New York Confidential (1955)

New York Confidential (1955) is a Manhattan hitman action and romancing 'Confidential' series New York on-the-ground corporate crime country club hypocrite political scheming, punch-up shoot-out and dragnet multi-male Kefauver-inspired crime syndicate insider circle of self destruction organized crime politically and judicial bribery criminal cartel classic film noir mobster melodrama by Russell Rouse and starring Broderick Crawford, Anne Bancroft, Marilyn Maxwell, Richard Conte, Mike Mazurki,

New York Confidential (1955) has qualities so numerous with fights and shootings an elevator scene a parking garage scene Broderick Crawford with set dressed sky-scarpers in the background scenes which give the film a lot of confidence, pushy lushes, lushes galore with the lushing of Marilyn Maxwell fairly amongst the greats of the noir lady of sadness and sleaze, the gangster's wife, when the gangster is a skyscraper dwelling man of bullets, matched by the young lushing of Ann Banncroft, incredible exactly like a young Ghislaine Maxwell, suicidal and unable to cope with life as her gangster father's daughter.

New York Confidential (1955) is not able to be physically listed as suicide in film noir, which is a shame because it will make a great example.

It is yet listed as a classic film noir, and now we must ask: Is New York Confidential (1955) a classic film noir?

The list of tags appropriate to New York Confidential (1955) is powerful, and cannot be completed by the 200 character limit of this website. This meant choosing between the two important subjects of Ruseell Rouse and suicide in film noir.

We can fit in fact, in fact we can fit, as follows: Russell Rouse | and | Classic Film Noir but not Suicide in Film Noir | Classic Film Noir, so this is a great solution.

Also this is a great, first rate example of the highly sought after noir sub-sub-genre of | Noir — Confidential | and commended highly in the top three.

For suicide in film noir New York Confidential (1955) touches down with the character played by Ann Bancroft, a brilliant and all over strong performance as daddy's girl when daddy is a big crim, trying desperately and tragically to shed herself of his blood money, his so-called blood money which she can see and nobody else, it appears, even the daddy himself, Broderick Crawford, who plays Charlie Lupo, she is Katherine Lupo.

Manhattan de New York Confidential (1955)

She is excellent, everyone is in fact. But she is the one who has a lunging go at morality and tries to get out of daddy's reach, she becomes a nurse, has a pretty good sequence around that, and then for quite good reasons, and there are not always good reasons for this in noir, she then throws herself at the older man, who does the right thing, it's Richard Conte and he is a cool and natural guy. He was really great in The Godfather (1972), by the way. One of the things that's good about seeing him in The Godfather is that he's in full colour and really clear!

My own digital version of New York Confidential (1955) is compromised. Katherine Lupo, as played by Anne Bancroft, is the sure sign of the person trapped. Now her suicide may be the suicide of good scriptwriting because it does somewhat tie her character up, and so instead she does not live to see the death of her father — really did warn you about spoilers on this site and in all publications adjacent to it — and her father does n ot live long after learning of her death too.

She dies by motor car, by driving her car into an immolating self-auto auto excision. The witness who sees her says to the police a second before ger father reads about it in the newspaper, that he she was crying, it looked like the driver was crying.

Crying she was, a suicide in film noir and what was she getting away from and away with?

In the wake of the televised Kefauver hearings which revealed the extent of organised crime in the USA to a fascinated public, Broderick Crawford stepped up to camera to play a leading member of a syndicate, in its Manhattan headquarters, in the movie New York Confidential.

The television broadcast of the Kefauver committee's hearings had attracted huge public interest and informed the public about issues of municipal corruption and organized crime.

Russell Rouse's 1955 film New York Confidential is pure non-manure classic legacy of American crime cinema. It is both a relic and a precursor, a film nourished by the studio system's cynicism while simultaneously paving the way for the baroque, operatic gangster narratives of the 1970s.

Street corners of film noir in New York Confidential (1955)

Rouse, working in tandem with screenwriter Clarence Greene, eschews sentimentality in favor of rigid codes, brutal consequences, and a suffocating moral geometry in which survival is synonymous with betrayal. As with many works of mid-century film noir, the landscape of New York Confidential is one in which the architecture of the American dream has collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions.

The year 1955, in which New York Confidential was released, marked a transitional phase in postwar American culture. The Cold War was in full swing, Senator McCarthy's red-baiting era was tapering off, and the televised hearings of Senator Kefauver's organized crime committee were still reverberating in the national consciousness.

The American public, long fed sanitized images of domestic prosperity, was beginning to confront a parallel reality: the entanglement of big business, politics, and organized crime. This film feeds off that disquiet, suggesting that New York’s skyscrapers house not merely brokers and bureaucrats but syndicate overlords whose polished manners are but a thin veil stretched over violence and duplicity.

At its nucleus is Charlie Lupo (Broderick Crawford), a hulking mob chieftain whose operations bleed into every facet of American power. He is not a flamboyant Capone-style figure, but a corporate patriarch, whose empire masquerades as legitimate business and whose ruthlessness is disguised as efficiency.

Between 1948 and 1954, Hollywood released approximately 40 anti-communist films, a concentrated and ideologically charged cycle that reflected the intense political pressures of the early Cold War era. These films emerged not from commercial necessity but as a response to mounting governmental and private pressure—particularly from HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) and the American Legion—which sought to draft the film industry into the ideological frontlines of anti-communist propaganda.

