Edge of the City

Axel has deserted the army, changed his name and taken work loading freight at the New York docks. The gang boss skims wages and makes threats and nobody objects. Tommy, who runs another gang, helps him and the two become friends. Tommy is Black and Axel is white, and the film does not open that as an issue; it simply shows it. The subject is not race but one man being willing to speak on another's behalf. What Axel is running from is guilt, and Tommy is the only person who makes him face it. What follows is precisely the price of that reckoning. The form was shot in the street and is raw. Docks, warehouses, narrow stairwells. The acting sits outside the studio template; John Cassavetes was not yet a director and his naturalism here is read as an announcement of the films to come. There is a political story behind the production. Martin Ritt had been blacklisted in television and could not get work; this was his first film. The screenplay comes from a play the same writer had written for television. An equal friendship between the two men was not a usual thing in an American film of 1957. Sidney Poitier plays Tommy and Jack Warden the gang boss. Who it is for: viewers who like fifties American realism and Cassavetes. Who it is not for: anyone who will find the melodrama of the final section excessive; the film loses its register there.