Word: hoodlum
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Director Robert Parrish serves this rehash expertly, pointing up the tart flavor and inventive trimmings of William Bowers' script. In his detective's masquerade as an out-of-town hoodlum roughing his way into the favor of waterfront racketeers. Academy Award Winner Broderick (All the King's Men) Crawford plays a tough guy's tough guy with engagingly sardonic humor...
...over the plant's fruit concession to him. When a Detroit child was kidnaped, Ford, who had a great love for all children, told Bennett to get the child back. Before he could do anything, the father paid a $20,000 ransom and the child was returned. Some hoodlum acquaintances of Bennett got the money back by torturing the kidnaper. The kidnaper went to Bennett's home, shot him in the side and fled. Bennett asked the police not to prosecute. But, he adds offhandedly: "The gunman was later shot and killed on a Detroit street-in some...
...series of taut opening scenes sets the spirit of the piece: leering and wriggling, the streetwalker lures her men one by one to a corner where her hoodlum accomplices beat and rob them. It is easy until the mandarin enters: he has to be thrashed, stabbed, choked and finally hanged before he can be made to die. That moves even the streetwalker. Too late, she realizes what the power of passion can be, throws herself on the mandarin's still body in almost necrophilic abandon...
...Roberts; United Artists) extracts a full measure of excitement from the predicament of a family imprisoned in its own seamy flat by an unpredictable hoodlum (John Garfield) who turns the place into his hideout. Hunted by the police for murder and robbery, he lets members of the family out to perform their daily tasks-so long as one always stays behind as his hostage...
...picture's rumpled sets, James Wong Howe's shadowy photography, the lower-middle-class characterizations, are all well-keyed to a note of squalid realism. The script gives the hoodlum some depth as well as menace; he is stupid, confused, worried sick, and for all his bitterness and bullying, wants eagerly to be liked. The acting is first-rate, not only by Garfield, but by Shelley Winters, deglamorized as the simple, forlorn pickup whose home he invades, by Wallace Ford as her father, grimly swallowing his self-respect, and Selena Royle as the distraught mother...