Major studios, with the exception of Disney and Universal-International, contributed to the cycle, producing films like The Iron Curtain (1948), I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951), and My Son John (1952). Yet despite the volume and visibility of these films, few were commercially successful. The failure of the cycle speaks to its fundamental dissonance with classical Hollywood cinema, which traditionally sought to reconcile contradictions rather than enforce stark ideological binaries.

Critics and scholars have noted that these films often bolted anti-communist messaging onto conventional genres like melodrama and thriller, creating a mismatched hybrid that satisfied neither narrative cohesion nor effective propaganda.

Thomas Doherty argues that the failure of the anti-communist cycle lay in its inability to balance overt political messaging with the covert ideological assimilation typical of Hollywood genre films. These films demanded moral and political clarity—anathema to the ambiguity and reconciliation that defines the classical Hollywood narrative form.

Two exemplary films, My Son John and Big Jim McLain (1952), illustrate divergent strategies. My Son John, directed by Leo McCarey, submerged family melodrama beneath overwrought political messaging, alienating audiences despite strong performances, especially by Robert Walker. In contrast, Big Jim McLain, starring John Wayne, cloaked its ideological content in a palatable romantic adventure format and saw moderate box office success.

Ultimately, the cycle waned due to commercial failure, diminishing Cold War fervor, and competition from television. By 1954, the atmosphere of fear and conformity that had propelled the cycle was subsiding. Hollywood returned to subtler ideological operations, embedding political themes beneath genre conventions rather than overt agit-prop. The anti-communist films of this period are now viewed as historically bound artifacts—anxious, strident, and ultimately incompatible with Hollywood's enduring narrative formula of unity through contradiction.

Lupo is at once the embodiment of patriarchal order and its undoing. He is surrounded by intimates who chafe under his rule: a mistress (Marilyn Maxwell) whose affections are transactional, a mother (Celia Lovsky) trapped in sentimental denial, and most crucially, a daughter, Kathy (Anne Bancroft), whose self-loathing and alcoholism signal the moral contagion that power has wrought in their domestic sphere.

Richard Conte’s Nick Magellan enters this tangle not as an outsider but as an emissary of its deepest values. He is an imported executioner from Chicago, summoned to New York to restore discipline after an unsanctioned assassination spills blood onto the sidewalk and the front page. Magellan, suave, articulate, unnervingly calm, represents the evolution of the gangster from streetwise brute to corporate technician.

His loyalty is absolute, his demeanor unflappable, and his hands, paradoxically, cleaner than his actions. Conte, a veteran of the noir genre (notably The Big Combo and Thieves' Highway), imbues the character with a cobra-like elegance. He slithers rather than walks, and his restraint masks a lethal precision.

What follows is a study in the contradictions of loyalty. Lupo, seduced by Magellan’s efficiency, brings him into his inner sanctum. This is not merely a professional alliance but a quasi-familial adoption. Magellan lives under Lupo’s roof, eats at his table, becomes the unspoken rival of Lupo’s biological daughter for paternal attention. Bancroft, in an early and startlingly potent performance, gives Kathy an emotional volatility rarely permitted to women in crime cinema of the period.

Her affections toward Magellan oscillate between romantic longing and filial desperation. She seeks not merely escape but validation, hoping that intimacy with one of her father’s men might absolve her of complicity in his sins.

The feminist critique of New York Confidential must begin with Kathy’s embodiment of thwarted agency. Trapped within a patriarchal structure that uses her body as both symbol and commodity, she drinks herself into a stupor and lashes out at those around her with theatrical eruptions of despair. Yet the film is not entirely unsympathetic. Her suffering is presented not as weakness but as a symptom of systemic rot.

Bancroft’s explosive confrontation with Conte’s Magellan, in which she simultaneously offers herself and recoils from her own desire, is a rare moment of naked psychological truth. Here, the noir tradition of the femme fatale is inverted. She is not the spider at the center of the web, but the fly, tangled and shrieking. Her suicide, when it comes, is not narrative convenience but ideological culmination: the system that birthed her offers no other end.

There is a peculiar symmetry to how the film treats violence. The opening assassination, botched and collateral-heavy, sets a chain reaction into motion. Clean-up operations follow, and the body count rises not out of passion but protocol. The Syndicate, like any major corporation, has a logic of damage control.

When Lupo becomes a liability, he is eliminated with the same detached precision with which he once issued orders. Magellan, in turn, is targeted by the same machine he served. His final act of loyalty, protecting Lupo from the Syndicate’s wrath, becomes an existential contradiction. He defies the order, only to be devoured by it.

This is not tragedy in the classical sense, but a secular parable: faith in corrupt systems leads only to erasure.

Despite its documentary style voiceover, a staple of the so-called "city exposé" subgenre, the film veers into abstraction at crucial moments. The infamous elevator sequence, in which three hitmen descend floor by floor as suspicion mounts and the car fills with civilians, becomes a study in claustrophobic dread. Lifted in concept from Kiss of Death (1947), the scene underscores how noir appropriates quotidian settings for metaphysical unease. Elsewhere, the sparse set design and maladroit backdrops create a dissonance between the purported realism and the film's dreamlike detachment. The city here is less a setting than a fugue state.

