Up In Central Park is a 1948 musical film that offers up Boss Tweed's criminal life and downfall. I watched it because it's got Vincent Price in it. He's Boss Tweed. It's based on a Broadway musical, the screenplay was adapted by producer Karl Tunberg and William A Seiter is the director. Of the rest of the cast, I knew Dick Haymes, Deanna Durbin and Thurston Hall.
Deanna is naive Irish girl named Rosie, she comes to New York with her father. Right off the boat the father gets picked up to vote in the election. He's getting paid $2 a vote to fill in for the bedridden and the deceased. After all, they need a voice. Since he cast 23 votes during the day, the father gets invited to the Boss's big victory party, and it's there that Tweed thinks Rosie might have heard him getting up some graft on the reno of Central Park. Boss Tweed appoints the father to be the new Park Superintendent.
It takes a while for Rosie and her father to figure out who's the baddie, these Irish folk seem mighty dim. Rosie falls for Boss Tweed, even though he's married. Her father figures it out sooner than Rosie and he works with a reporter after Tweed to re-educate her in the truth. Then Boss is on the run and things are hopefully better in Big Apple. I thought the songs were boring and the idea of the story stupid. It least there are less songs in the movie. Not one I'm going to need to pick up.
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