howardmorley Shelley Winters always seemed to specialise in playing roles of rather seedy, superficial glamorous, looking women who are down on their luck because they mix in bad company.Here she mixes with an assortment of low life Chicago characters, having married a man executed in the electric chair for murder.This fact she hides from her son (James Darren) because he is too young to bear the truth.Her son is gifted at music but Shelley has too many balls in the air trying to raise her family on the wages of a bar room hostess/waitress because she does not possess any other marketable skills.Dubbed on the soundtrack was a snippet of Beethoven's Pathetique sonata and Chopin which her son "plays" in preparation for his audition at the conservatoire in Chicago.Burl Ives is on hand to give a surrogate father's advice to James Darren and Shelley to keep them on the straight and narrow.He plays a drunken ex-judge who gives his life trying to save Shelley and James from an evil drug pusher played by Riccardo Montalban.A young Jean Seburg plays the love interest to James Darren the latter of whom I first saw in the 1961 film "The Guns of Navarone" which had a stellar cast.Passable, I rated the above film 6/10.

Robert J. Maxwell Not bad, actually, partly because the cast is as good as it is. And what a cast! James Darren, whose performance is exceptional in being less than particularly good, is Nick Romano. Well -- the kid is a genius at the piano, see. But he's being raised in this crummy Chicago apartment house and everybody around him is a loser in one way or another. There is the failed, drunken ex-judge (Burl Ives), the heroin-addicted saloon singer (Ella Fitzgerald, in another below-professional performance), Darren's distraught mother (Shelley Winters), the helpful guy who runs the news stand (I thought it was Richard Taber but he's not in the credits) and the helpful cab drive (Rudolf Acosta). They'd all like to help Nick when he runs into trouble with the law, injuring his precious hands, his tools out of the slums, and so on. And Nick is immediately sympathetic because his father died in the electric chair. But what can they do? They all have their own weaknesses and can barely keep themselves together.And there are bad guys too, exemplified by Ricardo Montalban's smooth, expensively dressed and immaculately groomed dope dealer, who shoots Shelley Winters up and then takes advantage of her, as they say, in her flat. The scene is kind of edgy for 1960 and only gets more so when Nick barges in on them unexpectedly while they are in flagrante delicto.Burl Ives pulls himself together sufficiently, with the aid of the good-natured others, to introduce Nick to someone (Philip Ober, an actor whose magnetism has always eluded me) in a position to get Nick into the Music Conservatory after high school. Pretty good, eh? It's not just how good you are, but who you know. Or, more precisely, it's who somebody you know knows. And then, to top it off with a cherry, Ober the Impresario has a drop-dead gorgeous daughter who comes in the shape of the young Jean Seberg, the perfect, if entirely conventional, incarnation of Nordic beauty.Actually, Seberg doesn't act well either. Let's see. It LOOKS like a good cast -- but Darren, Fitzgerald, Ober, and Seberg don't really deliver. You know when I said "the cast is as good as it is"? Can I take that back? I don't think I'll give away the ending except to mention that the very last shot in the film has Darren and Seberg walking hand in hand in front of the Chicago Art Institute. You'll have to guess the rest.I don't know who chose the title or why. It's from a speech by Robert Emmett, an 18th-century Irish nationalist I think, just before his execution. Emmett's message was along the lines of, "Don't judge me now, you cretins. The historians of the future will give me a fair shake." Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose. (My keyboard doesn't have the accents for that cliché.)

adsqueiroz What a film! A classic or a thriller, I don't know, but it sure is one of those films for you not to miss. It is already one of my favorite classics. A story that makes you understand how it is important to pursue a dream, a dream of not letting a child follow the footsteps of a criminal father. A story that teaches us some important values. It is a struggle for life and an excellent opportunity for us to think about this problem. Drugs, violence and alcohol are some of the matters that make this film an important issue to discuss about. Good casting and acting also help to make this film a must-see. It is a classic worth watching.

bux In this sequel to "Knock On Any Door" (1949) we find Nick Romano's illegitimate son being raised by his mother and a band of well intentioned, but flawed residents of a tennement slum. Winters as his drug addicted mother, and Montalban as her pusher are stand-out performances. It is a gripping scene, when young Nick walks in on his mother and her pusher and catches them "in the act.." Seldom appears on TV, but well worth catching.