Obviously made before its proper time had arrived, "13 West Street" from Alan Ladd's production company is a vehicle for the '40s star who's clearly past his prime. A decade later Charles Bronson iconically filled the bill as the prototypical urban vigilante revenging the murder of his family, while this treatment with Ladd miscast as the hero misses the mark by a mile.
He plays an engineer working on an important NASA space project who is beat up one night by a group of youths out for kicks, landing him in the hospital (and hobbling around almost comically for the rest of the movie with a leg in a cast). Rod Steiger is the juvenile crime squad detective assigned to the case, but Ladd gradually goes rogue, dedicating himself to getting the culprits and meting out punishment, his job and marriage falling apart as a result.
It's slowly paced and far from the hard-hitting drama (or exploitation movie the material cries out for) one craves. Punches are pulled throughout, as a subplot of the kids being racists at a bar (against Bernie Hamilton and a Latino, but taking it out on Ladd afterwards) is dropped. Smoothie cold-blooded killer Michael Callan as leader of the boys is effective, but when he tears open the blouse of damsel in distress Dolores Dorn as Ladd's wife, the movie quickly moves on rather than dwelling on the sexploitation angle.
Ladd's performance is lousy -he seems out of place in every scene and when violence erupts his handy stunt man takes over. A crappy car chase is inserted with ridiculous speeded-up footage, and poor Steiger is utterly wasted as a too-good-to-be-true cop: a nothing role with only a couple of seconds of his rage when Ladd starts overstepping to show the great actor underneath the walk-through.
Oddest touch is the screenplay, based on a novel by fine genre writer Leigh Brackett, that makes all the youth upper class types rather than the stereotyped juvenile delinquents who populate this type of picture. I suppose that was supposed to be making a social statement, but I found the ploy fatuous.
He plays an engineer working on an important NASA space project who is beat up one night by a group of youths out for kicks, landing him in the hospital (and hobbling around almost comically for the rest of the movie with a leg in a cast). Rod Steiger is the juvenile crime squad detective assigned to the case, but Ladd gradually goes rogue, dedicating himself to getting the culprits and meting out punishment, his job and marriage falling apart as a result.
It's slowly paced and far from the hard-hitting drama (or exploitation movie the material cries out for) one craves. Punches are pulled throughout, as a subplot of the kids being racists at a bar (against Bernie Hamilton and a Latino, but taking it out on Ladd afterwards) is dropped. Smoothie cold-blooded killer Michael Callan as leader of the boys is effective, but when he tears open the blouse of damsel in distress Dolores Dorn as Ladd's wife, the movie quickly moves on rather than dwelling on the sexploitation angle.
Ladd's performance is lousy -he seems out of place in every scene and when violence erupts his handy stunt man takes over. A crappy car chase is inserted with ridiculous speeded-up footage, and poor Steiger is utterly wasted as a too-good-to-be-true cop: a nothing role with only a couple of seconds of his rage when Ladd starts overstepping to show the great actor underneath the walk-through.
Oddest touch is the screenplay, based on a novel by fine genre writer Leigh Brackett, that makes all the youth upper class types rather than the stereotyped juvenile delinquents who populate this type of picture. I suppose that was supposed to be making a social statement, but I found the ploy fatuous.