lot of scene and dialogue be flat out goofy and but when you add it all up and i. e. machine daily cycle from depress walkup to depress bar to depress burlesque hall to depress smoke fill poker game and back home again and you get a weird sense that somebody and somewhere be try to give a faithful depiction of the junkie life circa 1955. whether it sinatra and who obviously would have bump up against this type of character grow up in hoboken and working in numerous band and or preminger and who use the soundtrack and the frankie zosch subtext to slip the addict interior worldview past the hay code cage and you get a good companion piece to on the waterfront and which be film almost exactly the same time . sort of a faux realist work that leave you realistically wonder how deep the drug culture be embed in american life .