just watch it!

Boring, long, and too preachy.

Absolutely the worst movie.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

Good gritty docu-drama of the procedural sort made popular by The Naked City (1948). Here we follow a Customs agent (Rober) and a Treasury agent (Brady) as they track down a gang of narcotics smugglers headed by a hirsute Yul Brynner in his first film. Unlike most docu- dramas of the period, this one is not overly diverted by procedure. Instead, the drama plays out in pretty tense fashion. Happily, the rather complex storyline is fashioned smoothly by director Benedek, despite the many segues. Then too, the live shots of New York are especially revealing to a non-New Yorker like myself, even if they are decades old.The faces in the movie also furnish a boost. There're the three gimlet-eyed hard cases (Challee, Stevens, Kellogg), the exotic looking Brynner, and the two meek-looking fall-guys (Blake, Carter), while Rober and Brady are appropriately clean-cut and strong-jawed. Brynner, of course, is particularly notable for his effortless accent and Euro-Asian appearance. The latter seems appropriate for a time when the Cold War was heating up. Thus Hollywood's lauding law enforcement at a tense time comes as no surprise.Except for Brynner and a couple jarring scenes as when Brynner turns on the disloyal Stevens, there's nothing particularly memorable here. Just solid entertainment done in highly competent fashion.

Prints for this movie are horrible. Opens with neat scenes of NY circa 1945. The film is about the flow of narcotics into NY harbor.The movie is horrible. The music in no way reflects what's going on in the film. It's as if someone stuck a record on. It actually detracts do much from the movie that it becomes annoying.It's not really a film noir so much as it is a Dragnet like movieThe PlotAgents Mickey Waters and John Flannery re-team to investigate the theft of medicinal narcotics from the S.S. Florentine. The vicious gang responsible is headed by the ruthless, but debonair Paul Vicola, who doesn't hesitate to murder anyone who stands in his way. Vicola's girlfriend is garroted when she becomes unreliable, and when go-between nightclub comic Dolly Carney poses a risk, he is thrown from his apartment window. After Waters is shot and killed trying to break into the gang's Brooklyn-based yacht club front, Flannery decides to go undercover and pose as a San Francicco drug dealer. The gang is smoked out and after a furious gun battle, Vicola is apprehended and his gang broken.

Tension is everywhere in this low-budget film noir that rivals "High Noon" in a clock-watching suspense. Unlike that western with psychological overtones, "Port of New York" is set in present day New York and deals with the Narcotic Squad's attempt to break an opium ring that is run by Yul Brynnur. Two years before he took Broadway by storm in "The King and I", Brynnur made his film debut in this low-budget classic. It wasn't until the film version of "The King and I" that he officially became a movie star, but this is a rare chance to see him when he was an unknown. That cat-eyed future soap diva, K.T. Stevens (best known as the veiled mama from hell, Vanessa Prentiss, on "The Young and the Restless") gets a Lizabeth Scott look, having done several years of featured roles, in the part of Brynnur's moll who pays dearly for her fear of being involved in criminal activities. (For other interesting roles Ms. Stevens played on screen, catch "The Great Man's Lady" and "Harriett Craig", where she shared scenes with legends Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford.) With Scott Brady on Brynnur's trail, backed by newsreel like narration not leaving out any detail, it is obvious how crime once again won't pay. Great location footage of New York (particularly a shot of the elevated train station at Canal Street above the Manhattan Bridge, no longer at that spot) makes this of historical importance, as well as the fact it was one of few films to tackle the subject of drug trafficking. The "B" studios at this time (Eagle Lion, Lippert, Screen Guild, PRC and Monogram) gave us some of the more interesting film noirs to study, and this one is among the goodies. Brynnur leaves no stone unturned in his performance of a ruthless killer. This gives a new meaning to Mrs. Anna's question, "Shall We Dance?".

Sporting a head of dark, wavy hair that paradoxically emphasizes his Mongol heritage, Yul Brynner plays a debonair drug runner bringing heroin into the U.S. (We know he's a monster from the 78s of dissonant, avant-garde piano music -- Prokofiev? Shostakovich? -- he's forever playing.) When a bribed purser from a luxury liner surfaces in New York harbor with his throat slit, Brynner's fiancee/accomplice (K.T. Stevens) starts running scared and meets up with a narcotics agent (Scott Brady). Bad mistake, which Brynner swiftly and coldly corrects. The investigation heats up both on shore and on water, taking a creepy, and unexpectedly Bohemian, turn toward a cabaret emcee called Dolly (Arthur Blake) who cracks jokes and does Charles Laughton impressions with a monkey on his back. His mistakes, too, prove unpleasantly fatal. Moving closer to the heart of this particular darkness, Brady poses as someone in the drug racket, and comes close to bringing it off.... Even though, despite Russian-born Brynner's playing the villain, there's not a whisper of Soviet conspiracy in Port of New York, it eerily foreshadows both the black-and-white brutality and the smug self-righteousness of the Red Scare cycle. (In the minds of the public and elected officials, during this springtime of McCarthyism, narcotics and Communism were pretty much the same thing.) Though it lacks the ambiguity of fully developed characterizations, the movie succeeds fairly well on its own, straightforward terms -- especially in turning an over-romanticized New York into the raffish port city it essentially is, or was.