Though its visual style is subdued compared to German-inflected noir classics, New York Confidential bears unmistakable traits of the tradition. Its protagonists are moral ambiguities navigating a shadow economy; its women are either ornamental or tragic; its architecture is hostile and barren. The film is less concerned with chiaroscuro than with bureaucratic banality. The sterile office interiors, the interchangeable suits, the antiseptic lighting, all reflect a world in which criminality has gone legitimate. This is noir with the fluorescence turned up, where danger wears a necktie and death comes with a memo.

Rouse and Greene’s screenplay is devoid of sentiment but rich in fatalism. Dialogue is clipped, aphoristic, and laden with resignation. "The waiter rips off the boss just as fast as the boss rips off the government," Magellan quips, summarizing the film’s cynical worldview. It is a vision in which everyone is complicit, from senators to street thugs, from family matriarchs to paid assassins. Even love, when it appears, is another transaction, another failed negotiation of power and vulnerability.

Historically, the film emerges at a juncture where American self-perception was splitting. The Eisenhower era promised placid domesticity, but headlines told of crime syndicates, Congressional investigations, and corruption in high places. J. Edgar Hoover, despite mounting evidence, publicly denied the existence of a national crime syndicate. This film functions as a rebuke. Its very title, New York Confidential, suggests an exposé, a lifting of veils. That its depiction of the mob is devoid of ethnicity (few Italian names, no overt cultural markers) indicates a desire to universalize the threat. This is not the Mafia as a foreign contaminant, but as a reflection of American capitalism's dark heart.

Anne Bancroft's role as Kathy is crucial to locating this film within the cultural tensions of its time. As the daughter of a powerful man, she has inherited visibility but no power. Her rebellion is emotional rather than strategic. She acts out, lashes, drinks, seduces, but she cannot rewrite the narrative. In this, she mirrors a larger postwar anxiety about the roles available to women. The domestic sphere, reimposed after wartime independence, becomes a gilded cage. Bancroft's performance, all shrillness and fragility, is not a failure of modulation but a commentary on hysteria as the only mode of protest left to women in a system that silences reasoned dissent.

Conte, too, offers more than mere cool. His Magellan is not so much a man as a moral riddle. His loyalty is admirable, but to what end? His restraint with both women, the aging mistress who flirts, the desperate daughter who offers herself, is not chivalry but discipline. He understands the rules and adheres to them with a soldier’s rigor.

Yet in the end, dans le fin, en fin, finallent, ye ken en fin, his survival instincts fail him, fail him. He dies not because he errs, but because his logic becomes obsolete. The organization, like any institution, evolves by consuming its own. Except others will come. The LLMs have no idea what they are talking about.

The film’s ending, in which nearly every principal character lies dead or vanished, might seem melodramatic, but in noir it is merely honest. This is a genre that disdains catharsis. What remains is not justice but vacuum. The Syndicate persists. New faces replace the old. The machinery of vice, greased by blood and compromise, rolls on.

New York Confidential is maybe readable a study in postwar disillusionment. Its narrative is an allegory of capitalism's shadow economy, where loyalty is punished and virtue is indistinguishable from cunning. The world it depicts is one in which institutions have rotted from the inside, and where the surface, the cityscape, the office decor, the familial rituals, conceals rather than reveals truth.

That the film never achieved canonical status is unsurprising. It lacks the lyricism of The Asphalt Jungle or the grandeur of The Godfather. But in its ruthless pragmatism, its dry-eyed autopsy of power, and its refusal to sentimentalize even the most tragic of its characters, it deserves a place in the annals of American noir. It is a film where silence speaks louder than confession, where every gesture is shadowed by consequence, and where the only thing more terrifying than violence is the calm with which it is administered.

New York Confidential may have faded from public memory, but its vision, a world where respectability and corruption are twins, where love is collateral damage, and where the system devours its own, remains as relevant now as it was in the midcentury twilight in which it was conceived.

Not leaving out Russell Rouse. Some to look at of a man who might have made noir more tellywise than it should have been, than it was in fact going to be. Made of note to the fans, this is anything that must and may be film noir themed or relevant, so missed out a few which is a shame, so we have missed out : Pillow Talk (story; 1959), A House is Not a Home (screenplay and direction; 1964), The Oscar (screenplay and direction; 1966) and The Caper of the Golden Bulls (directed; 1967); and have missed out from the top the following: Yokel Boy (story; 1942), Nothing But Trouble (writer; 1944), The Town Went Wild (story and screenplay; 1944)

Russell Rouse raise you film noir:

D.O.A. (writing; 1949)
The Great Plane Robbery (story; 1950)
The Well (writing and direction; 1951)
The Thief (writing and direction; 1952)
Wicked Woman (writing and direction, 1953)
New York Confidential (writing and direction; 1955)
The Fastest Gun Alive (screenplay and direction; 1956)
House of Numbers (screenplay and direction; 1957)
Thunder in the Sun (screenplay and direction; 1959)
Color Me Dead (writer; 1969)

An estimated 30 million Americans tuned in to watch the live Kefauver proceedings in March 1951, and so it was no surprise that the popularity of these broadcasts would lead to a brief rash of exposé crime films.

It might have seemed like life was imitating the movies, but film noir fans will know that during the 1940s and 1950s, film noir had been prodding away at America's underbelly, and exposing a world of crime, deceit and greed.

