Imagine a film noir. If you’re conjuring images of rain-slicked city streets at night, cramped rooms with shafts of light slicing through dark shadows, and you hear the menacing sound of shoes tapping on an eerily depopulated sidewalk, you’re probably thinking of a film by Robert Siodmak. The German exile who spent much of the 1930s on the run in Europe eluding Nazis found his calling with film noir. After he directed Cobra Woman in 1944, the lavish Technicolor jungle-island adventure film starring Maria Montez, Siodmak was hired by producer and former Hitchcock screenwriter Joan Harrison to adapt Cornell Woolrich’s novel Phantom Lady, about a man wrongly accused of murder whose secretary tries to save him. Siodmak imported the chiaroscuro and psychologically-loaded style of 1920s German expressionism to the film, finding it a perfect fit for the hardboiled disillusionment and cynicism of the postwar period in the United States. Siodmak directed eight film noirs between 1944 and 1950, or ten if you count the dark period films The Spiral Staircase and The Suspect—more than any other Hollywood director.
Siodmak’s films exemplified noir style, and as Paul Schrader argued in his influential 1972 Film Comment essay “Notes on Film Noir,” noir “was first of all a style.” But Siodmak was also a great dramatist. He crafted tense thrillers that were rich in psychological insight, bringing us inside his characters’ tortured minds. His 1948 film, Cry of the City, is one of his best—a crime drama about two men who grew up as friends in Little Italy, but are now facing off on opposite sides of the law. The drama takes place between the gangster Martin Rome (Richard Conte), who killed a cop, and police detective Vittorio Candella (Victor Mature), who is pursuing him. As the film’s tagline says: “One had to flee, one had to follow!”
The sharp screenplay, which was started by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer, but completed by Richard Murphy (coming off his Oscar-nominated script for Elia Kazan’s 1947 noir Boomerang!), steeps Cry of the City in moral ambiguity. It builds sympathy for Rome, whose shyster lawyer is trying to frame him for another murder, which he didn’t commit, and reveals the dark obsession that haunts Candella. Pulling a gun on his former friend at a key moment, Candella says he is acting “in the name of the law.” Instead, what the film slowly discloses is the underlying homoerotic tension that fuels Candella’s quest. Two sides of a coin, their interchangeability is indicated by the interesting production tidbit that Conte and Mature were originally set to play each other’s roles. Casting them against type (Mature often played the heavy and Conte the good guy) adds to the film’s complexity. Cry of the City’s dramatic tension is entirely between the two men; there are no alluring femme fatales in the film, although a young Shelley Winters has a memorable small role as one of Rome’s ex-girlfriends. But the most fascinating female presence by far is Madame Rose, a tough-talking criminal and masseuse played by the 6’ 2” strongwoman actress Hope Emerson, who towers over Candella in an unforgettable scene, further reducing his masculinity.
Cry of the City was something of an anomaly for Siodmak, who preferred to create his dream worlds in the controlled environment of a soundstage. Made during a brief period of Hollywood neorealism in the late 1940s—when films like Kiss of Death (1947), Call Northside 777 (1948), and House on 92nd Street (1945) were filmed on location—much of Cry of the City was filmed in New York City. The film’s New York flavor is strongly enhanced by scenes set in Rome’s Little Italy apartment, where his mother bemoans the fact that her oldest son is a killer as she cooks soup for him. New York moviegoers eagerly embraced the movie. It opened at the 6,000-seat Roxy Theater, one of Gotham’s grandest movie palaces, and was then the top movie in town, making $117,000 in its opening week (about $1.5 million in today’s dollars, adjusted for inflation.)
Cry of the City screens tonight, December 19, at Film at Lincoln Center on 35mm as part of the series “Robert Siodmak: Dark Visionary.”
