Murder, Inc. is a 1960 American gangster film starring Stuart Whitman, May Britt, Henry Morgan and Peter Falk.

[4] This was the first film directed by Rosenberg, who later won acclaim for Cool Hand Luke (1967), and it launched Stuart Whitman's career as a leading man.

After hiring them to kill Catskills resort owner Walter Sage for withholding slot machine profits from the syndicate, Lepke designates Emanuel "Mendy" Weiss, his assistant, as Reles' contact.

Upon their return to the city, Reles visits Joey at the apartment he shares with his dancer wife Eadie and coldly announces that he will kill them if they tell anyone about what happened.

Later, at a soda shop, Lieutenant William Flaherty Tobin, a local police detective determined to end the syndicate's reign of terror, arrests him and takes him to the station house for questioning.

One day, at the nightclub in which Eadie performs, he asks her to reconcile with Joey, before taking her to a luxurious apartment filled with stolen goods and offering it to the couple for free.

A grand jury impaneled by special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey soon convenes, forcing Lepke to hide at the couple's dwelling.

He instructs Mendy to personally kill Joe Rosen, a shop owner he had beaten for failing to pay extortion money, to prevent him from testifying.

Lepke reluctantly consents, but rather than the two-year prison term promised by Albert, is sentenced to thirty years in Leavenworth.

Lepke, concerned about being linked to Rosen's death, orders Mendy to kill the entire Brownsville gang along with Joey and Eadie.

Voice of Henry Morgan (speaking as Burton Turkus): "Lepke was the first of the ganglords to pay up in full in the electric chair.

Mister""Fan My Brow"Music & Lyrics by George Weiss Twentieth Century-Fox based Murder, Inc. on a 1951 book of the same title by Burton Turkus, former district attorney of New York, and Sid Feder.

The 1951 film begins with De Corsia's falling off a ledge despite Bogart's attempt to save him, and includes gruesome scenes based on fact.

[1] Robert Evans, who later became head of production at Paramount Pictures Corporation but at the time was a young actor, was offered the part of Reles but turned it down.

In an interview with The Guardian in 2002, Evans said: I was hot as an actor for a few minutes and I turned down parts that got guys nominated for Academy Awards.

[1] Falk chose his wardrobe for the film by scouring second-hand clothing stores until he got the right coat and hat, to give him the "East Coast 'wise guy' look".

Because of the shortage of time, the scene, set in the Catskill Mountains, was shot outside the studio on 126th Street in Harlem, minutes before the start of the strike at midnight.

Crowther praised the other leading performances but said that Morgan, a radio and TV personality known mainly for his sharp wit, "does better when he is telling jokes".

[13] Describing Falk's performance, Crowther wrote: Mr. Falk, moving as if weary, looking at people out of the corners of his eyes and talking as if he had borrowed Marlon Brando's chewing gum, seems a travesty of a killer, until the water suddenly freezes in his eyes and he whips an icepick from his pocket and starts punching holes in someone's ribs.

Falk's performance, it stated, "is one of the grittiest portrayals of the primitivism of an underworld henchman on film; the supporting relationships of Whitman's cowardly, acquiescent innocent and May Britt's beleaguered wife perversely juxtaposed to the unusual pathos generated by the crime boss and his aide delineate the glumness of the crime world with few concessions to moral righteousness".

[14] In the 1997 book Crime Movies, film historian Carlos Clarens compared Murder, Inc. unfavorably to Samuel Fuller's Underworld USA (1961), released at about the same time, on the grounds that it stuck too closely to the facts.

Falk, he wrote, delivered a "miscalculated comic performance" as Reles, and "the power and resonance of The Enforcer was missing, chiefly because the facts tyrannized the weak screenplay".

In contrast, the book states Underworld USA was a "free and colorful fiction" that "packed the visual and dramatic wallop of an atrocity photo in the National Enquirer".

"[17] In 2005, film scholar John McCarty praised Falk's performance and David J. Stewart's "reptilian" Lepke, and wrote "the film belongs to Stewart and Falk; as with Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York, it is mostly when they are on the screen that this minor but engaging docudrama about the mob's ugly but profitable murder-for-hire business really cooks.