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The Garment Jungle (Columbia) exposes the bare facts of life in the dress business. As the film begins, a wealthy dress manufacturer (Lee J. Cobb) leaps at a shapely model and rips the frock off her back, seam by seam, until she stands there looking downcast in her uplift. "Look at all these operations!'' he screams at his partner. "If we ran a union shop . . . we'd go broke making this dress." By paying his workers less than the contract minimum, Boss Cobb maintains what garment gamesmen call "The Edge''—a margin of profit that can make the difference between retirement to Miami or to a county relief check. But to keep the union out, he must pay a stiff percentage of his profits to an underworking (Richard Boone) whose strongboys keep the little man in line and the union organizers on the anxious seat.
The price of protection soon goes up. Cobb's partner, who wants the union in and the hoods out, winds up at the bottom of an elevator shaft. After that, the picture turns into a shemozzle over the manufacturer's soul as well as his love life (Valerie French) and his dollar, with the racketeer on the side of the angels and a union organizer (Robert Loggia) reading the gospel according to Dave Dubinsky—with one surprising variation. There is plenty of union activity, in a manner of speaking, but it generally seems to be of the kind that takes place between guys and dolls. The organizer, for instance, spends most of his time snuffling after his sexy young wife (Gia Scala) in an unpleasantly vulgar manner. The patronizing assumption seems to be that working people are always crude, and that leads to the soupy conclusion that crudity is therefore a virtue.
The organizer eventually gets the shiv in a manner viciously reminiscent of the death of I.L.G.W.U.'s William Lurye in 1949, and after a while the dress manufacturer cops it too. That leaves only the manufacturer's son (Kerwin Mathews), a superslick young article who hoodwinks the hoods and apparently manages with unseemly haste to inherit the organizer's widow along with his father's business.
Monkey on My Back (United Artists) is a picture about drug addiction that jabs the moviegoer full of sickly thrills while piously professing that it is simply pointing a moral with a morphine needle.
In a woozily inaccurate way the film is a biography of Barney Ross (Cameron Mitchell), onetime lightweight (1933) and welterweight (1934-38) boxing champion of the world.* The story starts with Barney's famous victory over Jimmy McLarnin, describes his wastrel ways as champion, and soon comes to his downfall under the whirling assault of the human pinwheel, Henry Armstrong. In the next few years, as the film tells the story, Barney gambles away his restaurant business and (for the time being) the affection of his best girl (Dianne Foster), winds up in the Marines during World War II.