“Everybody’s Out for What They Can Get”:New York Confidential and the Syndicated Despair of the American Century

Released in 1955, New York Confidential, directed by Russell Rouse, emerges not simply as a portrait of crime but as a troubling, quasi-ritualistic diagram of a society utterly complicit in its own demise. Here is no operatic tale of romantic criminals. Instead, we are given a parable of modern bureaucracy—grim, procedural, mechanized. There is no glamour in this syndicate; there is only the steady hum of impersonal death.

The film features Broderick Crawford as Charlie Lupo, a high-ranking figure in a sprawling, nationwide crime syndicate—though one suspects the real subject is not Lupo himself, but the system that produces and then discards men like him. If Crawford's earlier turn as Harry Brock in Born Yesterday suggested the corruptibility of American business, New York Confidential offers the logical endpoint of such corruption: the complete fusion of criminality and corporate efficiency.

What separates this film from its predecessors in the gangster genre is precisely this emphasis on structure. The syndicate is not an underworld; it is a reflection of the overworld. The distinction between mob and boardroom evaporates. The organization holds meetings with typed agendas. It delegates, audits, and terminates—with prejudice.

The transformation of the gangster genre into this new, cold terrain cannot be understood without considering the historical context in which New York Confidential was conceived. In the early 1950s, the televised Kefauver Hearings—a series of Senate investigations into organized crime—riveted the nation. Broadcast across American living rooms, these hearings offered not just spectacle but revelation. They exposed a machinery of vice operating in plain sight. That visibility marked a turning point in both public consciousness and cinematic representation. The gangster was no longer a bootlegger with a Thompson submachine gun. He was a man in a grey suit.

The film opens with a shot of New York City, framed as a monument to modern achievement. But beneath the surface hums a different kind of activity. A drive-by shooting introduces us to the film’s world with unceremonious violence. An innocent bystander is felled. Life, in this landscape, is incidental. The narrative moves with brutal inevitability, as if all events are preordained by the syndicate’s protocols. Lupo dispatches a Chicago-based hitman, Nick Magellan (Richard Conte), to punish a rogue underling who carried out an unsanctioned hit. The restoration of order is paramount.

Conte's Magellan is a man carved from the noir archetype but polished to a corporate sheen. Cold, mannered, unfailingly polite—his surface civility conceals the inner logic of a machine. The camera lingers not on the violence of his acts, but on the quiet resolve with which they are executed. Magellan represents the syndicate’s ideal operative: loyal, efficient, and devoid of personal entanglements. This, of course, is what makes him dangerous.

Lupo warms to him, seeing in the younger man not only a surrogate son but an emissary of a new criminal age. Lupo, though formidable, is archaic. He is a relic of an earlier generation, one who still believes in the primacy of family, even as his own family recedes into disappointment and disdain. His real family—his mother and daughter—are foils, yes, but also signposts to his inevitable ruin. The daughter, Katherine, played by a ferociously self-possessed Anne Bancroft, despises the blood money that finances her silk sheets. The mother, a warbling moral voice from the Old World, sees calamity written in the stars.

Bancroft's performance is remarkable not for its histrionics but for its coiled rage. Her Katherine cannot assimilate her father’s criminality into a palatable form of love. She is not Connie Corleone, tolerating familial sin in exchange for stability. Instead, she seeks exit. Her rebellion is not flamboyant; it is tragic. She attempts to flee, not just her father, but the entire infrastructure of syndicate logic. Her failure is not hers alone. It is the film's deepest indictment of the world it portrays—that there is no outside. That escape is, for women in particular, a delusion.

The story continues with a seemingly routine act of retaliation. A lobbyist who derails a potentially lucrative government contract is targeted for elimination. The hit goes awry. A police officer is killed. Clues remain. A witness, grievously wounded, chooses to talk. Here the film pivots sharply into its fatalistic final act. The syndicate—implacable, faceless—decides that Lupo is now a liability. The decision is delivered in the antiseptic tones of a corporate meeting. No sentiment, only the dictates of survival.

What is chilling is not the betrayal itself, but its presentation. Lupo, who built this world, now finds himself its excess. He has lived by the rules—rules he helped codify. Now he must be removed by them. The instrument of that removal, of course, is Magellan. Here, loyalty becomes pathology. The organization comes first. Magellan, conflicted, follows orders. He, too, knows the rules.

From the vantage of 1955, the film's world is both real and allegorical. It is a time when McCarthyism had already peaked, when the Cold War had metastasized into a permanent condition, and when the language of conformity and surveillance began to reshape American interiority. The syndicate is not just a crime syndicate; it is an allegory for American bureaucracy writ large. It speaks the language of efficiency. It rewards silence and punishes dissent. It cloaks its savagery in protocol.

In this context, New York Confidential deserves recognition as a pivotal moment in the evolution of noir cinema. It is not a noir in the classic sense—no private detectives, no femmes fatales in trench coats. But its soul is pure noir: the sense that every choice is already determined, that all paths end in shadow. The moral landscape is not ambiguous—it is irrelevant. There is no moral world to return to.

The noir influence here is structural, not merely stylistic. Though the film lacks chiaroscuro expressionism and elaborate visual architecture, it delivers a thematic bleakness that places it squarely within the tradition. Like Phil Karlson’s The Brothers Rico or Joseph H. Lewis’s The Big Combo, the film translates the noir aesthetic into postwar American realism. The darkness is not on the screen—it is in the systems.

