The Garment Jungle

The Garment Jungle (1957)

The Whole Naked Truth

Alan Mitchell returns to New York to work for his father Walter, the owner of a fashion house that designs and manufactures dresses. To stay non-union, Walter has hired Artie Ravidge, a hood who uses strong-arm tactics to keep the employees in line.

Date of release
1957-05-01
TMDB
6.5 / 10 (27)
Runtime
1h 28m
Genres
Drama, Crime
Director
Vincent Sherman, Robert Aldrich

Casting

Interesting facts

The Garment Jungle is a 1957 American film noir crime film directed by Vincent Sherman and starring Lee J. Cobb, Kerwin Mathews, Gia Scala, Richard Boone and Valerie French.

Production

In November 1955 Columbia announced they had purchased the rights to a Reader's Digest article, "Gangsters in the Dress Business" by Lester Velie, about the efforts of organized crime to infiltrate the garment industry. Harry Kleiner was assigned to write and produce. It was to be called Garment Center.

In July 1956 Robert Aldrich signed a two-picture deal with Columbia to make films through his own company, The Associates and Aldrich, and Garment Center was to be the first. Aldrich says he mostly agreed to do the film so Columbia would finance the second movie he wanted to make, Until Proven Guilty.

Aldrich said Kleiner's script was "terribly tough, controversial". He said it was about how mostly Jewish manufacturers hired the mostly Italian mafia to help them with labor. Aldrich said "it was a marvellous conflict - racial, social, religious."

Eventually the film was made for Columbia directly, but Aldrich planned to follow it with Until Proven Guilty for his company and to be distributed through Columbia. He arrived in New York with Kleiner in July to start scouting locations.

The lead roles were given to Lee J. Cobb, who had been in On the Waterfront (1954), a similar organized-crime-in-labor story for Columbia, and Kerwin Mathews, who was under contract to the studio and had just starred in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. Aldrich says he had to use Matthews along with other Columbia contract players such as Gia Scala, Robert Loggia, and Valerie French.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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