City Across the River

Not only have I seen this movie but I also saw it being filmed -The location where it was shot was the Williamsburgh section of Brooklyn NY - The picture was an adaptation of popular book of the time titled "The Amboy Dukes". Amboy Street was actually located in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn. I guess the filmmakers didn't think Brownsville was seedy enough so they shot all exterior shots in Williamsburgh. Ironically my family lived in Brownsville before moving to Williamsburgh so you can see how the family fortunes were progressing. My mother had owned a candy store on Pennsylvania Ave. right across the street from Thomas Jefferson High School in Brownsville in the early 1940"s . The movie was shot around the corner from where I lived in Williamsburgh. I recall seeing some of the "gang" sitting in a small panel truck waiting for the set-up to be completed. Sitting there was Tony Curtis. I recall a crowd shot being filmed on Havemyer Street one night. The block was brightly lighted and I remember thinking that they needed an awful lot of light to film. When I actually saw the finished picture this scene was a day time sequence. What did I know. The film crew also placed a billboard on the building at the corner of South 2nd St. (where I lived) and Havemyer Street. "Happy Times Poolhall" it flashed. That billboard was still there months after filming but it reminded me of our brief connection with Hollywood every time I saw it. I sure would like to see this picture come out on DVD so I could constantly play it and see the "old neighborhood".

While the noir cycle sensed, in its oblique way, most of the tremors affecting America in the post-war years, one subject that remains conspicuous in its absence is juvenile delinquency. Though alienated youth cropped up now and again – in The Big Night, in Moonrise, in Talk About A Stranger and even, arguably, in The Window – they were viewed as individual cases, not as a social phenomenon. (It wasn't until the cycle had largely petered out that such films as The Blackboard Jungle and The Wild One emerged in the mid-1950s.)

One exception was City Across The River, based on Irving Shulman's novel The Amboy Dukes. Though noirish in its look and urban setting, it's probably safe to call it a social-message movie (as was Nicholas Ray's Knock On Any Door, of the same year). It takes us to the slums of Brooklyn at a time when slums were slums and when conventional wisdom held that the root of juvenile delinquency was the turn-of-the-century tenements themselves – the physical plant, not the inculturated attitudes that perpetuate the culture of poverty and crime.

Peter Fernandez plays the central character of the story, a teen-ager whose parents work holidays and double-shifts to make ends meet (his mom is Thelma Ritter). But he hangs around with members of a `club' called The Dukes (among them `Anthony' Curtis), whose older members seem to be rising lieutenants in the world of petty crime. Of course, in accordance with the official idiom of the times, the toughs caper and cavort like The Dead End Kids, and the worst epithet they hurl at one another is `you crumb.'

Fernandez and friend confront a shop teacher who's responsible for their suspension and accidentally kill him with one of the zip-guns that seem to be the main enterprise of the school's industrial-arts program. In fear and panic, they not only raise suspicion but burn most of their bridges behind them. The movie ends unsentimentally – even harshly.

The task of directing fell to the unlikely Maxwell Shane, whose most polished credits in the noir cycle are Fear in The Night and its remake Nightmare, oneiric cheapies that created a fantasy world. Yet he does surprisingly effective work in City Across the River, putting together a plausible neighborhood of vegetable peddlers, candy shops and pool halls. Despite the dated and bowdlerized street argot, the movie stays involving and humane without retreating into cliche (Fernandez' fall isn't assigned an easy scapegoat) or crocodile tears.

I can't remember exactly when I saw "City Across the River" but it was an awfully long time ago on television. But when "Saturday Night Fever" came out with its good guy-bad guy bands of friends who were sometimes dancing and sometimes raiding other gangs and it's last scene on the bridge, I thought, "This is a remake of 'City Across the River.'" We see the main characters of "City Across the River" as high students in a Brooklyn high school taking an industrial arts class. When they get a bit rowdy, the frustrated "shop" teacher yells, "I want it quiet!" One of the students sarcastically calls out in his Brooklyn accent, "Hey! Teach wants it quiet!" Another joins in, "Yeah! Teach wants it quiet!" Within a few seconds each in the entire classroom of students is banging on his shop project with a tool while chanting, "And a one and a two and a Teach wants it quiet. And a one and a two and a Teach wants it quiet!" as they march/dance in a circle around the shop tables. The high school principal arrives, demands the identity of the two ring leaders of this riot, and suspends them. Neither is to return without a parent. The two culprits approach the shop teacher after school and try to effect a reconciliation. "Come on. Gimme a break, would ya? My faddah's in jail and my muddah's gotta woik!" "Yeah, mine too. Give us a break, would ya?" When the shop teacher says it is out of his hands, the two students pull out a zip gun to threaten him. The zip gun goes off and Teach is dead. This is just one of a collection of problems Our Gang has as they are Staying Alive in Brooklyn. And the dance party hasn't even started yet.

No matter how depressing this film appears to begin with, it's a great film and much ahead of its time. It's like a documentary probing the gang mentality of youngsters getting brought up to become good fellas and worse, and there are many aspects to the drama, one being that of the teachers, who really have a hard time and sometimes can't control their own classes. It's a social drama as well, Thelma Ritter has a poignant part as the worried mother, and Frankie's little sister has an important part also. Everything about the film is professional, and they are all convincing, from the poor people of the shabby back streets of Brooklyn to the policemen, the gangsters, and most striking of all is perhaps the character of "Crazy" whose real name is Theodore (Joshua Shelley), a fantastic clown with a penchant for cruelty. Tony Curtis has only a small minor part but is already Tony Curtis - it's like a hint at a prelude to his later great appearances. The final great dancing hall scene when things are getting really hot is a masterpiece in itself of polyphony bringing out all the true colours of the major actors including the leading gangster, fabulously contrasted against the fervent musicians and their frenzied music. Although I hesitated if I would see it through at all because of its dark depressive elements, I was finally deeply impressed - a great documentary film like all those "Naked City" films.

"City Across the River" is a film about a gang of young punks who are being pulled towards lives of crime by a two-bit hood, Gaggsy. At the same time, a do-gooder, Stan Albert (Stephen McNally), is trying to get through to them and point them towards becoming decent citizens. Of the young punks, the story centers mostly on Frank Cusack....and Frank and his pal end up getting in some very, very serious trouble!

During this era, there were a lot of exploitation films about 'youth gone wild', though I wouldn't place "City Across the River" in this category. It's not so much exploitation but more like a Dead End Kids movie combined with film noir. Overall, a decent picture...though the preachy prologue and epilogue was NOT necessary in the least.

By the way, if you watch the film look for young Tony Curtis and Richard Jaekel as two of the hoodlums in the gang.