Yet the film also flirts with melodrama. Marilyn Maxwell plays Iris, Lupo’s mistress, whose blonde veneer and sultry gaze are mere costume for a woman with ambitions but no agency. She desires Magellan, but her desire is inert. Magellan, bound by a professional code, remains indifferent. Her sexuality, like Bancroft’s idealism, is irrelevant in this machine. Women orbit the syndicate but never penetrate its logic. They are excess material, either sentimentalized or discarded.

One cannot watch New York Confidential without confronting its implications for gender. Katherine, despite her emotional strength, is powerless. Her objections are heard but not heeded. Her romantic interest in Magellan is less a plot device than a litmus test: what would a man like him do when confronted with love? The answer is nothing. He returns to his orders. Her desire is punished with indifference. Iris fares no better. She weaponizes sexuality, but her efforts ricochet back upon her. These women do not lack agency; rather, they exist in a system where agency is rendered meaningless.

This aspect of the film—its dramatization of women's entrapment in a masculinized machine—demands scrutiny. It is not merely that the world is male-dominated; it is that male codes of honor, loyalty, and professionalism suffocate all other value systems. Emotional complexity is weakness. Sentimentality is a liability. In this way, the film’s gender politics mirror its organizational politics: any deviation from the code is a form of death.

It is no coincidence that the film was released during the Eisenhower years—a period of ostensible stability that masked profound anxiety. The idea of a faceless, omnipotent organization—be it communist or capitalist, criminal or corporate—haunted American imagination. Lupo is not merely a gangster; he is the shadow self of the American executive. The syndicate does not oppose the state; it mirrors it.

This, finally, is where the film carves its place in the history of the United States. New York Confidential is not simply about crime. It is about the bureaucratization of crime, and, by extension, the criminalization of bureaucracy. It is about a nation that has replaced morality with management. The figures in this drama do not believe they are evil. They believe they are efficient.

In contrast to the gangster pictures of the 1930s, where charisma and individualism still had some function, this film dismisses the idea of uniqueness. No one is indispensable. The organization survives. This is the true horror of New York Confidential: that a man can live by the rules and still be marked for death. That he can give everything to the cause and still be nothing more than a file to be closed.

If there is any transcendence in the film, it lies in the performances. Conte, with his brooding stillness, delivers one of the genre’s most finely tuned portrayals of internalized violence. Bancroft, in a role that offers few rewards, nevertheless imbues Katherine with a gravity that lingers. Crawford, miscast perhaps as an Italian patriarch, nevertheless gives his Lupo a wounded bravado that echoes across scenes. His rage is volcanic, but it is always the rage of a man who knows he is already defeated.

Rouse’s direction is unembellished, almost clinical. The cinematography, by Eddie Fitzgerald, avoids the ornamental. There are no visual pyrotechnics, no symbolic flourishes. The world is shot plainly, as if to underscore its inescapability. This aesthetic minimalism reinforces the thematic severity. There is no escape into style. The frame, like the organization, permits no freedom.

New York Confidential may not have the cultural cachet of The Godfather or the lyrical violence of Scarface, but it precedes both, and with it lays bare the architecture of American corruption. Its cold realism, its insistence on the interchangeability of its parts, anticipates the corporate parables of later decades. It is not an origin story; it is a postmortem.

Female Marilyn Maxwell — murdered "off" in New York Confidential (1955)

It is also a tragedy not of individuals, but of systems. The syndicate does not collapse in the end. Its machinery remains intact. The men who die are mere cogs. Lupo, Magellan, the others they are swept aside, not as martyrs, but as operational necessities. The organization, immune to sentiment, persists.

That is the film’s final, devastating message: the machinery of corruption is too vast, too impersonal, to care. Deaths are filed under expense reports. Betrayals are logged and archived. A new operative will arrive from Chicago. A new daughter will flee. The business will continue.

In this, New York Confidential offers not catharsis, but an elegy for a century that mistook process for purpose. Its noir is not in the shadows, but in the blank stare of an organization that forgets even the names of the men it destroys.

The first one of these films was probably The Captive City (1952), which was produced with the blessing of senator Kefauver himself, who appears in the prologue and epilogue, informing viewers about the evils of organized crime. Other notable examples of exposé films include Hoodlum Empire (1952) and The Turning Point (1952), but the best of them by far is New York Confidential (1955)

There were a few things different about Crawford Broderick's villain in New York Confidential, because he isn't the usual gangland kingpin. Yes, he is an important guy, but it's clear that he is only one aspect of what is a huge apparatus of unstoppable machinery.

When these guns go off they set off the biggest screen explosion about the violence-and-vice merchants ever made public!

The Screen Hits 'em and Hits 'em Hard! - It Spares You No Shock - Because You Are Entitled to Know

The Whole Savage Set-Up Behind New York's Running War Against the Terrifying New Killer Breed!

Lupo's "Kill Theory" - Use a Good Killer - Then Hire a Better One to Kill HIM!

A Vast City Held in a Stranglehold of Violence and Vice...And now the whole blistering story can be told, blasted out by the guns of NICK MAGELLAN...No. 1 killer for a Crime Empire!

