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You're just not used to prosperity
Side Street (1949) is well named. It opens with an aerial panorama of New York City, wheeling above the Empire State Building and the skyscraping jigsaw of the Financial District, but most of the action in this "architectural jungle" will play out in the street-level labyrinth of bars and park benches and transient hotels, the front rooms of funeral homes and the back stairs of tenements and the charity ward of Bellevue Hospital. Nothing important in this film happens anywhere important, unless you count a taxi in a high-speed chase cornering Wall Street too hard and flipping right before the bronze eyes of George Washington at Federal Hall. It leans on the littleness of the big city, the anonymity and the isolation and the horror of being lost and surrounded at the same time. Get off track once and never mind that 850 Third Avenue is right where you left it, you might never find your way home.
At this point I care enough about film noir that I'm trying to write about it whenever I see it, whatever its grade; I enjoyed but don't want to oversell this one. Directed by Anthony Mann for MGM with a screenplay by Sydney Boehm and cinematography by Joseph Ruttenberg, it's a competent B-picture with compensations rather than a secret gem and it does have a couple of real faults. The ironic premise isn't one of them: a part-time letter carrier with money troubles and a baby on the way inadvertently steals $30,000 when he was just trying to steal $200 and spends the rest of his screen time dodging cops and criminals simultaneously, the former pursuing him for a murder committed by the latter in their efforts to recover the money which our hero has by now, just as fecklessly but rather more fatefully, lost. I'm almost convinced I've seen a comedy with this setup, but Farley Granger plays it with the freezing adrenaline of a panic attack, his own ordinary life as suddenly glassy and inaccessible as a nightmare. Joe Norson tries to apologize for the theft only to be told that nothing's missing, he goes to the bar where he stashed the money and it's under new management, he tracks down the former owner under an assumed name and finds the man dead, strangled with clothesline and Joe has to impersonate him to get out of the room. He's already avoiding his family, pretending to be out of town for a job he doesn't have. By the time he's playing up to his own wanted headlines ("Strangle-Slayer of Two Sought—Dragnet for Joe Norson Is Set") in order to intimidate an off-duty bank teller into giving him a lead on the origins of the thirty grand, he's well into the shape-shifting territory of so much noir, Granger's youthfully transparent face accumulating bruises and dread and distrust like grime on a windowpane. The relaxed sunlit sidewalks of the early scenes dim and contract into peeling hallways and underlit offices and the distressingly prison-like rounds of a maternity ward after hours; daylight from here on is no guarantee of safety, normality, or truth. But the pacing is ragged until well into the second act and I don't think the film recognizes that the police are the least interesting members of its cast, since it gives the narration to the strong-jawed, silver-haired, otherwise characterless captain played by Paul Kelly. His voiceover works in the opening shots as it surveys the metropolis and the statistics of its citizens and telescopes in on just one of the "eight million . . . problems that walk the streets of New York"; otherwise it's the kind of insulting intrusion that spells out what the audience can already see for itself—it is particularly egregious after the theft, when the look on Joe's face as the bundled hundreds just keep coming is more eloquent than any God's-eye paternalism—and it verges on disingenuous at the end, as the NYPD pats itself on the back for its helpfulness and compassion as the bodies are carted off, priestly forgiving of Joe's legal sins. The last scene would have been incredible with just the chimes of Trinity Church for accompaniment, or maybe some unmushy music. Kelly's Captain Anderson sounds like he's selling soap flakes: "He's going to be all right."
