On the Bowery

On The Bowery is quite strange to watch, considering the odd feeling one gets when watching this film. Is it unscripted? Is this really what happens? In the end, the film feels like a confabulated lie, one that shouldn't have been identified as a certain extreme. As a piece of fictionalized reality, this film does feel rather decent in its context. Sadly, only history will dictate how this movie is percieved, and even then, it will still be a perception that is not quite correct.

A 60-minute semi-documentary (some scripting) of life on New York's notorious Bowery.

Thanks TCM for reviving this slice of exotica for a general audience, and thanks fred3f for the edifying comments. Even now, so many years later, the film is still compelling. The faces, oh my, the faces! They're a road map of life in the raw, so unlike the cosmetics of Hollywood and Vine. So just grab a slab of sidewalk and sleep it off. Or spend the night blustering across a table with other drunks. But whatever you do, always guard your back.

For a Midwestern geezer like me used to the Hollywood product of the 50's, a film like this comes from another planet. To think there was a guy (Rogosin) working hard in the upscale 50's on a look at the subterranean America everyone else ignored is astonishing. What he's left us with is a record of permanent insight. Nevertheless, I'm skipping that next glass of wine, and from now on, I'll be making my bed with loving care.

As I read the admiring comments about this movie, I find myself confused. Yes, this is an excellent documentary -- and the question of whether some scenes may have been staged bothers me less than it does another commenter. Yet, good as it is, this sort of documentary did not spring newborn from the mind of Lionel Rogosian, like Athena from Zeus' brow. There are clear antecedents, like the photography of Walker Evans and even movies like Boris Kaufman's LES HALLES CENTRALES (1927).

In many ways it is a remake of the 1941 Passing Parade short THIS IS THE BOWERY, without the voice over commentary. Instead, it reserves its commentary to its cinematic choices: the editing that cuts faster and faster as arguments rage and the uncredited photographer, who carefully composed and key lit portrait shots that scream "This is a human being", Film is a medium that can lie or tell the truth twenty-four times a second, but which lies or truths the film maker chooses to tell.... that's the real point.

Having thus demonstrated my learnedness and balance as a film critic, let me turn again and note that such issues are irrelevant. A movie is made for an audience, and how would this movie strike its audience, who probably could not recall having ever seen anything like it before? Like a thunderbolt. This sort of cinema vérité film making was something usually seen in post-war Italian movies where the producer couldn't afford a studio. To see it applied to reality in the United States was devastating and changed documentary film-making permanently. At least, until the next new and greatest thing came along.

A window into a time and a place, and more importantly, a way of being that's so different from other depictions of life in America in the 1950's that it deserves a watch, even if it's depressing. Embedded in the rather extraordinary images of alcoholics down and out on skid row is a loosely scripted story performed by the alcoholics themselves, so it's a blend of documentary and neorealist fiction. It elicits a degree of sympathy for Ray who wants to get off the bottle but finds he can't tolerate sleeping in the mission, but there's no sugarcoating here. Mostly what we see are men stumbling about in a stupor, laying out on the street, arguing loudly in a bar, or struggling to make it to their next drink. The older guy, Gorman, is fascinating as he spins tales about his past life as a surgeon and thinks of himself as an honorable guy, but meanwhile has no problem stealing from his buddy when he's passed out. One can't help but wonder how these people came to be in this condition, the larger picture of their lives and the system they grew up in. Maybe that was part of the point.

I wanted to watch this hoping to see a DOCUMENTARY! Raw unscripted footage of skid row in the 1950s is what this would be if the director had even a molecule of talent... well this "documentary" is not one at all, it portends to be a documentary, but rather a "docufiction"(?) uhh. WTF is that? No such thing!!! A term that shouldn't exists and that fact that it does somehow enrages me. The result is such a blunder that the film is next to worthless. How can you tell what's real and what's not? Nearly all of it looks phony to me, even the homeless people appear to be acting and playing to the camera.