User Comments:
Howard Duff as rotten-to-core tabloid photographer, 4 September 2001
Author:
bmacv from Western New York
In Shakedown, Howard Duff plays his specialty, a winsome crumb. As a
down-at-the-heels shutterbug desperate for a job, he sells lurid
pictures --
drownings, defenestrations -- without any thought to the peril his subjects
face. Once he lands the job by buttering up his editor's assistant (Peggy
Dow), he realizes that compromising photos of crime figures pay better as
blackmail than as journalism. He doesn't scruple to double-cross his prey
if the profits can underwrite his taste for the high life, including the
widow of a mobster he set up for a hit. When he just happens to be on hand
to snap that murder, he causes a sensation but raises suspicions. Of
course, his duplicity and greed prove his undoing.... With such familiar
tough guys as Brian Donleavy and Lawrence Tierney, the movie clicks right
along apace with Duff's camera. A nice irony shades the ending, not unlike
the denouement of Taxi Driver: the heel gets turned into something like a
hero.
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