But even that's a forgivable offense. Superfluous voiceovers are an occupational hazard in film noir. The unforgivable one is wasting Cathy O'Donnell. With her fragile, hollow eyes and boyish bones, she was a singular presence in the genre and she had—as amply proven in They Live by Night (1949), which had been privately viewed by much of Hollywood in the two years Howard Hughes held up its release—fantastic chemistry with Granger and if Side Street gives them ten minutes together I'll do something suitably surprised. Whenever they're allowed to share the screen, the film takes a level in emotional reality. O'Donnell as Ellen Norson is stuck with the concerned wife role, first heavily pregnant and then recovering wanly but proudly among sheets and screens and disapproving nurses, but her scenes with Granger are so intimate and immediate that they don't feel like romantic boilerplate; they feel like eavesdropping. They embrace like even air won't get between them, their mouths fasten like they're breathing one another's breath. She can tell when he lies to her, but waits for him to tell her why: "I had this stupid notion that a couple hundred dollars could cure everything. You wouldn't have to have the baby in a charity ward. I—I'd built up a feeling of shame because everywhere I turned, people had things I wanted you to have." (Those last six words are key: Ellen isn't the one dreaming of mink coats and Paris or even a personal physician instead of a city clinic. She does not care about keeping up with the Joneses. She'd just like it if they didn't have to live with her parents—who are sympathetic and supportive, but still parents—anymore.) When, tracked down by the police and instructed to keep her husband talking on a traced call, she screams down the line for Joe to run, it's a more tearing jolt than any of the murders onscreen because she sounds like it's her heart in the trap. And she gets maybe half a dozen short scenes and maybe four with Granger and she should be as strongly felt as he is, just on the other side of the story; she's not. Especially knowing they were reteamed because of their bond in They Live by Night, it's a missed opportunity.
I mentioned compensations; after Granger's performance and the cinematography, they are the location shooting and the supporting cast. You want Greenwich Village in the days of the Weavers? We got Greenwich Village. You want the Third Avenue El before demolition and gentrification? We got the Third Avenue El. We got the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge, the Fulton Fish Market and Central Park West, Times Square and Stuyvesant Town—New York City as it doesn't exist anymore, right here in black and white and the occasional scratch. It's a very white New York City, I'm afraid, but I appreciate the Catholic priest and the Orthodox rabbi nodding genially to one another on the street in the introductory montage. The finale is a hell of a chase scene especially for 1949, smoking rubber and screeching through the masonry canyons that reduce even police cars to skittering tin toys in an experimental maze. Edmon Ryan is smooth but unsurprising as the crooked lawyer at the top of the racket, but his thugs on the ground are the nervous cabbie played by Harry Bellaver and James Craig's strangle-happy ex-con and they add considerable force and color to the cat-and-mousing. We got William Hansen as an unflappable coroner who knows from kebabs and Whit Bissell as the tower-of-Jell-O chief teller. And we got the peerless Jean Hagen as an eleven o'clock number of a hard-drinking singer, crooning "You'd Be So Easy to Love" on a listless Saturday night and knocking back whiskey shots as Joe gently presses her for the whereabouts of her uncouth ex. I had never seen her as anyone but Lina Lamont. She's brunette here, her low honey voice no one's but her own; her Harriet Sinton has a cute, tired smile, a forlorn dignity mixed with foggy outrage. She tells us everything about her relationship in one poignantly pissed-off line: "He hit me once when I recited Robert Burns. He hit me right in the eye! George was no good." The plot disposes of her too readily—this picture is no prize for women in noir—but until then she's all that and a bag of chips. I may finally have to see The Asphalt Jungle (1950) for her sake.
I am glad to have seen a good print of this film, in order to appreciate its roofs and alleys at the resolution at which they were meant to be seen; it may be only an okay noir, but it's a great New York movie. You could watch it for lost Manhattan alone, much as you might watch Mystery Street (1950) for the silver-salt ghosts of Boston. I don't know that it's going to unseat The Black Book (1949) as my favorite noir by Anthony Mann, but at this point I've seen exactly two (2) of those and how often do you get to see Richard Basehart as Robespierre tell his chief henchman to stop calling him "Max"? Minus the voiceover and plus more Cathy O'Donnell, Side Street could have offered some competition. As it stands, however, it is not devoid of cold morning thrills. Pigeons fluttering above chimneys and lines of washing. Fingers touching either side of the same thin glass. This shortcut brought to you by my part-time backers at Patreon.
