After watching Farley Granger play so many naive, young patsies in films like Rope (1948), They Live By Night (1948) and Side Street (1950), his performance as the confident, tough-minded murderer and death row inmate Nicky Bradna in Maxwell Shane’s The Naked Street is a treat. When neighborhood racketeer Phil Regal (Anthony Quinn) learns that the recently incarcerated Nicky got Phil’s sister Rosalie (Anne Bancroft) pregnant, he deploys his thugs to torture the witnesses into recanting their testimony and exonerating Nicky so he can come home and serve his obligation as a proper husband. But when Rosalie loses the baby and Nicky gets a bit too big for his britches, all loyalties disintegrate, and mayhem ensues. While the plot may be far-fetched for some and the journalistic framing perhaps unnecessary, the performances are strong (especially Quinn) and the brutality is unrelenting — men are torched alive, detonated in car bombs, stabbed in the back, and beaten unconscious behind a billboard warning “Drive Safely – The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”