Word: gangsters
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...movie is hampered by occasional Hollywood cliches. There is the gangster type: the sinister leer over the villain's left shoulder and the final gun battle with the police surrounding Garfield and his girl; and the gay ending type: bells tolling and people dancing in the streets...
...Back Streets of Paris" is a good example of how the French, unhampered by any gangster-cow-boy heritage, can make a decent blood 'n' thunder movie. The characters somehow standout from the screen as real people; you may disapprove of the life they lead, but still it's a perfectly credible life. Not that the film lacks any violence; on the contrary, there's a lot. But you quite literally always know what the shooting's about. "Back Streets of Paris" treats the activities of the French underworld in a frank and unassuming way; some scenes are so natural...
...deals with the citizens' chase after the robbers for the subsidy money in an attempt to save their first post-war crop. The theme of the film is the plight of the unemployed veteran in a defeated, starving, and bankrupt country, and the ease of transition from soldier to gangster when the will-to-live exceeds respect for law and the rights of others. The theme itself is very effectively handled...
Criss Cross (Universal International] is fairly routine gangster melodrama in which the hero (Burt Lancaster) is led into a whole mess of trouble by his alluring ex-wife (Yvonne de Carlo). But it is sharply directed by Robert Siodmak and enlivened with some fresh bits of business. Samples: a jug-nursing old gentleman (Alan Napier) who makes a specialty of planning complex holdups; the robbery of an armored car (in which Lancaster is a guard), a rare sport among real-life or cinema crooks; so much double-crossing that the cast almost needs military maps to remind them...
...carting him off to prison, the gang's trigger man catches up with him. This leads to the most gruesome of the movie's assortment of gruesome scenes: Scott and the kindhearted girl (Dorothy Malone) who has hidden him are parked on a lonely roadside while a gangster cheerfully digs a grave to dump them in. A gentler touch: Scott shoving a gunman over the edge of a building. Flaxy Martin is not the wickedest of Warner's gangster sagas, but its leading lady sets some kind of a record for doing dirt...