At this point I care enough about film noir that I'm trying to write about it whenever I see it, whatever its grade; I enjoyed but don't want to oversell this one. Directed by Anthony Mann for MGM with a screenplay by Sydney Boehm and cinematography by Joseph Ruttenberg, it's a competent B-picture with compensations rather than a secret gem and it does have a couple of real faults. The ironic premise isn't one of them: a part-time letter carrier with money troubles and a baby on the way inadvertently steals $30,000 when he was just trying to steal $200 and spends the rest of his screen time dodging cops and criminals simultaneously, the former pursuing him for a murder committed by the latter in their efforts to recover the money which our hero has by now, just as fecklessly but rather more fatefully, lost. I'm almost convinced I've seen a comedy with this setup, but Farley Granger plays it with the freezing adrenaline of a panic attack, his own ordinary life as suddenly glassy and inaccessible as a nightmare. Joe Norson tries to apologize for the theft only to be told that nothing's missing, he goes to the bar where he stashed the money and it's under new management, he tracks down the former owner under an assumed name and finds the man dead, strangled with clothesline and Joe has to impersonate him to get out of the room. He's already avoiding his family, pretending to be out of town for a job he doesn't have. By the time he's playing up to his own wanted headlines ("Strangle-Slayer of Two Sought—Dragnet for Joe Norson Is Set") in order to intimidate an off-duty bank teller into giving him a lead on the origins of the thirty grand, he's well into the shape-shifting territory of so much noir, Granger's youthfully transparent face accumulating bruises and dread and distrust like grime on a windowpane. The relaxed sunlit sidewalks of the early scenes dim and contract into peeling hallways and underlit offices and the distressingly prison-like rounds of a maternity ward after hours; daylight from here on is no guarantee of safety, normality, or truth. But the pacing is ragged until well into the second act and I don't think the film recognizes that the police are the least interesting members of its cast, since it gives the narration to the strong-jawed, silver-haired, otherwise characterless captain played by Paul Kelly. His voiceover works in the opening shots as it surveys the metropolis and the statistics of its citizens and telescopes in on just one of the "eight million . . . problems that walk the streets of New York"; otherwise it's the kind of insulting intrusion that spells out what the audience can already see for itself—it is particularly egregious after the theft, when the look on Joe's face as the bundled hundreds just keep coming is more eloquent than any God's-eye paternalism—and it verges on disingenuous at the end, as the NYPD pats itself on the back for its helpfulness and compassion as the bodies are carted off, priestly forgiving of Joe's legal sins. The last scene would have been incredible with just the chimes of Trinity Church for accompaniment, or maybe some unmushy music. Kelly's Captain Anderson sounds like he's selling soap flakes: "He's going to be all right."
But even that's a forgivable offense. Superfluous voiceovers are an occupational hazard in film noir. The unforgivable one is wasting Cathy O'Donnell. With her fragile, hollow eyes and boyish bones, she was a singular presence in the genre and she had—as amply proven in They Live by Night (1949), which had been privately viewed by much of Hollywood in the two years Howard Hughes held up its release—fantastic chemistry with Granger and if Side Street gives them ten minutes together I'll do something suitably surprised. Whenever they're allowed to share the screen, the film takes a level in emotional reality. O'Donnell as Ellen Norson is stuck with the concerned wife role, first heavily pregnant and then recovering wanly but proudly among sheets and screens and disapproving nurses, but her scenes with Granger are so intimate and immediate that they don't feel like romantic boilerplate; they feel like eavesdropping. They embrace like even air won't get between them, their mouths fasten like they're breathing one another's breath. She can tell when he lies to her, but waits for him to tell her why: "I had this stupid notion that a couple hundred dollars could cure everything. You wouldn't have to have the baby in a charity ward. I—I'd built up a feeling of shame because everywhere I turned, people had things I wanted you to have." (Those last six words are key: Ellen isn't the one dreaming of mink coats and Paris or even a personal physician instead of a city clinic. She does not care about keeping up with the Joneses. She'd just like it if they didn't have to live with her parents—who are sympathetic and supportive, but still parents—anymore.) When, tracked down by the police and instructed to keep her husband talking on a traced call, she screams down the line for Joe to run, it's a more tearing jolt than any of the murders onscreen because she sounds like it's her heart in the trap. And she gets maybe half a dozen short scenes and maybe four with Granger and she should be as strongly felt as he is, just on the other side of the story; she's not. Especially knowing they were reteamed because of their bond in They Live by Night, it's a missed opportunity.
