Lionel Lindon, John Frankenheimer's camera man on The Young Savages, does a masterful job. Both he and Frankenheimer bring out one of Burt Lancaster's best performances. (Netflix currently has this in HD on their streaming service.) The plot is fairly simple:
A district attorney investigates the racially charged case of three Italian teenagers accused of the murder of a blind Puerto Rican boy. He begins to discover that the facts are the case aren't exactly as they seem to be. - IMDB
Finding clear lines of meaning and truth, however (and especially), in the turbulent atmosphere of 1960s New York, as remarkably illustrated by Frankenheimer, is not so simple. In truth, a similarly themed filmed could be shot in NYC today with a not altogether different set of "ethnic" communities in conflict and a mainline central character (or someone who has crossed over to the mainstream), who must confront the ever present, seemingly unending racial and socio-economic conflict within himself and the larger society.
The film is exactly 50 years old and I certainly can't point to vast changes (or, at least, any significant changes) within the cultural/social/economic landscape of New York, despite all of the physical re-manuevering, which is caught very effectively by Lindon (a major demolition of a huge swath of territory was being cleared for what is now Lincoln Center). This dovetails with one of the film's main themes: change as an agent for destruction. Has fifty years of change improved the plight of the disadvantaged and/or poor in New York (or in any large urban American city)? And is this so-called change anything more than conformity? The film poses these questions (among others) but, fortunately, doesn't attempt to answer them. Someone called this West Side Story without the music. Not quite. And it's too sophisticated a production to call it a polemic. But the final frame of the film with the noble Lancaster lawyer figure walking down the courthouse steps with his nice white family (wife and daughter wearing all white), shaken up but in-tact, speaks volumes.
And, yes, that's a young Telly Savalas doing an early Kojak.
