Cry of the City is a 1948 American film noir starring Victor Mature, Richard Conte, and Shelley Winters.

[2] Martin Rome (Richard Conte), a hardened criminal, is in a hospital room awaiting surgery for critical wounds he received in a shootout where he killed a police officer.

At the hospital, he is visited by members of his family and his girlfriend, a priest for last rites, and Teena Ricante (played by 14-year old Debra Paget), as well as by police detectives Candella (Victor Mature) and Collins (Fred Clark).

Niles (Berry Kroeger), a sleazy lawyer, who attempts to coerce Rome into confessing to the jewel robbery, threatening to harm Teena.

[5] The staff at Variety magazine liked the film and wrote, "The hard-hitting suspense of the chase formula is given topnotch presentation in Cry of the City.

It's an exciting motion picture, credibly put together to wring out every bit of strong action and tension inherent in such a plot.

The Time Out Film Guide praises the realistic look and feel of the city: "Rarely has the cruel, lived-in squalor of the city been presented in such telling detail, both in the vivid portrayal of ghetto life and in the astonishing parade of corruption uncovered in the night (a slug-like shyster; a monstrous, sadistic masseuse; a sleazy refugee abortionist, etc.)".

[7] Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton writing in A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941–1953 comments that director Siodmak had better noir efforts but the film does have one lasting image, "Siodmak will rediscover neither the brilliance of The Killers nor the 'finish' of Criss Cross in the over-rushed, too uneven, Cry of the City: for all that, one will remember the figure of a forever famished masseuse, a real 'phallic woman' who, with a flick of the wrists, has a 'tough guy' at her mercy".

Hirsch describes Rome's innocence in the jewel robbery, despite his criminal background, as an "ironic variation on the wrong man theme" of some film noir movies.

The musical score of the film is Alfred Newman's Street Scene, which had debuted in a 1931 movie of the same name and was heard in other big-city gangster pictures produced during that era.