Edge of the City is a 1957 American crime drama film directed by Martin Ritt in his directorial debut, and starring John Cassavetes and Sidney Poitier.

Robert Alan Aurthur's screenplay was expanded from his original script, staged as the final episode of The Philco Television Playhouse, A Man Is Ten Feet Tall (1955), also featuring Poitier.

Tommy serves as a mentor to Axel, urging him to stand up to Malick, and that if he does he will be "ten feet tall."

Though this sum was considered small by movie industry standards, it was the largest fee Poitier received up to then.

The film was shot on location at a railroad yard in Manhattan and on St. Nicholas Terrace in New York's Harlem.

[4] The film earned positive reviews,[5] with critics praising the unusual multiracial relationship between the Poitier and Cassavetes characters.

The Motion Picture Production Code Administration allowed the innuendo, but recommended "extremely careful handling to avoid planting the suspicion that he may be homosexual.

It did not play in the Southern United States, and was refused by many theater managers because of its depiction of an interracial relationship.

[1] Los Angeles Times critic Dennis Lim, writing in 2009, described Edge of the City and Something of Value (1957) as "variations on an early Poitier specialty, the black-white buddy movie, the most vivid example of which is perhaps Stanley Kramer's The Defiant Ones (1958)," in which Poitier and Tony Curtis played escaped convicts shackled to each other.

Bogle writes that Poitier's "loyalty to the white Cassavetes destroys him just as much as the old slave's steadfastness kept him in shackles.