming dope peddler; Ella Fitzgerald, who gets to act a bit and isn't bad; and Jean Seberg, not quite credible as the Lake Shore girl Darren loves. The direction is uninspired, and the screenplay a little contrived (when it wants us to know Ives loves Winters, it just has him confess to the camera), but what's fascinating is the brio with which the filmmakers depict all the sex and violence and addiction and grimness. It's as if they were trying to show how grownup they are by thrusting all that misery in your face. It moves fast, and if your attention starts to wander, be assured, Shelley Winters will be erupting again soon.

sol (Some Spoilers) Powerful story about life on the other side of the street. In this case the shoddy and crime ridden slums of Chicago personified in the movie as West Madison Street.Hard working waitress and sometime B-girl Nellie Romano, Shelley Winters, has been trying to keep her young and talented son Nick Jr, James Darren, out of trouble since her common-law husband "Pretty Boy" Nick ended up frying in the state electric chair. "Pretty Boy" gunned down a cop outside a nightclub back in 1948 when Nick Jr was less then a year old. Keeping his mouth shut not to implicate his gangster friends "Pretty Boy" Nick paid for what he did with his life.It's when Nick Jr just couldn't take the razzing anymore from his high-school classmates about his both dead father and hard working mother that he started to get himself into trouble defending them and their backgrounds: A hard working and sacrificing, for her son, mother and a convicted and executed for murder father.With the help of a number of people from the neighborhood including local barfly and former circuit judge Bruce Sullivan, Burt Ives, young Nick has his life turned around as he starts to practice with his piano keys not with his fists. Playing up a storm and bringing people listening literally to tears, whenever he bangs and tinkers the ivory keys, Nick is soon destined to become one of the great ones: Another musical genius on the piano like Rubinstein Pederewski or Richter.It's when Nellie meets, at the dive she's working at, hoodlum Louie Ramponi, Recordo Montalban, that things for her and young Nick started really going sour. Bailing Nick out of prison for an act of juvenile delinquency, a fist fight, Louis starts to work on his mom Nellie in getting her hooked on dope. Having a front as a both flower dealer and bookie Louie's real source of income, that he of course keeps from the IRS, is pushing junk or dope in the neighborhood.As Nellie's life went to pot her son's was picking up with Nick being discovered, with the help of Judge Sullivan, by multi-millionaire and music lover Grant Holloway, Philip Ober. Grant's daughter the classy and beautiful Barbara Holloway, Jean Seaberg, got so hung up on Nick's music, not his boyish good looks, that she became his girlfriend, Nick's first, without him even having a chance to ask her out for a date. A star struck Barbara even proposed to Nick before he had a chance to pinch himself to see if he was dreaming or not!It's when Nick came home to Madison Street unexpectedly, to tell his mom the good news, that he found to his horror Nellie, with Louie helping her shoot up, strung out on the big "H" heroin. Running away in disgust Nick gets a gun from the local friendly and legless neighbor newspaper peddler Wart, Walter Burke, and crashes into Louie's flower shop to pay him back for what he did to his mom.***SPOILER ALERT***Overpowered by Louie and one of his goons Wally, Jack Bryan, Nick is tied up and about to be shot up with a possible "hot load" of heroin not only turning him into a junkie but having him buried next to his long dead father Nick Senior whom he's never met! It's then that the outraged and bear-like Judge Sullivan comes on the scene and at the cost of his own life single-handedly puts an end to Louie Ramponi's crime empire by putting an end to him.Hard hitting and effective the movie "Let No Man Write My Epitaph" goes where no other film, back then in 1960, dared to go. The movie shows how dope or drugs are used by slime-balls like Louie Ramponi to keep people enslaved and under their control. Also in the movie is jazz legend Ella Fitzgerald as the downtrodden and suicidal Flora who just happens to be one of Louie's many drug addicted customers.

Robert J. Maxwell Not bad, actually, partly because the cast is as good as it is. And what a cast! James Darren, whose performance is exceptional in being less than particularly good, is Nick Romano. Well -- the kid is a genius at the piano, see. But he's being raised in this crummy Chicago apartment house and everybody around him is a loser in one way or another. There is the failed, drunken ex-judge (Burl Ives), the heroin-addicted saloon singer (Ella Fitzgerald, in another below-professional performance), Darren's distraught mother (Shelley Winters), the helpful guy who runs the news stand (I thought it was Richard Taber but he's not in the credits) and the helpful cab drive (Rudolf Acosta). They'd all like to help Nick when he runs into trouble with the law, injuring his precious hands, his tools out of the slums, and so on. And Nick is immediately sympathetic because his father died in the electric chair. But what can they do? They all have their own weaknesses and can barely keep themselves together.And there are bad guys too, exemplified by Ricardo Montalban's smooth, expensively dressed and immaculately groomed dope dealer, who shoots Shelley Winters up and then takes advantage of her, as they say, in her flat. The scene is kind of edgy for 1960 and only gets more so when Nick barges in on them unexpectedly while they are in flagrante delicto.Burl Ives pulls himself together sufficiently, with the aid of the good-natured others, to introduce Nick to someone (Philip Ober, an actor whose magnetism has always eluded me) in a position to get Nick into the Music Conservatory after high school. Pretty good, eh? It's not just how good you are, but who you know. Or, more precisely, it's who somebody you know knows. And then, to top it off with a cherry, Ober the Impresario has a drop-dead gorgeous daughter who comes in the shape of the young Jean Seberg, the perfect, if entirely conventional, incarnation of Nordic beauty.Actually, Seberg doesn't act well either. Let's see. It LOOKS like a good cast -- but Darren, Fitzgerald, Ober, and Seberg don't really deliver. You know when I said "the cast is as good as it is"? Can I take that back? I don't think I'll give away the ending except to mention that the very last shot in the film has Darren and Seberg walking hand in hand in front of the Chicago Art Institute. You'll have to guess the rest.I don't know who chose the title or why. It's from a speech by Robert Emmett, an 18th-century Irish nationalist I think, just before his execution. Emmett's message was along the lines of, "Don't judge me now, you cretins. The historians of the future will give me a fair shake." Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose. (My keyboard doesn't have the accents for that cliché.)