It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

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

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Three teenagers find a briefcase with a beat-up old can in it. They throw away the can and pawn the suitcase. When they read in the papers that the can was full of uncut heroin and belonged to a drug dealer who killed two narcotics agents in a shootout, they go back to look for the can, find it, and decide to go into the heroin selling business.This is not one of those great crime films you hear about, but it should be. It not only has a great story of cops and crooks, with teenagers caught in the middle, but it is refreshingly honest. I don't know that films about heroin were really around until the indie boom of the 1970s, but this film is very direct and does not try to sugar coat the issues.I suppose one could say it has some seems that are bit melodramatic, and the junkie's long story of going through withdrawal has almost a "Reefer Madness" quality to it. But as a whole, this is a solid film.

Stakeout on Dope Street (1958) is the first movie feature directed by Irvin Kershner whose technique is angled much more to the demands of TV than the cinema – as we might expect from someone who spent the previous five or six years filming episodes for TV's Confidential File series. Although interest is kept alive by intercutting the sluggish main action with an occasional flash as to what the police are doing, the pace is often dead slow in these sequences too. No need to list all the movie's not-so-admirable TV traits like the over-reliance on close-ups, the filling-in-time dialogue that slows down the action while we needlessly tune in to the banal philosophy that underlies the actions of the three principals as they throw their dialogue back and forth in the one cramped studio set. As if this were not enough, we are then forced to take in another dose of philosophy from the hero's girlfriend, played by Abby Dalton, an attractive girl with a pleasant face and an absence of bustiness that makes her acceptable as a girl-next-door type. Stakeout was obviously lensed on an extremely tight budget. There is very little action and even the climax is rather tame. Best feature of the movie is Haskell Wexler's glossy, low-key photography. Available on a Video Beat DVD.

Long before Irvin Kershner tackled big budget movies such as "The Empire Strikes Back", he began his theatrical directorial career with this little movie. At times it's a pretty interesting debut. It tackles the subject of drugs when it was next to taboo to deal with them in movies. Kershner probably got away with it because the movie does portray drugs in a very negative light, from showing the brutal criminals that deal with them to the addicts controlled by the drugs they take. The negative portrayal is a little heavy handed at times, but one must remember the movie was made during a different time. Anyway, as entertainment the movie is certainly not boring, though the plotting is somewhat off - the bad guys after the opening sequence don't really reappear until the last part of the movie, and the youths' plan to sell the heroin seems padded out by today's standards. It also doesn't help that the "youths" are portrayed by actors who obviously left their teenage years many years in the past. In short, this is a flawed movie, but may be of interest to those who have interest in low budget youth-oriented movies from this period.

A jazz score accompanies the soundtrack of this gritty story about three teens who get involved with drugs (heroin supply) and then try to make a deal with a druggie who can turn over some cash for whatever amount they come up with. Meanwhile, some drug dealers are also after the drugs and will stop at nothing to find out where the teens have stashed the goods.The no name cast is headed by YALE WEXLER as the more sensitive one who decides the drug heist should be handed over to the cops--but by the time he makes this decision it's too late and the dealers have already trapped his friends and beat them up. He manages to elude them when they pursue him on a climactic chase that forms the climax of the story.Interesting, gritty and worthwhile if you're a film noir buff, but nothing extraordinary. The only reason I watched it was because I had seen the screen test of YALE WEXLER for the role of "Ben-Hur" in 1959 and wondered if he ever pursued an acting career after losing that role. Evidently, he did. He gives a convincing performance here and so does the rest of the cast.