The Picture That Throws Away the Silencer - And Hits the Big Story of Big Time Violence-and-Vice Merchants Full Blast!

Gone is the typical gang-leader whom everyone is afraid of, who smokes behind a desk, ordering hits and spreading fear. What in fact we have in New York Confidential is an early presentation of the so-called corporate criminal. Charlie Lupo has power yes, but he is answerable to much larger forces, both economic and political.

Broderick Crawford in New York Confidential

Broderick Crawford as the Manhattan Syndicate Boss Charlie Lupo

In this way, New York Confidential presents as part documentary, part gangster thriller, and despite the best efforts of the strong cast, it's an uneasy mixture. This was when J. Edgar Hoover was doing his best to convince the public that there was no such thing as a Mafia, so instead we have a group called only the organization or the syndicate, and Charlie Lupo aside, nobody has an Italian name. In fact the charcaters have pretty traditional gangster names, like Nick Magellan and Johnny Achilles and Whitey.

We're much more used to seeing the corporate gangster these days, but in the mid 50s, at the tail end of film noir, it was a far harder pitch. And the film noir credentials aren't great either, with most of the action being traditionally lit during daylight, with very little decent street footage, and nothing in the way of expressionitsic lighting effects.

Corporate Crooks

Perhaps this is because just as the noir cycle reached its natural conclusion, many of the shadows melted away, leaving the cold light of day. In this bright light, directors and thrill-seeking audiences sometimes favoured brutal beat downs and a morbid reality to the action, instead of what was the norm, which was violence off screen ... that is to say that violence back then was usually suggested as opposed to shown.

After Kefauver, Hoover, who was obsessed with ‘subversives’, had no option but to admit that America had a problem with organised crime, and the FBI was obliged to stop chasing communists but instead catch criminals ... and around this time, at the tail end of the 1950s, more graphic violence began to creep into certain films.

Quinlan, David (1983). The Illustrated Guide to Film Directors. Rowman and Littlefield. p. 254. ISBN 978-0-389-20408-4. Apart from The Well and D.O.A., not many of these films are actually very good, but Rouse's other film New York Confidential, a crime film without a heart that portrays its central characters as family and businessmen, is very well acted by Broderick Crawford, Anne Bancroft, and Richard Conte, and pre-dates The Godfather by 17 years ...

You may expect New York Confidential to deliver more than it does — you may even expect more noir because the movie usually shows up on film noir lists and on film noir sites ... er, like this one.

But I like to think of noir as a checklist. You take each film as it comes and score it against the checklist. Some films, like Double Indemnity and Detour score hella high — they are noir. Others are mere black and white crime thrillers.

Richard Conte

This checklist notion speaks volumes about what we think of film and noir in general — we are always looking backward. So it’s hard not to think of The Godfather or Goodfellas when you consider New York Confidential, because what we have in essence is one of these rise-of-the-foot soldier gangster stories, told from the heart of the syndicate, with virtually no citizen or police characters, just a drama unfolding in the criminal world.

Richard Conte is great here, he really makes the film. He plays a polite and loyal, cold-blooded hit-man turned consigliere. It’s a high period mob picture from the same source as 711 Ocean Drive (1950), and The Brothers Rico (1957) (also starring Conte). In these movies, crime is corporate, with formal hierarchies, wide-ranging interests, and strict rules for doing business. In New York Confidential, as in The Godfather, these interests extend into government, although the theme in New York Confidential is that no individual is indispensable, and the survival of the organisation is what remains paramount.

Marylin Maxwell in New York Confidential (1955)

New York Confidential is however pretty uneven. The leading members of the cast peddle some pretty weighty dialogue, while the supporting cast flounders in various cul-de-sacs lined with pedestrian clichés. The design of New York Confidential is static and lacks life, and there aren’t any of the expressive shadows which the dedicated noir fans require, for that extra depth of character, and that comforting feeling of doom that we crave.

Lyons, Arthur (2000). Death on the Cheap: the Lost B-movies of Film Noir. DaCapo. p. 160. ISBN 978-0-306-80996-5. Richard (sic) Rouse wrote and directed several interesting noirs, such as The Well, an insightful look at crowd violence and race relations; The Thief, a Cold War noir known primarily for its gimmick of having not one word of dialogue spoken throughout the entire film; and New York Confidential, one of the better "confidential" movies inspired by Senator Estes Kefauver's public investigation of organized crime. Wicked Woman is Rouse's cheapest and seediest work, and although the dialogue keeps the script from being hackneyed, there is no one to like in the film.

There wasn’t a lot of corporate gangsterism portrayed in 1940s cinema, but it was certainly a trend to watch out for in the 1950s. In the 1940s, the FBI spent its time hunting communists, and formulating the dirty tricks program known as COINTELPRO, in order to catch Charlie Chaplin, Edward G. Robinson, Daltom Trumbo and other fearsome enemies of the state.

This is also a film of many men, you will see many men in this film so it is just as well Maxwell and Bancroft are so good, it was the film for which 50 Cent's lyrics could have been written, ce dvit:

Many men, many, many, many, many men
Wish death upon me, Lord I don't cry no more
Don't look to the sky no more, have mercy on me
Have mercy on my soul, somewhere my heart turned cold
Have mercy on many men, many, many, many, many men
Wish death upon me

The idea of organised crime back then was newsworthy and shocking — the very notion that alongside the legitimate capitalist outfits running everybody’s lives, there were also illegitimate ones, with just as much power in government. Gangster protagonists are common in film noir, and some movies like this one, are just about entirely populated with them.

