Jewish brothers in Baltimore, 1954, era of fine automobiles, including a 'Green mist' coloured cadillac.
Ben Foster falls for black girl in class Rebekah Johnson (who's also in As Good As It Gets), Adrian Brody for a spoiled rich girl, Carolyn Murphy. Neither of these are dealt with in a clichéd manner - the young black girl, for example, proves to be extremely loyal and brave. Their dad Joe Mantegna gets in trouble over his numbers racket (honestly, no one invests in 13, and also to put odds on the square root of minus one is just crazy), putting him in a situation with criminal Orlando Jones. There's a lot of nice observation of the culture of the times and the way alliances are formed between different cultural groups. And it's quite auto-biographical - "A lot of things happened to my cousin Eddie, like dressing up as Adolph Hitler on Halloween" he's quoted as saying. And there's those trademark Levinson Diner conversations.
There's a weird connection to the Baltimore-set The Wire, in that David Simon sent his 'Homicide' work to Levinson, who chose to produce it as a series, which led on to Simon's TV career.
With David Krumholtz, Bebe Neuwirth. Beautifully photographed by Chris Doyle, music by Andrea Morricone (Ennio's son), edited by Stu Linder.
Ed. From Wikipedia: 'The numbers game, also known as the numbers racket, is a form of illegal gambling or illegal lottery played mostly in poor and working class neighborhoods in the United States, wherein a bettor attempts to pick three digits to match those that will be randomly drawn the following day. '
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