This is How Movies Should Be Made

Great movie! If you want to be entertained and have a few good laughs, see this movie. The music is also very good,

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

Though released in 1960 and therefore in my opinion too late to be considered a true film noir, "Murder, Inc." plays like one, and I can easily see this having come out about a decade earlier, when noirs were in their heyday, with little alteration.It's based on the true events that led to a crackdown on an organized crime syndicate in Chicago in the 1930s, and specifically a group of hired killers who were employed to wipe out anyone who crime bosses viewed as an adversary. It makes absolutely no effort to recreate period detail, and aside from a few antique cars, looks like it's set in the present day of 1960. Stuart Whitman plays the protagonist, a man whose desperation leads him into a life of crime but whose moral code leaves him feeling conflicted and ultimately leads to him becoming an informer. The film is probably best known today as the one that brought Peter Falk his first of two Oscar nominations for playing one of the hired killers and both friend and foe to Whitman. The film looks cheap and gritty, which serves the material well, but it also feels ragged and undercooked, and not in that enjoyable way that traditional noirs could often be. Especially toward the end, the film feels like its makers lost interest in the movie they were making and decided to abruptly wrap things up just so they could be done with it.Grade: B

Film editor Ralph Rosenblum is obviously a disciple of Sergei Eisenstein. Certainly, Eisenstein's method of montage is very appropriately applied here – as is Gayne Rescher's bleak black-and-white CinemaScope photography. This documentary was actually based on the autobiography by Burton Turkus (played by Henry Morgan in the movie). Alas, the direction by Burt Balaban and Stuart Rosenberg is often over-reverential towards its original material. In fact, the movie is so weighed down with talk that the pace often slows to the speed of a snail. Fortunately, some persuasive acting is contributed by David J. Stewart and his glum henchman, Joseph Bernard. I also enjoyed Morey Amsterdam's bit. The film also supposedly "introduces" Sarah Vaughan who actually made her movie debut back in 1951 in "Disc Jockey". She sings a couple of songs. One actor we could do without, however, is Stuart Whitman whose performance is not only unconvincing but painfully tedious. May Britt's acting also disappoints, but at least she is easy on the eyes! As for Frank DeVol's music score this also is well below his usual high standard.

This doesn't pretend to be a documentary-style drama of Murder, Incorporated, the 1930s organization that accepted murder contracts, although the Introduction tells us, "ThIs Story is True. The People are Real." A good guess is that Peter Falk's character, Abe Reles, was a real historical figure, along with some ancillary characters, but I don't believe Mai Britt's character, as the innocent schlub Stewart Whitman's wife, had its genesis in anything but the writers imagination. She embodies the anima of the film, the tender-hearted part designed to appeal to the women in the audience, while the men are wringing their hands in anticipation of the next homicide. And the truth is, if you have to have a female victim in the movie, Mai Britt will do as well as anybody else. She may not be much of an actress but her beauty is practically extraterrestrial. Each of her wildly slanted blue eyes seems to look in a direction of its own choosing, like a chameleon's. She's stunning.So is Peter Falk, but in an entirely different way. He may be wearing a fedora and a suit and tie, or even evening dress, but he still looks as seedy as Lieutenant Columbo. There the resemblance ends. He's a cold-blooded merciless killer (he uses an ice pick) and he's first-rate at scanning other people for their emotions. If, for instance, a gangland lawyer like Vincent Gardenia rescues him from the cops (Simon Oakland) with a writ of habeas corpus and then, when Falk tries to shake his hand, remarks, "I wouldn't be caught dead with you," Falk knows right off the bat that Gardenia doesn't like him. But Falk is not only perceptive, he's sensitive. He's HURT when someone insults him. The problem is that he's the kind of guy who's chagrin can express itself in only one way -- violence. It's a nasty trait, and this is probably Falk's best dramatic role, not that there were that many of them.Stewart Whitman, alas, is stuck with the part of the innocent guy who agrees to do a few small favors for Falk in order to work off the money he's borrowed, but then discovers he's been swept up in some nefarious doings. You know, along the lines of Marlon Brando's Terry Malloy in "On The Waterfront." "Geeze, Charlie, I thought you was just gonna LEAN on him a little." This true story of real people turns Abe Reles into a sadistic rapist as well as a hit man, so the ending isn't inappropriate. Any sorrow one might feel at Abe Reles' passing, a spectacular exit through the window and off this mortal coil, is limited to the realization that now he won't be able to testify against Albert Anastasia and the rest of the Goombas he works for. The police are supposed to be the good guys here, but I don't know. Of the three priceless witnesses they're holding under close protection, two manage to get murdered.It can't have cost much to make this picture. There's little attempt to evoke the neighborhoods of Brooklyn in the 1930s. The hair styles are entirely modern, as if the producers didn't really care whether the audience noticed or not. Even the sets are spare and functional. When Falk shows off a palatial apartment to Mai Britt, it's risible because it resembles a set left over from a high school play about rich people.Falk is entertaining, though, and Mai Britt is Venusian, and simmering in the background is something about Murder, Inc.That's about it. The movie is strictly routine.

For anyone who has read the book by Burton Turkus that the screenplay was based on, the movie is a considerably watered-down version of the ugly events depicted. But the movie succeeds at evoking the grimy environment of Brooklyn hoodlums in the late Thirties and early Forties very well. The leads are adequate and the basic story telling is okay. But what makes this movie worth seeing is the astounding performance by Peter Falk as the hit man Abe Reles. He manages to be incongruously funny, in a way that can genuinely make you laugh, but is absolutely terrifying at the same time. He plays a hoodlum with a grotesquely logical sense of values, who sees life and people through such a distorted lens, that he seems like a creature from another planet. His performance is so uncannily convincing, you feel as if you need to take a shower after watching the movie. The only performance I've seen that comes close is that of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas.Definitely worth seeing for true crime buffs and gangster movie fans, though not totally reliable as history.