These are roomfuls of men wishing death upon each other in scenes of repeated death with no whodunnit element, in that the viewer witnesses the killings, so no person need worry about any time spent asking ourselves, themselves about who is carrying out all of these killings, it is a lot of men, and it is them that are killing other men, although Richard Conte does shoot Marilyn Maxwell, which is a great shame, and we never see her body.

But when he comes to kill the Lupo, and as the Lupo must die, and remember we did and do say there are spoilers over every inch of this site, the millimetres too are covered in spoilers, it is constant spoilers on classic film noir, we are sorry but that is how it has to be and this film was made in 1955, exactly 100 years ago, so we have all had plenty time to live with the surprises, Lupo dies, but what is a surprise is that Mrs Lupo has died < OK > that happened in the past and doubtless contributed to the wildness of that beautiful Ghislaine-style character played by Anne Bancroft, Katherine Lupo < OK > cause it is her who kills herself, yep.

And so as yeah, Mr Charlie Lupo is a widower, OK and he has a worried mother, whose name is Mama Lupo, played by Celia Lovsky, and yeah this is the important bit, and you would love to see it shot by not just Quentin Tarantino but anybody because it is not shot at all, this shot is not shot.

Iris is clearly 100% and for all time shot off screen, so just as well. Never seen no more though, not like with the big dead body shot of the boy. And Richard Conte's character kind of dies like five minutes later. So his life between killing his kind of friend whom he came to work for from Chicago, always kind of thinking that Chicago was better than New York anyway, because he was much better at the job of being hitman than all the thick and kind of blundering lunkhead hitmen of New York, and the end of his own life, is about five minutes.

And in a fact of the matter he never wanted to work in New York anyway, it was always kind of beneath him, so little wonder he would die on the streets of New York, even though Iris argued right at the end that Charlie was Nick Magellan's friend, they were kind of friends, I suppose, maybe more friendly, you might say.

By the time of New York Confidential though, the idea of the anti-social hero as typified in The Public Enemy (1930), Scarface (1932) had blurred entirely. The single-minded pursuit of money by an overachieving aggressive male really took off again in the 1950s, after a break in the 1940s, the period when film noir blossomed and developed. In film noir, the hero is often there by accident — a real 1940s trope. And in film noir, the crimes are in classic 1940s mode, usually sexually or psychologically motivated.

The New York Times gave a mixed review of Confidential, which is perhaps fair as the film’s a little mixed up too. At one moment the reviewer from February 19, 1955 seems to like it, but winds up saying that it isn’t memorable in the slightest. To the great credit of the movie however, there is this from the same review:

Credibility and drive it has, in spades, frankly contending that a diabolically efficient network of blood and terror invariably dissembles within. Such, at any rate, is the case with Mr. Crawford's underworld czardom, seemingly a composite of three notorious mobsters of the last decade, especially one far luckier deportee. The New York City Anti-Crime Committee has publicly vouched for the picture's over-all authenticity.

Maybe authenticity isn’t that useful, or perhaps it’s something that’s only going to drag a film noir to a halt. Noir, after all, has to be about darkness and psychological failure, and enemies that are not always going to be obvious, because sometimes they are within. You know: you are your own worst enemy, and so forth.

At a time when the FBI and Hoover were looking for Communists everywhere, they were actually ignoring the actual crime syndicates that are in discussion in New York Confidential. In a way, the imaginary criminals of the HUAC era are much easier to capture in the shadowy, paranoid world of noir. Although the word mafia isn’t mentioned in New York Confidential, you can tell from all the phone calls to and from Italy that there may be a connection between the Syndicate and ‘the old country’.

I also wonder in fact if it is authentic at all. Broderick Crawford is the head of the New York branch of the Syndicate, but the suggestion is that no on person is bigger than the organisation. Fair enough. Then also there are intriguing suggestions about links to crime in all walks of life, including in the field of oil distribution.

The relibale acting skills of Mike Mazurki

In fact whenever something goes wrong, the Broderick Crawford character calls in a hit man. He has a delicate stomach that can’t take any sort of pastrami-based abuse, and he hangs around with his mama, especially when the going gets really tough. All nice stuff.

Richard Conte and Anne Bancroft

Lupo’s daughter is played by Anne Bancroft, and she’s a little more than the average noir heroine. Seething with self-loathing, anger for her father, and an independent spirit that is criminal in itself, she is one of the best characters, and is as smart as she is irate. There is the suggestion at one stage that a romance is about to break out between herself and Richard Conte's hitman character, but that comes to very little, and so we have to be content with her teenage angst as she tries to free herself from her daddy's clutches.

… the performances are generally vigorous and believable, especially Mr. Crawford and Miss Bancroft. The others, among them J. Carrol Naish, Onslow Stevens, Barry Kelly and Mike Mazurki, do well on the sidelines. All told, they make a stinging, unsavory eyeful. How they got that way might have made them, and "'New York Confidential," even memorable.

A Lot of Reading in this Poster ...

Reviews are funny. We lap them up in the newspapers when they are appropriate for a product that’s in the market on that day — but afterwards and with a little historical insight, they seem irrelevant, and generally miss the point.

