Leofwine_draca
PORT OF NEW YORK is a low budget crime thriller of 1949 in which a couple of narcotics agents go up against a criminal organisation smuggling drugs in through the New York docks. As a film it's very much par for the course and a product of its era, mostly a police procedural with a few scenes of interest here and there. There's a large cast but the characters tend to be underwritten so it's difficult to care about whether the heroes live or die; this is the kind of genre that would reach its peak some 20 to 30 years later in the films made by Roy Scheider and his contemporaries. Chiefly of interest is the casting of a youthful Yul Brynner - with hair! - as the bad guy, supported by a debuting Neville Brand as a snarling henchman.
MartinHafer
"Port of New York" is the sort of film noir picture I like. It's tough, violent and very exciting...and it does this with a small budget and mostly no-name actors. The only 'big' actor is Yul Brynner but this was his first film and he was hardly a star.The film begins in a semi-documentary style--with a narrator and film footage of a drug dealer being murdered and the discovery of a box of pharmaceuticals that is instead filled with sand. Federal agents get involved and the trail eventually leads to a very tough criminal boss (Brynner) who doesn't mind leaving a long trail of dead bodies.What I loved about the film was how heartless it was. Folks are murdered in cold blood--nothing pretty about this. Brutal and tough...as well as well written and exciting throughout. Despite its being a cheap film there is nothing second-rate about it!
Tom Willett (yonhope)
Hi, Everyone, Scott Brady has an idea how to steal a scene from Yul Brynner. Scott Brady has better hair, but Yul has the voice and facial expressions that show he was destined for a big Hollywood career.This was 7 years before The King and I would make Yul Brynner a bald box office giant. Much of Yul's pleasant killer personality would be used in future bad guy roles such as Westworld, The Ten Commandments and Magnificent Seven. In this 1949 film, Yul seems to enjoy playing cat and mouse with his intended victims. He being the cat, of course.Scott Brady did an excellent job as the good guy here. Lots of good action scenes with Scott apparently doing his own falls.The plot basically is the bad guys want to bring one million dollars worth of narcotics into the U.S. One million dollars worth of narcotics today would be a misdemeanor.This is a joy to watch just for the history. DeSoto Cabs follow Checker Cabs. Grand Central Station is shown during rush hour. Rush hour was anytime in the 1940s. Men's suits looked smart. Neville Brand is seen here shortly after his World War II service ended. He is the guy who is operating the ship's steering wheel in some scenes.All of New York looks dressed up for a holiday but that is just what people wore in 1949. Good scenes, good plot, good cast.The guy who plays Dolly Carney does an excellent job. His name was Arthur Blake. Interestingly, Yul Brynner, Scott Brady and Arthur Blake all died in 1985.This one is worth watching.Tom Willett
bmacv
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.
AD
