New York’s fashion district seems to me to be an unlikely subject for a noir, but I learned from the supplemental materials accompanying 1957’s The Garment Jungle just how dangerous an industry that was.  Maybe it still is.  At the time, it was apparently mobbed up.  Something I found ironic is the gangsters are not associated with the union but are instead trying to prevent a shop from organizing.  Not that the mob and union have any kind of history together!  Parish the thought…

This particular business is headed by Lee J. Cobb, in a role he could likely literally do in his sleep.  He is opposed to partner Robert Ellenstein’s desire to unionize.  Ellenstein thinks it would be better to pay their employees a living wage instead of those funds going to thugs who are blocking the union.  Alas, Ellenstein fails to notice the elevator repairman is Wesley Addy, one of those paid thugs.  The service elevator plummets in free fall in a bit which is somehow equally exciting and ridiculous.  It goes on for so long that the building this sweatshop is in must be taller than the Empire State.

This is right before Cobb’s son (Kerwin Mathews) comes home.  Despite dad’s protestations, he wants to help in the company.  Cobb decides the best way to learn the company is from the bottom, so floor manager Harold Stone starts the young man on the work assignments in the shop.  Credit to the filmmakers, if that shop isn’t a real location, then somebody seriously did their homework.

Mathews quickly empathizes with the employees and reaches out to union steward Robert Loggia.  Soon, Mathews sees first-hand just how brutal the union busters can be and will eventually learn his father is in cahoots with these gangsters.  Still, I felt there was some attempt to represent Cobb’s perspective of a man frustrated by the idea he might lose control of the business he built with his own hands.  Mathews says to him, “I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t hear anything about right and wrong.”  Cobb responds, “There is no right or wrong in the garment business”

There are some threads of real ugliness through this.  Even if the actual events happen off-screen, this is a rather violent picture for the time.  We will also see some real footage of union demonstrations, and the tension in that stock footage is palpable.  There is also some blatant racism, with two different characters addressing Loggia as “you Spic bum”.  I thought it curious each used those exact words.

Of the performances, Mathews fares the worst, being as dull here as he was in Five Against the House.  Loggia is completely believable as a man passionate for good working conditions and wages for the common laborer.  Alas, he has to die so that wife Gia Scala can get cozy with Mathews.  She didn’t have much a career in film, but leaves quite an impression here.  The way a strap on her dress keeps falling off one shoulder is sexier than anything from any porn.

For a movie about the fashion industry, it seem odds most of the product we see in The Garment Jungle looks like garbage.  The hats are especially ridiculous.  A fashion show in one scene has the emcee wearing what appears to a hat made of the hair.  It isn’t a wig, but it doesn’t quite look like a hat, either.  I wondered if it she had scalped a model and was wearing that pate atop her own.  Wow, fashion was really a cutthroat business back then.

Dir: Vincent Sherman

Starring Lee J. Cobb, Kerwin Mathews, Gia Scala, Robert Loggia

Watched as part of Powerhouse/Indicator UK (region B) blu-ray box set Columbia Noir #2