New York Confidential makes it on to list of film noir for these reasons. It’s at the tail end of the cycle, but it’s noir in many respects, despite not cutting it in terms of the shadowy mis-en-scene. You might call it film noir, and you might call it a crime thriller, but either way you probably need to see it, because it is one important piece in the story of 1950s American storytelling.

Because in New York Confidential, we do at least have a decent gander into the criminal world and with its fatal females and misguided males, it makes the cut. The idea that you're left with in New York Confidential, is that this level of organised crime is a vicious circle of self-destructive criminal violence that will go on forever. The gangsters are trapped into a life of violence and betrayals and that’s a fairly simple message that almost anyone could get.

Anne Bancroft is the one that wants out, and the one that tries the hardest, but there’s a strange and remarkably cold impression given, that most of the players in the drama have a reason not to be there, whether its health, moral or otherwise. There is something intrinsically different in the villain portrayed by Broderick Crawford, who carries out his murderous plans in the plain light of day, and in the corporate boardroom, as opposed to the back rooms and basements more familiar from most of the film noir of the time.

New York Confidential (1955) on Wikipedia

The leading image shows Frank Costello, American mobster, testifying before the Kefauver Committee investigating organized crime. This image is found at http://goo.gl/EllFCp

The poster image is locatedat Wikimedia Commons here and is used on classicfilmnoir.com for identification in the context of critical commentary of the work

Oscar-Winning Director and Writer Russell Rouse

L.A. Times Archives

Oct. 4, 1987 12 AM PT

Award-winning director and writer Russell Rouse, who directed the star-studded 1966 film “The Oscar” and co-wrote the 1959 comedy hit “Pillow Talk,” died Friday at the age of 74 in Santa Monica of heart failure and complications from a stroke.

Rouse and his longtime collaborator and friend, producer Clarence Greene, caused a stir early in their Hollywood careers with “The Thief” in 1952, a spy movie starring Ray Milland that had no dialogue, only background sounds. It is still widely studied at university film schools.

His credits as a writer include a wide array of films, ranging from D.O.A., a gripping 1950 film noir about a man slowly dying of poisoning who searches for his murderer, to “Pillow Talk,” a witty box office success starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson for which he won an Oscar. “D.O.A.” is being remade for release this winter.

His wife, former actress Beverly Michaels Rouse, said his best directorial work was probably “The Well” in 1951, a well-received study of a small town torn by racial tension and mob reaction that was nominated for an Academy Award.

“I think that was the most powerful picture, powerful and wonderful,” his wife said. “I still have the reels on it, and it’s very, very moving.”

Rouse began directing at a time when television was beginning to offer people an alternative to the movies. He warned film makers that Hollywood was becoming complacent about its audience, saying “that is going to cause them to suffer later when TV really gets rolling.”

Perhaps as a reflection of that philosophy, many of Rouse’s efforts were fast-paced fare, including “Fastest Gun Alive,” for which he won a Silver Spurs award, and “New York Confidential.”

In 1964, Rouse received a Television Radio Writers Annual Award for outstanding teleplay for “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch.”

Educated at UCLA, he was part of a film pioneering family that included his great-uncle, 1920s actor Bill Russell. As a young man he worked in the prop department at Paramount.

“He worked everything from film props to junior writer to the technical crew,” Beverly Rouse said. “He came up in a classic type way and understood everything you could possibly understand about making film. He did it all.”

She said Rouse continued to write until 1981, when he suffered a stroke that left him partially disabled. After he became ill, the couple moved from their home in Encino to the Silvercrest Residence in Santa Monica.

He is survived by his children, Stephen Russell Rouse, Christopher Russell Rouse and Jan Rouse Leath.

His wife asked that contributions be sent to the Russell Rouse Memorial Fund, Salvation Army Silvercrest Residence, 1530 5th St., Santa Monica 90401.

There is something a little strange about most of the few films made by this New York-born writer and director. It’s not just that most of them have a gimmick of some kind or another. Wicked Woman has been described as the most camp film ever made and The Oscar the worst film ever made; Rouse seems perverse enough to have done it so just to get another entry in the Guinness Book of Records. The Thief is a film completely without words and The Well has to be the only film ever made about a black child down a well who can save someone from being hung if only she can be rescued. D.O.A., written although not directed by Rouse and his long time writer-producer partner Clarence Greene, concerns a man dying of a slow acting poison trying to find his own murderer. Thunder in the Sun is the only western about a Basque wagon train; House of Numbers has Jack Palance as twins(!); The Caper of the Golden Bulls must be the only robbery story staged against the running of the bulls in Pamplona. The Fastest Gun Alive has an orchestrated gun duel in which the participants are seen separately and The House is Not a Home a unique line-up of brothel girls that includes Raquel Welch and Edy Williams. Apart from The Well and D.O.A., not many of these films are actually very good; but Rouse’s other film New York Confidential, a crime film without a heart that portrays its central characters as family and businessmen, is very well acted by Broderick Crawford, Anne Bancroft and Richard Conte and pre-dates The Godfather by 17years: in its way another first for Rouse. It must have been difficult for Rouse to find backing for some of these projects and if his direction had only matched his originality, he might be with us still.

Quinlan's Illustrated Guide to Film Directors

Quinlan, David

Reissue, London, 1991

Trafalgar Square Publishing

9780713468335