Irving Schulman's novel The Amboy Dukes was written and being read around the time I was born. For those of you who don't know, Amboy Street is a street in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn where the street gang the Dukes hang out.
Overwrought, overdone, talky, superficial, .... all the things you expect when adults recreate teen hoodlum angst with their audience in mind and then characters are forced through a contrived sieve.
They live in the slums of Brooklyn, and they think the whole world is against them. They're not a gang -- they say.
No matter how depressing this film appears to begin with, it's a great film and much ahead of its time. It's like a documentary probing the gang mentality of youngsters getting brought up to become good fellas and worse, and there are many aspects to the drama, one being that of the teachers, who really have a hard time and sometimes can't control their own classes.
"City Across the River" is a film about a gang of young punks who are being pulled towards lives of crime by a two-bit hood, Gaggsy. At the same time, a do-gooder, Stan Albert (Stephen McNally), is trying to get through to them and point them towards becoming decent citizens.
Not only have I seen this movie but I also saw it being filmed -The location where it was shot was the Williamsburgh section of Brooklyn NY - The picture was an adaptation of popular book of the time titled "The Amboy Dukes". Amboy Street was actually located in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn.
While the noir cycle sensed, in its oblique way, most of the tremors affecting America in the post-war years, one subject that remains conspicuous in its absence is juvenile delinquency. Though alienated youth cropped up now and again in The Big Night, in Moonrise, in Talk About A Stranger and even, arguably, in The Window they were viewed as individual cases, not as a social phenomenon.
Dreary by-the-numbers juvenile delinquency with opening narration that sets the tone for sledgehammer righteousness. Peter Fernandez is never even remotely likable in the main role, and his cohorts are like overgrown Dead End Kids without the energy.
I lived in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, NY and saw "City Across the River" after reading "The Amboy Dukes" when I was 13 years old, a very impressionable age. Tony Curtis was the rage and all the boys started combing their hair with the "Curtis look.
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