I mentioned compensations; after Granger's performance and the cinematography, they are the location shooting and the supporting cast. You want Greenwich Village in the days of the Weavers? We got Greenwich Village. You want the Third Avenue El before demolition and gentrification? We got the Third Avenue El. We got the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge, the Fulton Fish Market and Central Park West, Times Square and Stuyvesant Town—New York City as it doesn't exist anymore, right here in black and white and the occasional scratch. It's a very white New York City, I'm afraid, but I appreciate the Catholic priest and the Orthodox rabbi nodding genially to one another on the street in the introductory montage. The finale is a hell of a chase scene especially for 1949, smoking rubber and screeching through the masonry canyons that reduce even police cars to skittering tin toys in an experimental maze. Edmon Ryan is smooth but unsurprising as the crooked lawyer at the top of the racket, but his thugs on the ground are the nervous cabbie played by Harry Bellaver and James Craig's strangle-happy ex-con and they add considerable force and color to the cat-and-mousing. We got William Hansen as an unflappable coroner who knows from kebabs and Whit Bissell as the tower-of-Jell-O chief teller. And we got the peerless Jean Hagen as an eleven o'clock number of a hard-drinking singer, crooning "You'd Be So Easy to Love" on a listless Saturday night and knocking back whiskey shots as Joe gently presses her for the whereabouts of her uncouth ex. I had never seen her as anyone but Lina Lamont. She's brunette here, her low honey voice no one's but her own; her Harriet Sinton has a cute, tired smile, a forlorn dignity mixed with foggy outrage. She tells us everything about her relationship in one poignantly pissed-off line: "He hit me once when I recited Robert Burns. He hit me right in the eye! George was no good." The plot disposes of her too readily—this picture is no prize for women in noir—but until then she's all that and a bag of chips. I may finally have to see The Asphalt Jungle (1950) for her sake.
I am glad to have seen a good print of this film, in order to appreciate its roofs and alleys at the resolution at which they were meant to be seen; it may be only an okay noir, but it's a great New York movie. You could watch it for lost Manhattan alone, much as you might watch Mystery Street (1950) for the silver-salt ghosts of Boston. I don't know that it's going to unseat The Black Book (1949) as my favorite noir by Anthony Mann, but at this point I've seen exactly two (2) of those and how often do you get to see Richard Basehart as Robespierre tell his chief henchman to stop calling him "Max"? Minus the voiceover and plus more Cathy O'Donnell, Side Street could have offered some competition. As it stands, however, it is not devoid of cold morning thrills. Pigeons fluttering above chimneys and lines of washing. Fingers touching either side of the same thin glass. This shortcut brought to you by my part-time backers at Patreon.
no subject
no subject
It does! There are a lot of street crowd scenes in which the streets and the crowds are playing themselves. Some shots of the opening montage are obviously staged, but much of it looks documentary—market stalls and pushcarts, mounted cops in Central Park, a coffin being carried out from the undertakers and rows of babies in a maternity ward, the Staten Island Ferry. There's one great location shot of Joe passing a playground, his face framed by the iron fence like prison bars, but on the other side the kids are just swinging and playing like nature footage of the juvenile New Yorker, frequently accompanied by mothers. The rooftop full of domestic pigeons is terrific.
no subject
it may be only an okay noir, but it's a great New York movie. You could watch it for lost Manhattan alone --I understand this, yes! It's thanks to you that I have a sense of film as unintentional historical evidence.
no subject
Yes! I didn't think of it, but yes. More survivable, thankfully.
--I understand this, yes! It's thanks to you that I have a sense of film as unintentional historical evidence.
Thank you. I'm really glad to be a link to that.