brenniemay
I'm a 57 year old woman and I haven't seen or forgotten this film since seeing it at approx. 8 yrs. old. I remember it as being very dark. It upset me a lot as a child which is probably why I've never forgotten it. I'd like to view it again as well as it's prequel, 'Knock On Any Door', which I didn't know existed until researching, 'Let No Man Write my Epitaph', a story of a young boy of a single mother. Clearly, they were poor and living in a Chicago tenement. The Mother, played by Shelley Winters, became a heroin addict and neighbors in the tenement were trying to prevent the boy from following his Father's past as a criminal subjected to death by electric chair.
Robert J. Maxwell
Not bad, actually, partly because the cast is as good as it is. And what a cast! James Darren, whose performance is exceptional in being less than particularly good, is Nick Romano. Well -- the kid is a genius at the piano, see. But he's being raised in this crummy Chicago apartment house and everybody around him is a loser in one way or another. There is the failed, drunken ex-judge (Burl Ives), the heroin-addicted saloon singer (Ella Fitzgerald, in another below-professional performance), Darren's distraught mother (Shelley Winters), the helpful guy who runs the news stand (I thought it was Richard Taber but he's not in the credits) and the helpful cab drive (Rudolf Acosta). They'd all like to help Nick when he runs into trouble with the law, injuring his precious hands, his tools out of the slums, and so on. And Nick is immediately sympathetic because his father died in the electric chair. But what can they do? They all have their own weaknesses and can barely keep themselves together.And there are bad guys too, exemplified by Ricardo Montalban's smooth, expensively dressed and immaculately groomed dope dealer, who shoots Shelley Winters up and then takes advantage of her, as they say, in her flat. The scene is kind of edgy for 1960 and only gets more so when Nick barges in on them unexpectedly while they are in flagrante delicto.Burl Ives pulls himself together sufficiently, with the aid of the good-natured others, to introduce Nick to someone (Philip Ober, an actor whose magnetism has always eluded me) in a position to get Nick into the Music Conservatory after high school. Pretty good, eh? It's not just how good you are, but who you know. Or, more precisely, it's who somebody you know knows. And then, to top it off with a cherry, Ober the Impresario has a drop-dead gorgeous daughter who comes in the shape of the young Jean Seberg, the perfect, if entirely conventional, incarnation of Nordic beauty.Actually, Seberg doesn't act well either. Let's see. It LOOKS like a good cast -- but Darren, Fitzgerald, Ober, and Seberg don't really deliver. You know when I said "the cast is as good as it is"? Can I take that back? I don't think I'll give away the ending except to mention that the very last shot in the film has Darren and Seberg walking hand in hand in front of the Chicago Art Institute. You'll have to guess the rest.I don't know who chose the title or why. It's from a speech by Robert Emmett, an 18th-century Irish nationalist I think, just before his execution. Emmett's message was along the lines of, "Don't judge me now, you cretins. The historians of the future will give me a fair shake." Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose. (My keyboard doesn't have the accents for that cliché.)
LadyRagweed
I was pleasantly surprised by all of the comments on this film. I haven't seen it for many, many, years, probably 15 or more. However, I remember it well and had believed for a long time that I was the only one who knew of it's existence. *laughing* This is one of my favorite Shelley Winters movies. And of course Miss Ella Fitzgerald was an added treat. I first saw it when I was about 15 (mid-1970s), so you can imagine what an impact it had on me. I'd had a crush on James Darren from his role in the television series "The Time Tunnel". I wish I could find it on video or DVD somewhere; but that's unlikely. I was just looking over the credits and saw a couple of familiar names; Bernie Hamilton(who starred in a lot of the so-called Blaxploitation films of the seventies) and Jeanne Cooper,whom I adored in the seventies as Mrs. Chancellor in the popular soap, "The Young and the Restless". Try as I might, I cannot remember them in the film. Which is why it is a must I see it again! *Laughing* I'll be armed with "TVio" and "VCR" the next time it makes it's appearance on cable....TCM are you listening???!! Miss "P"
