No matter how legit someone previously connected to a syndicate has become, once that past is sealed, there's no dissolving it off your record. One time mob bookkeeper Richard Conte has gotten into the legitimate laundry business, but no amount of soap can wash his hands of his past, or his family's. Brothers James Darren and Paul Picerni are still connected but have somehow vanished, and mob boss Larry Gates (another one with a clean public image) wants to smoke them out. Conte is contacted by Gates and later on Harry Bellaver, tightening the noise, and that's where the aspect of film noir comes in, threatening to spiral Conte's life out of control.
I rank noir on a darkness scale in addition to the overall quality, and as noir, this gets a C rating, while as a film overall, it's a B. At the start, it's your typical gangster melodrama (a genre often misidentified as noir), but as the darkness grows, so does the noir quotient. The men get better parts than the women here whom I found whiny and uninteresting, especially mother Rico (Argentina Brunetti) whose grasping personality is all the more marked by her shrill voice. Dianne Foster and Kathryn Grant dissolve in the background and Conte and Darren's wives. Gates and Bellaver are chilling as syndicate leaders. Overall not bad but pretty much formula.
I rank noir on a darkness scale in addition to the overall quality, and as noir, this gets a C rating, while as a film overall, it's a B. At the start, it's your typical gangster melodrama (a genre often misidentified as noir), but as the darkness grows, so does the noir quotient. The men get better parts than the women here whom I found whiny and uninteresting, especially mother Rico (Argentina Brunetti) whose grasping personality is all the more marked by her shrill voice. Dianne Foster and Kathryn Grant dissolve in the background and Conte and Darren's wives. Gates and Bellaver are chilling as syndicate leaders. Overall not bad but pretty much formula.