Shot largely from below the belt, 99 River Street delivers a one-two punch of brute force and formal cunning. The film builds on typical noir elements—a down-on-his-luck protagonist, an untrustworthy blonde wife, a grisly gallery of underworld types—but ventures beyond familiar wrong-man themes to explore the overlaps between reality and spectacle. We first meet Ernie (John Payne), a failed prizefighter turned taxi driver, as he watches himself lose on a TV show called “Great Fights of Yesterday.” Bruised, embittered but earnest Ernie is ensnared in an unstable universe where shops selling flowers and puppies are backdrops to crime, and murder is played as theater. When gangsters cast Ernie in the role of wife-killer, an aspiring actress (Evelyn Keyes) tries to help him with yet more artifice, but the ex-pug's response to his predicament is more direct: “I gotta hit.” The film's working title was “Crosstown,” evoking both the characters' mutual betrayals and the cabbie's nocturnal travels across the map of New York, finally leading him down a dead-end street in Jersey City.
—Juliet Clark