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MovieMail's Review
Knock on any door and you may find Pretty Boy Romano. Raised in poverty and beset by tragedy, he’s a victim of society – and the first guy the cops look for when a bar is stuck up and a policeman shot. But bequiffed, combustible Romano (John Derek) claims he’s innocent and calls in a figure from his past, crusading lawyer Humphrey Bogart, to beat the rap.
The film opens with a bang, and the kind of bold, scene-setting brilliance more often associated with Sam Fuller. A piercing police whistle announces the start of a raid. Then, to the accompaniment of a mournful sax and an excitable string score, a lowlife in a trenchcoat ducks into an alley and guns down a cop.
In common with countless crime pictures of the period, this one tells its story in flashback from the courtroom. Bogart is his usual self: characteristically excellent, and somehow both sardonic and good-humoured. He’s a chess-playing lawyer who came up from nothing, then got sidetracked by the big bucks. Now he’s trying to right his conscience, having inadvertently set Derek on the road to crime.
The collision between the assured Bogart and some of cinema’s earliest teenagers, with their slicked-up hair, smart mouths and massive insecurities, is a striking one. “I know how you feel,” Bogart tells Derek. “Nobody knows how anybody feels,” the kid bites back.
The script offers forceful social comment, taking in the legal system, anti-semitism and slum life, and some lyrical dialogue. Aged newspaper vendor Houseley Stevenson says he’s feeling “a little older, a little more tired, a little more confused”, while Derek sums up his life by murmuring “I guess I just played it wrong.” Director Nicholas Ray’s atypically restrained handling is impressive, whether creating sentiment or suspense.
And like Ray’s stunning debut, They Live by Night, the movie ties its 'estrangement from society' theme (familiar from movies like I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang and Angels With Dirty Faces), to a portrait of youthful alienation. Romano may have "played it wrong", but a new generation identified with his mission statement: “Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse.”
Bogart plays an attorney, Andrew Morton, who has made it out of the slums. Nick Romano is his client, a young man with a long string of crimes behind him. After he lost his paycheck gambling, hoping to buy his wife some jewellery, she announced she was pregnant, Later he finds her dead from suicide. When he turns again to robbery he's caught by a cop and Nick pumps all his bullets into him in frustration. Morton's appeal to the court emphasizes the evils of the slums.
