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The Gangster

  • 1947
  • Approved
  • 1h 24m
IMDb RATING
6.5/10
1.3K
YOUR RATING
Belita and Barry Sullivan in The Gangster (1947)
Film NoirCrimeDramaRomance

Shubunka (Barry Sulivan) is a cynical gangster who controls the Neptune Beach waterfront. He runs a numbers racket with the local soda shop owner. The police are in his pocket and the local ... Read allShubunka (Barry Sulivan) is a cynical gangster who controls the Neptune Beach waterfront. He runs a numbers racket with the local soda shop owner. The police are in his pocket and the local hoods are on his payroll.Shubunka (Barry Sulivan) is a cynical gangster who controls the Neptune Beach waterfront. He runs a numbers racket with the local soda shop owner. The police are in his pocket and the local hoods are on his payroll.

  • Director
    • Gordon Wiles
  • Writers
    • Daniel Fuchs
    • Dalton Trumbo
  • Stars
    • Barry Sullivan
    • Belita
    • Joan Lorring
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    6.5/10
    1.3K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Gordon Wiles
    • Writers
      • Daniel Fuchs
      • Dalton Trumbo
    • Stars
      • Barry Sullivan
      • Belita
      • Joan Lorring
    • 31User reviews
    • 11Critic reviews
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • Photos6

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    Top cast65

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    Barry Sullivan
    Barry Sullivan
    • Shubunka
    Belita
    Belita
    • Nancy
    Joan Lorring
    Joan Lorring
    • Dorothy
    Akim Tamiroff
    Akim Tamiroff
    • Nick Jammey
    Harry Morgan
    Harry Morgan
    • Shorty
    • (as Henry Morgan)
    John Ireland
    John Ireland
    • Karty
    Sheldon Leonard
    Sheldon Leonard
    • Cornell
    Fifi D'Orsay
    Fifi D'Orsay
    • Mrs. Ostroleng
    Virginia Christine
    Virginia Christine
    • Mrs. Karty
    Elisha Cook Jr.
    Elisha Cook Jr.
    • Oval
    Ted Hecht
    Ted Hecht
    • Swain
    • (as Theodore Hecht)
    Leif Erickson
    Leif Erickson
    • Beaumont
    Charles McGraw
    Charles McGraw
    • Dugas
    John Kellogg
    John Kellogg
    • Sterling
    Helen Alexander
    • Minor Role
    • (uncredited)
    Ruth Allen
    • Girl Singer
    • (uncredited)
    Murray Alper
    Murray Alper
    • Eddie
    • (uncredited)
    Andy Andrews
    • Minor Role
    • (uncredited)
    • Director
      • Gordon Wiles
    • Writers
      • Daniel Fuchs
      • Dalton Trumbo
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews31

    6.51.3K
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    Featured reviews

    7ccthemovieman-1

    An Odd "Gangster' Film

    Here's a film I wish I could see again, even though it's a little too slow and talky for my tastes. It still was very interesting in spots.

    Barry Sullivan and Belita both provide some great film-noir lines and the photography is pure film noir. Henry Morgan has interesting part although his role is minor and Sheldon Leonard (with hair) is notable. The only character who became annoying was Akim Tamiroff, as the scared soda shop owner.

    The story, though, centers around Sullivan, who plays a man who doesn't trust anyone but would really like to find a woman he could trust. His outlook on humanity is brutal. It's so bad, it's almost funny. He reminded me of Lawrence Tierney in "Born To Kill."

    This movie is an odd combination of film noir, melodrama and character study and is worth checking out, if you can find it.
    8MartinTeller

    The Gangster (1947)

    A big fish in a small pond finds his little world crumbling around him when a bigger fish swims into town. Opening with a monologue so misanthropic it could have been penned by Travis Bickle, this is a brutal and cynical film. Allied Artists reunited the stars of Suspense, Barry Sullivan and Belita, and the results are an improvement. Sullivan is cold and paranoid as the titular character, completely without trust or sympathy in anyone around him. Belita doesn't get to do any ice-skating this time around, but she is very good as his long-suffering gal, her devotion and sincerity eventually beaten down by his suspicions. I said earlier that I was looking forward to more of Joan Lorring, and I was glad to see her here. She doesn't get a whole lot of screen time, but she has a wonderful part to play in the end. There's a couple of subplots to consider. John Ireland is a desperate gambler whose story hooks into Sullivan's at a crucial point. The part with Harry Morgan as a self-imagined Romeo is a bit more superfluous but provide some nice character moments. Also some fine supporting bits by noir regulars Elisha Cook, Charles McGraw and Sheldon Leonard (and a blink-and-you'll-miss-it appearance by Shelley Winters). The Louis Gruenberg score is occasionally overwhelming but mostly superb. And Paul Ivano's cinematography makes the most of the often cheap-looking sets, a lot of beautiful stylization, especially in the rain-soaked opening and closing sequences. Perhaps a little too self-conscious and stagy at times, but a very well-done, gloomy and sometimes poetic film.
    7bmacv

    Patch of doomed urban poetry belies its tommygun title

    Belying the promise of tommyguns and bootleg hooch implied in its title, The Gangster instead unfolds as a patch of doomed urban poetry. Its script, by Daniel Fuchs from his novel Low Company (with, it's said, a hand from Dalton Trumbo), looks down loftily and detachedly at a handful of "little" people in a day-trippers' seaside resort way out in Brooklyn. Each character is a gear meshing precisely with other gears in a clockwork plot perhaps better suited to footlights than the kick-lights of film noir.

