Cry of the City

Directed by Robert Siodmak, Cry of the City follows a tenacious New York City detective (Victor Mature’s Candella) as he sets out to find and arrest a childhood friend (Richard Conte’s Martin Rome). Filmmaker Siodmak, working from Richard Murphy’s script, delivers a deliberately-paced drama that grows more and more compelling as it unfolds, and it’s clear, certainly, that the picture benefits quite substantially from the superlative efforts of its uniformly top-notch cast – with Mature and Conte’s predictably engrossing work here matched by an eclectic, effective roster of periphery players. (There’s little doubt, ultimately, that Hope Emerson completely steals each of her scant scenes with a captivating and unexpectedly terrifying turn as a brutal criminal.) The movie’s proliferation of engaging attributes, such as Lloyd Ahern’s striking cinematography and Alfred Newman’s foreboding score, goes a long way towards smoothing over a few lulls within the narrative, while the presence of several spellbinding sequences, including a tense prison-hospital escape interlude and Rome’s encounter with Berry Kroeger’s smarmy, evil lawyer, paves the way for a thoroughly satisfying third act – with the end result an above-average film noir that fares better than one might’ve initially anticipated.

*** out of ****