The Garment Jungle
With Lee J. Cobb, Kerwin Mathews, Gia Scala.
US, 1957, 35mm, black & white, 88 min.
Print source: Sony Pictures
Aldrich’s leftist sympathies are everywhere apparent in this little-known Columbia picture that echoes On the Waterfront in its stinging critique of gangster racketing and its urgent plea for unionized labor. Lee J. Cobb stars as a hardheaded garment factory owner locked in a dangerously close “relationship” with the mob that turns perilous when his long-estranged son enters the family business and begins to ask one too many questions. Aldrich had almost completed filming when he was taken severely ill with flu. Shortly after Columbia hired Vincent Sherman as a substitute director, Harry Cohen abruptly gave full reins of the picture to Sherman, summarily dismissing the ill Aldrich and cutting him entirely out of the final edit. Despite the film’s ultimately quite conventional narrative and ending, The Garment Jungle is, nevertheless, clearly branded by key Aldrich moments—the shocking death in the elevator shaft, for example, and the vivid glimpses into a seedy, festering underworld.
