Cry of the City (1948)

I caught Robert Siodmak's Cry of the City this morning, and it's an excellent crime film. It's not shot quite as a noir, really, but it has plenty of wonderful shadows and play with light and dark throughout. It also boasts some excellent performances – Hope Emerson appears in a great small role and there is also a long sequence with a fabulous Shelley Winters. The film's best performance might be by young Tommy Cook who had previously had roles in such inauspicious movies as Adventures of Red Ryder and Jungle Girl.

There are many intriguing things to say about Cry of the City. It is, for one, a great example of a film made under the production code, where we can talk about bullets and fire guns, but we can't actually see anyone get shot. A woman, for example, apparently gets shot through a door, though the door's window doesn't break. A man is also stabbed to death with a switchblade through an office chair. There are two more shootings that happen in the film, neither of which looks even remotely realistic. This tends to leave 1940s writers completely off the hook – we never see where any bullets go in, so does the victim get shot fatally? Well, it's up to the writers! They just choose where they want the story to go.

Even more interesting is the film's own deeply conflicted attitude toward law enforcement and the criminal justice system. It feels very simple, watching the movie from the perspective of 2023, to see that it is actually the police who cause most of the trouble in this movie. As Victor Mature (the cop) lists all of the harm that Richard Conte (the alleged perp) has caused in act three, it's quite clear that in fact that harm has all been caused by the police themselves. All of it! What's even more intriguing is that Conte's character solves a separate crime for the police that they weren't able to solve on their own - one in which a rich old lady was allegedly tortured and killed for her jewel collection. Worse of all, perhaps, is that the lead policeman, at the end of the film, shoots an unarmed man in the back. This Cry of the City seems to present to the audience as justice. It's deeply unsettling, although I'm not sure I understand if Siodmak is as conflicted as I am.

Perhaps the key to all of this is that, according to IMDb, Conte was originally slated to play the cop and Mature the criminal, but Mature had played too many bad guys lately and 20th Century Fox swapped the roles. The criminals and those nominally assigned to catch them produce one another in Cry of the City, and it is this, finally, which makes the film as rich as it is.