Street Scene

Imagine Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, but instead of spying on the people in a building from across a Greenwich Village courtyard and speculating on what their lives are as Jimmy Stewart does, instead you're up close and personal like you have a dwelling right on the sidewalk and see and hear it all. Instead of a colorful Village apartment it's a Lower East Side tenement which today would be filled with Yuppies. But back in the Twenties when it was written you have Elmer Rice's Pulitzer Prize winning Street Scene.

Street Scene ran a very nice 601 performances on Broadway and two members of the original cast came over for the film. John Qualen and Beulah Bondi playing Mr.&Mrs. Olsen. They reminded me so much of the Kravitzes from Bewitched, Mr. Kravitz who just wanted to relax and read his paper and Mrs. Kravitz forever in everyone else's business mostly the Stevenses. Bondi was a much nastier character, still kind of funny that her own life is so empty that all she takes pleasure in is dishing the dirt about others.

The main action centers around Sylvia Sydney who with this film and Dead End established herself as Hollywood's favorite slum daughter. She's the pretty girl in the building who gets everyone's hormones in overdrive. Her lummox of a father David Landau feels trapped by middle age and a life of no special significance. So does her mother Estelle Taylor. Thanks to Bondi everyone knows about her carrying on with the milkman, except her children and husband. When Landau finds out there's tragedy coming up like an oil gusher.

The only other significant character is William Collier, Jr. a quiet and studious kid who just wants out of the slum. He's Jewish and Sylvia is Irish. Despite that Collier is the only one that Sylvia really responds to, even though others push him around and make fun of him.

Street Scene is not your melting pot slum of the East Side Kids who are from many backgrounds. Elmer Rice has a most politically incorrect work where everyone even casually refers to each other with all the ethnic slurs going. It's probably why Street Scene is not revived that often.

Yet I'm glad the film isn't lost, it should be preserved and seen as a guide to American attitudes back when it was made.

Even though this is a filmed version of a stage play, it never seems like a "filmed play," thanks to the fluid camera work and the excellent direction of King Vidor. The film is vibrant throughout and, at about an hour and 18 minutes, for me wasn't long enough. It never seems quaint or clunky, the way a lot of movies from this era do. Sylvia Sidney is the best known person in the cast but there are a few familiar faces among the supporting cast, such as Beulah Bondi and John Qualen. All are excellent. Highly recommended for the serious viewer interested in seeing filmed American literature.

This is my favorite Hollywood movie of the thirties, and it's hard to tell why. It has a radiance that no other movie has. It's filmed theater, but somehow more alive than real life. It takes ordinary life and challenges us to see the beauty in it, or even the ugliness, anything rather than nothing. It depicts a sordid life, but isn't all life sordid? All actors are wonderful, especially Bondi and Sydney. The camera work is a dream. It makes you love people. Cheap theatrics are deftly avoided. This is art. It makes a symphony of cacophony.

There is just one scene for the entirety of the film - the front of a brownstone tenement in New York City during the summer. However, residents and visitors come and go, making conversation and sometimes vicious gossip to pass the time on the steps of the building. This is not a film about people living in outright poverty. As a whole,they are one rung above being poor with the safer position of being outright middle class just out of reach. The drama and the conversation mainly revolves around the Maurrant family. Anna Maurrant has been having at least a close relationship and perhaps an affair with the married milkman. We never really see exactly what is going on between them. Anna's husband, Frank, a man who is basically angry at the whole world, thinks that in the depression the fact that he holds down a job should make him husband of the year in the eyes of his wife, and that his barking orders at her should be good enough conversation for her. The couple has a grown daughter, Rose (Sylvia Sidney), whose married boss is leaning hard on her to let him become her "sugar daddy" and set her up in her own apartment. The couple also has a son who is well on his way to becoming a juvenile delinquent. Beulah Bondi really steals the show as a middle-aged housewife who is the building's gossiper-in-chief. She doesn't have a kind word to say about anyone and thinks she knows how every household should be run. She doesn't seem to notice that her own Mama's boy son is a proficient bully and a journeyman gangster.

Sam, the son of a Jewish couple in the building, is somewhat sweet on Rose, as she is on him. Her father outright objects to any relationship based on his own prejudice. The Jewish couple has similar objections, although they try to use the reason that any girlfriend will interfere with Sam's ambitions to become a lawyer.

Then there is the woman and two children who are about to be evicted because the husband has run off and they cannot pay the rent. In one particular scene that is relevant to social attitudes towards the poor today, a welfare worker shows up and chastises the woman when she learns that she has taken the children to the movies - she has spent a whopping 75 cents. When one of the neighbors mentions that he gave the woman some money because it made him feel good and made the woman feel good, the welfare worker replies he shouldn't do that because it is bad for the woman's character.

The whole thing builds slowly and artfully. Everyone knows something violent is going to happen here, the question is who will be the perpetrator and who the victim. There are any number of disgruntled, desperate, and angry people with an ax to grind.

The whole movie is just a very well done depression era slice-of-life film that shows that the residents may come and go, but the situations for whatever occupants that live there will remain the same. They will remain people one paycheck away from poverty, and possibly one revelation or argument away from violence. Highly recommended if you can find a copy.

It shows its age, and that's part of its charm. It's filled with old-fashioned ethnic stereotypes, but that makes it even more fascinating. This movie is a time machine; hop into it and you'll see a gritty and realistic picture of working-class New York City life in the early 1930s. It's pre-Code, so the language is blunt and the sexuality more open. The plot isn't Shakespeare, but it grabs onto you anyway, and the characters are so attractive and watchable that you become part of their neighborhood. A piece of cinematic and social history that is well worth your 80 minutes of time.