Richard Conte

Richard Conte's line of villains may have opened with a swap of parts. On the Cry of the City page the catalogue, relying on a press release, writes that Victor Mature and Conte were at first given each other's roles, and that when it was judged unsuitable for Mature to play another criminal, Conte, whose two previous parts had been extremely sympathetic, took the gangster instead; the name he played is Martin Rome. A year later he worked on Jules Dassin's Thieves' Highway, and by Michael Sragow, writing for Criterion, he forged an entirely new kind of lead under Dassin's direction, rough and masculine and naive, carrying violent insecurity and gentlemanliness in equal measure. The twenty-seven films here begin in 1943, with the last five of them squeezed between 1973 and 1975.