Cry of the City is a complex, multilayered story of immigrants, police, criminals, lawyers, men and women. It is also very much about New York, just as Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722, which I have been reading lately) is about London. As Anthony Burgess says, "One of the most remarkable things about the Journal is the way in which London is made to appear as a breathing, suffering entity and not just what Auden called 'an abstract civic space.'" Cry of the City does the same for New York
In Cry of the City Siodmak combines his film noir style (see my posts of Aug 29 2016, Aug 4 2015, June 29 2015) with the 20th Century Fox documentary style of the forties, with much of the film taking place on rained-soaked streets. Cop murderer Richard Conte escapes from jail and is pursued by cop Victor Mature, who also grew up in Little Italy. Conte is quite a womanizer, getting a nurse (Betty Garde)to take a message to his lover (a young Debra Paget) and having Shelley Winters drive him to a crooked doctor when he escapes. Conte ends up in tunnel after tunnel, literal and figurative, as he finds his way to masseuse Hope Emerson (one of a number of women of various ages who try to help Conte, including his mother) who makes a deal with Conte that neither of them keep. Meanwhile Conte has killed two more people --a lawyer and his secretary -- in his attempt to get enough money to escape the country, even trying to get his younger brother to steal from their parents, as Conte travels through the streets, candy stores and subways of New York. Siodmak and cinematographer Lloyd Ahern beautifully meld the indoor sets with the crowded and dangerous New York locations in an intense chiaroscuro black-and-white.
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