City Across the River

The film opened at the Capitol Theatre in New York City on April 7, 1949,^[4] and grossed $72,000 its first week.^[5]

Thomas M. Pryor, film critic for the New York Times, gave the film a positive review: "Despite its limited view, City Across the River is nevertheless an honest and tempered reflection of life. It is rich in character delineation, especially in minor roles, and there is a coarse, natural tang to much of the writing by Director-Producer Maxwell Shane and his co-scenarist, Dennis Cooper. Most of the players are comparatively unfamiliar, with the exception of Stephen McNally, who plays the role of a community center director in the neighborhood, and this gives the film an added degree of realism."^[6]

Variety magazine praised the film: "Out of Irving Shulman’s grim novel, The Amboy Dukes, Maxwell Shane has whipped together a hardhitting and honest film on juvenile delinquency ... The plot threads are smoothly woven into the social fabric ... The performances by all members of the cast are marked by Shane's accent on naturalness."^[7]

In 2000 film critic Dennis Schwartz questioned the honesty of the screenplay: "This is a much softened version of Irving Schulman's The Amboy Dukes, a book about a rough gang of teenagers in the postwar [sic] period of Brooklyn ... This is a tired and clichéd film with its main selling point all the good location shots of the city. Tony Curtis made his film debut, taking a small part as one of the Amboy Dukes. All the gang members are stock characters and the predictable story sheds little insight about juvenile delinquency, offering only an outsider's look into the grimness of street life ... This film missed what teenage life was like in the city slums by a country mile and instead threw together a cliché-ridden story. The book was a popular hard-hitting novel. This film lost everything about the novel that was essential, and the robotic acting didn't help."^[8]

• City Across the River at the AFI Catalog of Feature Films
• City Across the River at IMDb
• City Across the River at the TCM Movie Database (archived version)
• City Across the River is available for free viewing and download at the Internet Archive
• City Across the River film clip on YouTube