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Reviews
City Across the River (1949)
Brings back Brooklyn memories
I lived in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, NY and saw "City Across the River" after reading "The Amboy Dukes" when I was 13 years old, a very impressionable age. Tony Curtis was the rage and all the boys started combing their hair with the "Curtis look." At the time it seemed as if all of my contemporaries read the book, much like "God's Little Acre." The former because it described our lives in Brooklyn and the latter because of the "sexual" passages contained therein. It was a time of pegged pants, "ducks-ass" hairdos ala Curtis, stick and punch ball, athletic clubs, going to the 12 cent movies Saturdays at 12 o'clock to see a double feature, cartoons, the "chapter" (weekly serial), not getting caught with your feet on the tops of seats in front by the omnipresent white dressed matron, street gangs, zip guns and our beloved Brooklyn Dodgers. Immediately after seeing the movie, "the neighborhood" boys, from ages 13 to 16, vicariously adopted the nicknames of the characters in the movie according to their own personalities. As I recall, names were Crazy Shack, Bull Benson, etc. One of the things that sticks in my mind was the way the neighborhood kids, in order to show their machismo as depicted in the movie, would gather on street corners and lift the metal bus stop stands as dumb bell weights, with one arm and then the other. It was a great time and television was only seen if you looked in the window of the bar and grill around the corner on Flatbush Avenue and Winthrop Street.