seymourblack-1 In the early 1950s, television coverage of the Senate Committee hearings on organised crime (chaired by Estes Kefauver) generated a huge amount of public interest and movies such as "The Enforcer" (1951) and "New York Confidential" (1955) capitalised on this brilliantly. The latter movie is essentially a low-budget, semi-documentary expose of the culture of a nationwide organisation that makes its money from murder, vice and corruption but is also in the process of blurring the lines between itself and legitimate business. In order to achieve an appearance of respectability, however, the organisation has to operate by strict rules and ensure that, as far as possible, it doesn't attract any adverse publicity.New York City crime boss Charlie Lupo (Broderick Crawford) has to take action when a mobster in his territory kills another hoodlum purely for personal reasons and so hit-man Nick Magellan (Richard Conte) is imported from Chicago. Nick is the son of one of Charlie's old friends and the two men get on well. So after Nick kills the rule-breaking mobster, Charlie keeps him on as his bodyguard and steadily promotes him to a top position in his organisation. Nick is smart, confident and very efficient and Charlie admires his coolness and the fact that he's considerably more polished than any of the other men he has working for him.Widower Charlie has three women who are important to him. His mother, who's very demanding and warns him of trouble ahead, his spoilt daughter Kathy (Anne Bancroft) who despises his line of work because it impacts badly on her ability to move in society circles and Iris (Marilyn Maxwell) who's his mistress. For some time, the organisation had been working with some corrupt politicians and lawyers to set up a highly lucrative oil-shipping contract but the whole deal suddenly falls through when a lobbyist they were relying on double-crosses them. A board meeting of the crime bosses from all of the cities where the syndicate is active follows and it's unanimously decided that the lobbyist should be eliminated for his betrayal and that Charlie should take responsibility for ensuring that the hit is carried out.Charlie appoints three of his men to assassinate the lobbyist and although they achieve their goal, they also leave clues behind and kill a cop in the process. In order to cover his tracks, Charlie assigns Nick to kill the three men. Nick succeeds in eliminating two of them but a third eludes him long enough to turn state's evidence and in so doing, threatens to expose Charlie's involvement and by extension, that of the nationwide syndicate. Predictably, the consequences of this are enormous.Richard Conte is astonishingly good as Nick in a performance that outshines everyone else in the movie and Anne Bancroft is extremely intense, feisty and contemptuous as she portrays her character's feelings about what her father does to make a living. Fast-talking Broderick Crawford successfully exudes all the toughness and power that one would expect of a crime boss of Lupo's stature but also displays the vulnerability that his character feels because of his health issues and the degree to which he's hurt by his daughter's angry condemnation of him."New York Confidential" is hard-hitting, rich in realism and provides a fascinating insight into the world of organised crime at a time when its involvement in business, politics and everyday life was extensive. The simplicity of the rules under which everyone operated were clear-cut and anyone who stepped out of line knew exactly what to expect. In this movie, Nick's character provides the clearest illustration of someone who conforms to the rules as he's unerringly loyal to the organisation, carries out all the orders given to him (regardless of his own feelings) and resists the attentions of both Kathy and Iris because of his respect for Charlie. Having been brought up as the son of a gangster, he knows better than anyone that the interests of the organisation always come first.

bkoganbing 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.

Howard_B_Eale 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.

bmacv In Russell Rouse's New York Confidential, Broderick Crawford plays a darker extension of his Harry Brock character in Born Yesterday. Brock was a corrupt businessman, a wheeler-dealer with senators in his pocket, but the movie (a comedy, after all) never went so far as to label him a mobster, much less a killer. But five years later, in the wake of the televised Kefauver hearings which brought the scope of organized crime to a rapt public, Crawford has become a cog in a vast `syndicate' or `cartel' - an important cog in its Manhattan headquarters, yes, but only one piece of its unstoppable machinery.When one of his vassals stages an unauthorized hit, Crawford calls in some talent from Chicago (Richard Conte) to enforce discipline. The widowed Crawford warms to Conte as the son he never had, though he does have a handful of a rebellious daughter (Ann Bancroft) as well as a high-maintenance mistress with a platinum chignon (Marilyn Maxwell). Maxwell has eyes for Conte, but his eyes stay affixed on the unstable, hard-drinking Bancroft, who wants nothing to do with her father's business - or with any of his minions.The triangulated romance, however, takes second place to the mob's tangled business interests. When a recalcitrant lobbyist scuttles a scheme to profit from government shipping contracts, he's ordered killed. In the movie's best orchestrated sequence, torpedo Mike Mazurki accomplishes the hit but botches his escape from a hotel; wounded, he decides to flip and sing.With the big heat now on, the executive board decides Crawford must take the fall; he, however, decides to join Mazurki in singing a duet. So the board contracts Conte to eliminate the now dangerous Crawford....The gangster movies of the early 'thirties endure as character studies of flamboyant but flawed figures played by the likes of Edward G. Robinson, Jimmy Cagney and Paul Muni. This spats-and-tommyguns genre, however, fell out of favor in the 'forties (given global upheaval, bootleggers became small fry). When mob pictures reemerged in the 1950s, their difference in tone was palpable. From 711 Ocean Drive in 1950 to Phil Karlson's 1957 The Brothers Rico (also starring Conte), crime had become corporate, with formalized hierarchies, far-flung interests, and strict, if ruthless, rules for doing business. That's the thread that runs through New York Confidential: that no there's no individual who's indispensable, that the survival of the organization remains paramount.