Not as a messagey as I feared, and just intelligent enough to make you wish it were a truly great movie.

Not too preachy, and the performances are pretty hard-edged, particularly Richard Widmark's racist and Linda Darnell as his dead brother's girl.

A tense, incisive racial issues movie, with Widmark playing the vilest character of his career He says some absolutely heinous shit, but it never seems gratuitious, exagerrated, or phony. Poitier in his first Hollywood role sets the standard for his career: powerful, intelligent and dignified. Linda Darnell is very good in it as well. A movie as explosive in its depiction of racial conflict at its time as Do the Right Thing was nearly 40 years later.