A violent melodrama about juvenile delinquents that, coming as it did in the wake of The Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without A Cause, didn't make a huge stir, Crime In The Streets was adapted by Reginald Rose (Twelve Angry Men) from his script for the Elgin Playhouse television production. Filmed, with the exception of the opening scene, on a single set - “a sort of expressionistic view of a New York street designed by Serge Krisman and lighted impressively by cameraman Sam Leavitt” (D.S.) - the film has an eerie quality to its visuals as well as its characterizations, which include Sal Mineo and John Cassavetes (already a uniquely effective vessel of evil in 1956) as JDs who plan to murder a middle-aged man. James Whitmore is the settlement worker with the unholy task of convincing the punks that (as West Side Story had it, five years later) they're “depraved on accounta' they're deprived.”