Stoutor It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

Dirtylogy It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

Arianna Moses Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Ortiz Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

bkoganbing Broderick Crawford borrows a great deal from his Academy Award winning Willie Stark from All The King's Men in playing underworld boss Frank Lupo in New York Confidential. Crawford is a combination of Stark and Don Corleone and he doesn't get the best of it.Like Corleone and Stark, Lupo has trouble with his children, but unlike Stark, Lupo has a daughter played by Anne Bancroft. Now if Bancroft was content to be Connie Corleone she could have any number of willing suitors who are in the family business working for dad. She aspires to more and her father's reputation kills off any chance she can marry respectably.Not that respectability guarantees honesty. When old line money WASP William Forrest pulls the rug out from under a multi-million dollar deal the Syndicate is bankrolling they decide to take care of him in the true Syndicate manner. Crawford though he opposes the idea gets the contract and from their the dominoes start to fall.One thing however when the fires threatens, organized crime knows how to start backfires to make sure the organization itself is not touched. A whole lot of dead bodies start to pile up before the film ends.Also starring in the film is Richard Conte playing an out of town hit man who Crawford takes a shine to and has him stay in New York. Conte was always great in noir films and he certainly is here. New York Confidential touches upon a lot of the issues involving systemic corruption much the same way The Godfather films do. Of course it does not have the budget those blockbusters had nor an unforgettable music score, still New York Confidential makes it point. It's still a valid film for today's audience.

Martin Teller A nice bridge from the gangster pictures of the 30's to the modern day mafia flick. You can see echoes of this film in GODFATHER and GOODFELLAS and others. Going inside a crime syndicate and also the private lives of the gangsters, it's a pretty satisfying drama with a lot of facets. Richard Conte is superb as a polite but cold-blooded hit-man turned consigliere, and there are also memorable performances from Anne Bancroft and the reliable heavy Mike Mazurki. Broderick Crawford is generally quite good although he does deliver a few stiff line readings. Unfortunately, the film suffers from utterly bland cinematography, and we spend so much time in well-lit rooms that it often feels like a stage production. A very good script, but the execution only provides a few exciting moments.

christopher-underwood Flawed but always worth watching, this movie seems to have sprung from nowhere onto DVD. Certainly not pure 'noir' but neither is it simply a crime drama. Indeed with the documentary element and Crawford's wayward antics on the one side and the coolness of Richard Conte and his relations with the ladies on the other, this could be considered a bit of a mess. That it is not is due in the main to the tremendous performances of Conte, Bancroft and to a lesser extent, Marilyn Maxwell as Iris, Crawford's mistress. For me Crawford is over the top as the macho boss man and simply unable to deal with the more sensitive scenes, but he is overshadowed by Conte and we are soon persuaded to view the events through his steely eyes. A few location shots that really only go to show up the shoddiness of the studio ones but there is a great ending and as I say enough along the way to make this almost unseen film well worth a watch.

bmacv In Russell Rouse's New York Confidential, Broderick Crawford plays a darker extension of his Harry Brock character in Born Yesterday. Brock was a corrupt businessman, a wheeler-dealer with senators in his pocket, but the movie (a comedy, after all) never went so far as to label him a mobster, much less a killer. But five years later, in the wake of the televised Kefauver hearings which brought the scope of organized crime to a rapt public, Crawford has become a cog in a vast `syndicate' or `cartel' - an important cog in its Manhattan headquarters, yes, but only one piece of its unstoppable machinery.When one of his vassals stages an unauthorized hit, Crawford calls in some talent from Chicago (Richard Conte) to enforce discipline. The widowed Crawford warms to Conte as the son he never had, though he does have a handful of a rebellious daughter (Ann Bancroft) as well as a high-maintenance mistress with a platinum chignon (Marilyn Maxwell). Maxwell has eyes for Conte, but his eyes stay affixed on the unstable, hard-drinking Bancroft, who wants nothing to do with her father's business - or with any of his minions.The triangulated romance, however, takes second place to the mob's tangled business interests. When a recalcitrant lobbyist scuttles a scheme to profit from government shipping contracts, he's ordered killed. In the movie's best orchestrated sequence, torpedo Mike Mazurki accomplishes the hit but botches his escape from a hotel; wounded, he decides to flip and sing.With the big heat now on, the executive board decides Crawford must take the fall; he, however, decides to join Mazurki in singing a duet. So the board contracts Conte to eliminate the now dangerous Crawford....The gangster movies of the early 'thirties endure as character studies of flamboyant but flawed figures played by the likes of Edward G. Robinson, Jimmy Cagney and Paul Muni. This spats-and-tommyguns genre, however, fell out of favor in the 'forties (given global upheaval, bootleggers became small fry). When mob pictures reemerged in the 1950s, their difference in tone was palpable. From 711 Ocean Drive in 1950 to Phil Karlson's 1957 The Brothers Rico (also starring Conte), crime had become corporate, with formalized hierarchies, far-flung interests, and strict, if ruthless, rules for doing business. That's the thread that runs through New York Confidential: that no there's no individual who's indispensable, that the survival of the organization remains paramount.