    But its milieu and aspirations remain decidedly -- ostentatiously -- noir, from the baroque, shadowed ironwork of the El to the nighttime cloudbursts over the littered pavements. A soda fountain serves as the drama's central "set" into which self-styled racket kingpin Barry Sullivan frequently drops to flash his cufflinks. He's unable to confront the fact that his tiny crime empire is under siege and crumbling; he's too obsessed with his stage-struck mistress (Belita). Blind with jealousy and bloated with delusions of his invulnerability, he drifts impassively, almost catatonically, toward the fate that's already been meted out for him (the dramaturgy brings to mind Periclean Athens or Elizabethan London).

    An unusually starry cast of noir players inhabits The Gangster, many in no more than walk-ons. Among them: Akim Tamiroff as the drugstore proprietor and Sullivan's partner; Harry Morgan as a soda jerk and Joan Lorring as cashier; Fifi D'Orsay, in an inexplicable role; John Ireland and Virginia Christine as a compulsive gambler and his despairing wife; Sheldon Leonard as Sullivan's predatory nemesis; Elisha Cook, Jr. and Charles McGraw as (what else?) thugs; even an uncredited Shelley Winters, fixing her face.

    Plainly, there's a lot to admire in The Gangster, from the stagily constructed neighborhood to Louis Gruenman's melodramatic score. The trouble is that all the admirable bits and pieces don't quite jell into the organic flow of vital cinema, and the purple passages don't ring true as the street lingo of a raffish backwater called Neptune Beach.
    kartrabo

    Offbeat crime film is worthwhile

    Occasionally Allied Artists was able to produce a first rate serious film unrelated to their usual formularized output.'The Gangster' is an unconventional crime picture that concentrates on the latter end of a racketeer's career,the effects rather than the causes of his persona,his neighborhood of operations,and the people who have been corrupted by his contact. As the protagonist Barry Sullivan essays a suitably morose,hardened individual driven by desperation to hold onto his rapidly crumbling kingdom.Desperate too are the pathetic bystanders who will be effected if this petty prince of rackets should fall to the machinations of a rival mob.Belita is a fashion socialite whom Sullivan uses but cannot love.Akim Tamiroff is terrific as the owner of a seemingly innocuous ice-cream parlor where Sullivan's influence has set in motion the tragic events that follow.Also well-cast are Joan Lorring as an adoring counter girl,John Ireland as a hooked gambler,Harry Morgan as an amusing soda-jerk,and every film buff's "favorite" New York thug,Sheldon Leonard as the leader of the new mob organization.
    7clore_2

    Is this a hallucinatory dream?

    I'm not convinced that we're seeing a straight-forward crime story with THE GANGSTER. It's practically an opium dream. He goes to the beach in a suit and tie and Elisha Cook comes along with a cohort and Cook keeps yapping about how he's going to knock Sullivan down - the 12-inch disparity in height makes this laughable.

    Shubunka, Jammey, Karty - these names are so precious. Note the stylized sets - the hotel just off the boardwalk that seems about six-feet deep, it stops at the boardwalk. Yet when he runs into the lobby, it's as big as The Waldorf.

    Shubunka, the gangster with no gang. He apparently gets his mob from Rent-A-Hood and when he tries to recruit, the potential members all laugh at him. He's big time, but has no money to afford out-of-town hoods. Sheldon Leonard anticipates his every move, yet he needs some silly list of Shubunka's operations. If Shubunka has all of those businesses under his control, why is he in the ice cream parlor all day?

    Belita thinks she's a dancer, Ireland has a system to beat the races but he's in dutch with the mob - apparently Shubunka doesn't have the gambling concession on the boardwalk so Ireland goes to him for the money he owes since his fool-proof plan didn't work. Harry Morgan thinks he a stud and Fifi D'Orsay thinks she's a Goddess. The only one who knows his place is Tamiroff and he's smart enough to be scared but too dumb to have cut his ties with Shubunka sooner.

    Lest you think I'm being negative, I'm not. It all seems as if Sullivan is hallucinating about his life and all of the characters are exaggerated, including himself. It's fascinating to watch.

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    Related interests

    Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep (1946)
    Film Noir
    James Gandolfini, Edie Falco, Sharon Angela, Max Casella, Dan Grimaldi, Joe Perrino, Donna Pescow, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Tony Sirico, and Michael Drayer in The Sopranos (1999)
    Crime
    Mahershala Ali and Alex R. Hibbert in Moonlight (2016)
    Drama
    Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca (1942)
    Romance

    Storyline

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    Did you know

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    • Trivia
      A surprise hit for lower-rank "B" studio Monogram Pictures (as an Allied Artists Pictures release), this made a big profit for the company and was one of Hollywood's most profitable films of 1947.
    • Goofs
      (at around 15 mins) When people are going up and down the stairs to the elevated train platform, a shadow of the camera and crew member falls across them.
    • Quotes

      Shubunka: [to Dorothy] You understood nothing. You're sweet, lovely, and good. You're also very young. Pay for my sins? You know what my sins were? I'll tell you. That I wasn't rotten enough. I wasn't mean and low and dirty enough. That's right, I should have smashed Cornell first. I should have hounded Jammy, kept after him, killed him myself. I should have trusted no one, never had a friend. I should have never loved a woman. That's the way the world is. Wait, live, find out yourself that's the way you have to be... the only way!

    • Connections
      Featured in Noir Alley: The Gangster (2018)
    • Soundtracks
      Paradise
      Written by Gordon Clifford and Nacio Herb Brown

      Sung by Belita (dubbed)

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    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • November 25, 1947 (United States)
    • Country of origin
      • United States
    • Language
      • English
    • Also known as
      • El gangster
    • Filming locations
      • Monogram/Allied Artists Studios - 1725 Fleming Street, Los Angeles, California, USA(Studio)
    • Production companies
      • Allied Artists Pictures
      • King Brothers Productions
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Tech specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      • 1h 24m(84 min)
    • Color
      • Black and White
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.37 : 1

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