Year:  1960
Rating: 5.5

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Murder Incorporated was a criminal group formed by the Syndicate - the Mafia and the Jewish gangs - to carry out hits in the 1930's and 40's. They are estimated to have murdered well over 100 people - perhaps up to 400. They were run by Louis "Lepke" Buchalter and Albert Anastasia and their killers were generally recruited from the Brownsville gangs of Brooklyn.


This film is a bit of a mash of police procedural, melodrama and murder and it doesn't really work. If they had left out the melodrama, it would have been more cohesive and interesting. And the melodrama part was as far as I can tell completely fictional while the rest stuck to the historical record or close enough for horseshoes. Lepke (David J. Stewart) is a smooth operator at the top of his empire and he hires a member of the Brownsville gang to organize the hits. This is Reles, a real life character, played by Peter Falk like a sharp rusty blade - nasty and psychotic.


This was one of Falk's first big roles - he gets the "Introducing Peter Falk" line in the credits and he is terrific and he received an Oscar nomination for Supporting Actor. Here is where the film goes off the rails a bit - Reles forces a civilian (Stuart Whitman) to help him with a hit (Morey Amsterdam!) which makes no sense - you don't create eyewitnesses or if you do you take care of them. Instead, Reles rapes his wife (May Britt, who dropped out of acting after this film and married Sammy Davis Jr. and then returned after they divorced in 1968). This does not engender good feelings. So much of the film is spent on these two characters while what we really want is more Lepke and more Reles and the film bogs down at times only to be lifted when another hit takes place. By the 1940s Murder Inc was broken up after Reles turned canary and fingered many of them.


Some other good actors here - Henry Morgan and Simon Oakland as cops, Vincent Gardenia as a lawyer, a bunch of character actors who are excellent and featuring one song from Sarah Vaughan.