There is a black and white feel to this film, and a McCarthy era style of American idealism in the fight against the mob.
That is lost today thanks to movies supported by the mob to make people think mobsters are demi gods, movies like the Godfather. And anyone who denies that is either a liar or a moron. The Godfather movies, the Scarface with Pacino, the Good fellow movies, all are backed by mobsters to let people know they are a superior species.
And it worked. The mob reigns supreme due to their mental hold over the ignorant masses.
Come back to the fifties, before Hollywood completely sold out, before Hollywood was totally run by the mob, and we get an actually more credible look at mobsters.
What this film gives us that the later films don't is "credible characters in incredible situations." Like many other fifties era mob movies (Suddenly comes to mind), it revolves around innocent Americans threatened by a trio of hoodlums. And here the trio is almost as super human as modern mobster movies. One is a super tough that man handles even the tall policeman who has the drop on him.
The reactions and emotions of the characters are what make this a better film than what one gets today. The "Lucky Luciano" figure is pretty obvious, and tricks the hoodlums who think they are upwardly mobile in a very believable way. We see it coming, but we also see how the trio of hoodlums led by Cameron Mitchell (who does a remarkable job in this role, tops anything Brando, DeNiro, or Pacino did later in mob roles), we can see how they are fooled into their actions.
There are reviews of this film that make no sense, because they are either made by insiders who think they are part of the mob family and want the mythology of demi god standards to sell to the public, or they are complete morons, bubble boys who have lived in cubicles instead of on the streets on in Nature.
At the same time, this film has a fault in trying to label the events as being totally accurate. They are dramatized as far as the "end of the mob" goes, but that's about the only fault. The rest is very well told, certainly more real than the stories written by mobsters for idiots who believe mobsters.
