John Frankenheimer's The Young Savages unfolds in a Manhattan made fearful by the new phenomenon of brutal gang warfare between the arriving Puerto Ricans and older ethnic groups Italian and Irish who live in the same slums and consider them their rightful turf. It starts out with real flair for moviemaking and floats a lot of provocative ideas along the way, but when it's over you wonder what the hell it was all about. It gets progressively weaker, squandering away its most promising themes, and finally grinds to a halt in a long courtroom sequence that, despite the obligatory histrionic outbursts, stays dramatically dead.
In its energetic, dialogue-free opening, three young gang members invade Puerto Rican territory and stab a blind boy to death. They claim self-defense, but it turns out the knife the victim was wielding was a harmonica. The case plays big in the press, and prosecutor Burt Lancaster gets the job of sending the three to the electric chair.
But there are complications. One of the accused is the son of a woman (Shelly Winters) Lancaster used to date; he hails, you see, from these same mean streets and changed his name from Bellini to Bell. And his wife (Dina Merrill), who's what was in that era called a Limousine Liberal, staunchly opposes the death penalty (at least until she's menaced in an elevator by a pair of young hoods).
As Lancaster delves into the case, he finds discrepancies. Winters' son, it seems, is no racist (or at best not a homicidal one). The victim served as a sort of arms-courier to his sighted brethren, and the star witness for the prosecution, his grieving sister, turns out to be a 16-year old hooker. This is bad news for Lancaster's boss, opportunistic District Attorney Edward Andrews, who wants the case to be his launching pad to the governor's mansion. But Lancaster, visibly suffering the pangs of conscience, decides to pursue The Truth.
It's far from one of his best roles. He gets no chance to unleash the furled energy that was so much a part of his screen presence; and when he's worked over by a gang on a subway car you don't believe it this is a man who could scatter those punks away with one sweep of his paw. Merrill has her moments but stays confined to what's really a sub-plot, while Winters' saintly part does her in heavy earnestness, of the sort that would win her Oscars, did her in as an actress, too.
Probably the script can be held to blame for the wishy-washy impression the movie leaves. Characters espouse various positions on the issues involved, but it's never clear whether they're being advanced seriously or being held up to ridicule. Everything is played too safe to be satisfying. And another movie of the same year, with the same setting and the same themes, would totally eclipse The Young Savages, which now seems like West Side Story minus the music and the dancing.
In its energetic, dialogue-free opening, three young gang members invade Puerto Rican territory and stab a blind boy to death. They claim self-defense, but it turns out the knife the victim was wielding was a harmonica. The case plays big in the press, and prosecutor Burt Lancaster gets the job of sending the three to the electric chair.
But there are complications. One of the accused is the son of a woman (Shelly Winters) Lancaster used to date; he hails, you see, from these same mean streets and changed his name from Bellini to Bell. And his wife (Dina Merrill), who's what was in that era called a Limousine Liberal, staunchly opposes the death penalty (at least until she's menaced in an elevator by a pair of young hoods).
As Lancaster delves into the case, he finds discrepancies. Winters' son, it seems, is no racist (or at best not a homicidal one). The victim served as a sort of arms-courier to his sighted brethren, and the star witness for the prosecution, his grieving sister, turns out to be a 16-year old hooker. This is bad news for Lancaster's boss, opportunistic District Attorney Edward Andrews, who wants the case to be his launching pad to the governor's mansion. But Lancaster, visibly suffering the pangs of conscience, decides to pursue The Truth.
It's far from one of his best roles. He gets no chance to unleash the furled energy that was so much a part of his screen presence; and when he's worked over by a gang on a subway car you don't believe it this is a man who could scatter those punks away with one sweep of his paw. Merrill has her moments but stays confined to what's really a sub-plot, while Winters' saintly part does her in heavy earnestness, of the sort that would win her Oscars, did her in as an actress, too.
Probably the script can be held to blame for the wishy-washy impression the movie leaves. Characters espouse various positions on the issues involved, but it's never clear whether they're being advanced seriously or being held up to ridicule. Everything is played too safe to be satisfying. And another movie of the same year, with the same setting and the same themes, would totally eclipse The Young Savages, which now seems like West Side Story minus the music and the dancing.