Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

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

During the dispute of the box championship, the boxer Ernie Driscoll (John Payne) loses the fight and the champion damages his optic nerve. Ernie is forced to quit his career and becomes a taxi driver in New York. His wife Pauline Driscoll (Peggie Castle) blames him for their simple life and their relationship is not good. The quick-tempered Ernie usually meets his friend, the aspirant actress Linda James (Evelyn Keyes), at the bar where he drinks coffee late night. Pauline has a love affair with the elegant thief Victor Rawlins (Brad Dexter) and she helps him to steal a fortune in diamonds from a man called Dutch. Meanwhile Linda lures Ernie to be cast in a play but when she learns that the producer has accused Ernie to the police to promote his play, she regrets and decides to help him. Meanwhile Victor kills Pauline to sell the jewels to a powerful fence and frames Ernie so that he can travel abroad. Now Ernie and Linda need to track Victor down to prove his innocence, but the fence and his gang are also chasing Victor to kill him."99 River Street" is a different, underrated, fast-paced and violent film-noir. The story and the screenplay are engaging and the direction and performances are top-notch. The conclusion with a happy-ending is also unusual in this genre but works very well in this film. My vote is nine.Title (Brazil): "A Morte Ronda o Cais" (""Death Prowls the Habour")

John Payne plays a bitter cab driver saddled with a cheating wife who wants the moon and the stars and everything that goes with it. Something she realizes will never come married to this broken down hack. Such is the singular event that starts in motion a series of events, some coincidental, some planned and all of them unexpected. And unlike some lesser entries into the film noir black and white movies of the day, this has some totally logical and totally unexpected twists along the way. Peggie Castle was never sexier than this film, Evelyn Keyes was never more reserved-- until you get about the three quarters mark, and then she does one of the most erotic things I've ever seen in any film from 1953 or anywhere in the '50's. The fight scenes are gritty and realistic and the dialog is understated and not hysterical. And the pacing is big screen professional. I highly recommend this film to anyone looking for some serious fun.

Excellent film noir with John Payne starring as an ex-prizefighter up to his neck in trouble. Evelyn Keyes steals the picture with some fine acting, particularly when she is using Payne to rehearse for a part in a Broadway show.The film doesn't really make it look like women are exactly too nice here. Keyes, though redeeming herself, played Payne for a sap in that acting scene, and his movie-wife, Peggy Castle, acts like Virginia Mayo did in "The Best Years of Our Lives," when her marriage was over. Castle is two-timing Payne and gets punished for it by her lover, heavy Brad Dexter.This is a very enjoyable mystery capped off with a great cast.

John Payne, smart guy, not much of an actor, made a series of inexpensive studio-bound semi-noirs in the early 50s in which he was often the victim of a frame. In this one, he's an amiable ex boxer -- nice, masculine occupation -- who now drives a cab because of an eye injury. When he discovers that his gorgeous, sexy wife (Castle) is schtupping some thief, he becomes bitter and easily angered. It's even worse because her boyfriend is Brad Dexter, the sleazy private eye who had shot Sterling Hayden in "The Asphalt Jungle." Peggy Castle simply has no taste, you know? Dexter is mixed up with a gang of armed robbers, fences, money launderers, and shoe fetishists or something. It's not clear exactly what such established heavies as the pop-eyed Jay Adler and the Neanderthal Jack Lambert actually do, besides double cross each other.Adler has agreed to buy some stolen diamonds from Dexter but when Dexter show up with Payne's runaway wife in tow, Adler demurs. He don't do business with no dames because they can't be trusted. The solution to Dexter's conundrum is simple. He takes the luscious Peggy Castle up to his apartment, strangles her, and dumps the body in the back of Payne's cab.Dexter finagles the fifty large from Adler but Adler wants the money back and pursues Dexter as he tries to make a getaway from a pier behind the River Cafe or whatever it is, in Jersey City. Payne is in pursuit of Dexter because, by this time, he's discovered that Dexter is the killer of his wife. Well -- not exactly. Actually that conclusion requires a leap of faith on Payne's part.But let's not get into holes in the plot or, more generally, its weaknesses because then we'd have to figure out why so much emphasis is place on Payne's determination to return to boxing, a narrative thread abruptly dropped, like a corpse in the back seat of a taxi. We'd have to start wondering why Jay Adler has such a problem doing business with women around, even as mere witnesses. What did Adler's mother ever do to him? Speaking as a psychologist, I'd begin with deficient potty training. And then, too, we'd need to ponder Dexter's motives in dragging Peggy Castle along and insisting she witness the exchange of money and diamonds. We psychologists call this "separation anxiety." It's why children cry when they have to leave home for their first day of school. I have other questions too. To whom do I send this bill? The director was Phil Karlson, who had a curious career. His work might be called clumsy by some but I think "primitive" is a more apt description. He does a headlong job, kind of like Samuel Fuller but without any irony or social comment. He rams the fast-paced plot down your throat whether you're ready or not. He made some clunkers but also some more disturbing things like "The Phoenix City Story" and "Five Against the House" and "Walking Tall."