Excellent but underrated film

Admirable film.

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one

A shocking mid-town assassination results in two innocent bystanders being killed and what follows threatens to blow the lid off the ruthless big business of the organized crime world that reaches into the pockets of Washington D.C. politicians. The plot surrounds the head of one of the syndicate (Broderick Crawford) and his family life which includes his trampy mistress Marilyn Maxwell, aging mother Celia Lovsky and troubled daughter Anne Bancroft. She loves her father enormously but hates the person he is and goes into hiding to escape her legacy. Hit-man Richard Conte is assigned to find her, tame her and bring her home, but this likable killer, sympathetic to her plight, must betray boss Crawford in order to do it, choosing to romance her in hiding.As the violence of the underworld increases, so does the threat of the downfall to this Corleone like dynasty. We have learned through "Scarface" and "The Godfather" that organized crime families have a code of honor within their clans and that they are just as normal as other families are. As Conte explains to Bancroft, "the waiter rips off the boss just as fast as the boss rips off the government", so the end justifies the means and all in a day's work. (He forgets to include, "Just don't get caught.") Yet, not every killer or crook is all black or white, so the fact that these characters have two sides to them is supposed to make them o.k.It's hard to dislike a family man like Crawford (very loyal to his worried mama), but you just know that the downfall he faces will involve traitorous activity. There's an intense scene of two killers making their escape down a hotel elevator after taking care of one of the traitors that gets more and more crowded with each passing floor. Detectives are nearing the hotel and the expression on the killers' faces just gets more and more nervous.Bancroft explodes in a scene with Conte after her identity has been discovered which most of her previous films lacked. You know that inside this stage trained beauty is a star waiting to emerge and it would take just the right part to turn her from "B" film actress with much stage training into the legend of stage and screen she would become in later years. The narration by Ralph Clanton is typical of "Naked City" stories and by 1955, a film noir cliché of its own. One point of interest is the presence of pin-up girl and "Phoenix City Story" actress Meg Myles in a party sequence where her fantastic figure is given more attention than she is lines.

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.

Flawed but always worth watching, this movie seems to have sprung from nowhere onto DVD. Certainly not pure 'noir' but neither is it simply a crime drama. Indeed with the documentary element and Crawford's wayward antics on the one side and the coolness of Richard Conte and his relations with the ladies on the other, this could be considered a bit of a mess. That it is not is due in the main to the tremendous performances of Conte, Bancroft and to a lesser extent, Marilyn Maxwell as Iris, Crawford's mistress. For me Crawford is over the top as the macho boss man and simply unable to deal with the more sensitive scenes, but he is overshadowed by Conte and we are soon persuaded to view the events through his steely eyes. A few location shots that really only go to show up the shoddiness of the studio ones but there is a great ending and as I say enough along the way to make this almost unseen film well worth a watch.

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.