Street Scene

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.

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.

King Vidor's Street Scene, from the infancy of the sound era, may be cinema's quintessential slice of life. Drawn from the 1929 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama by Elmer Rice – so many movies from the earliest 1930s were little more than filmed stage plays – Street Scene surmounts the limitations of its time and its material to achieve the status of a minor milestone in movie history. It's dated, occasionally clumsy, but unforgettable.

Street Scene's microcosm is a brownstone in a Manhattan tenement block during a scorching heat wave. The residents, in their various comings and goings, loiter on its front stoop to catch a stray zephyr and exchange some gossip. The gossip-in-chief is Beulah Bondi, a dried-up streel griping that she doesn't have a `dry stitch' on her (Vidor permits himself a cheeky shot of her, shot from below and behind, when she furtively unsticks her house dress from her, well, person).

Incidental players include a henpecked young husband whose wife is about to go into labor; an elderly Jew spouting socialist rant; his son, a non-violent college man with a crush on a gentile girl; cheerful Italians and dour Scandinavians; pinched and bitter social workers; gasbags, mashers and inebriates.

After reviling the weather with immemorial cliches, the characters turn wickedly to their chief topic: the milkman's suspicious visits to a married woman upstairs. (Her daughter, the central character in the drama -- Sylvia Sidney -- makes a later entrance but will ring down the curtain.) Meanwhile, the characters carry on city life in a rough-and-tumble of casually aimed racist barbs, sanctimonious judgementalism, and general acceptance of the notion that one's neighbors' lives are the reality television of the day, to be viewed with gusto. The potent cocktail of slander and humidity will have fatal results.

Vidor employs his talents adroitly. The movie's first `act' stays stubbornly crouched on that stoop, but gradually Vidor opens up his stage in a series of tilts and pans so that the brownstone becomes but one cell in a bustling urban organism. (Technically, it's precocious, and the story's dramatic `climax' arrives in a montage that may elicit smiles but still remains impressive.) Surviving current attitudes about political correctness and convincing `realism' (that most elusive of artifices), Street Scene endures as haunting, human experiment – among the finest of the first `talkies.'

Note: Rice's play was later to become the libretto to Kurt Weill's Broadway `opera' Street Scene.

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.

In front of a New York City tenement, on a swelteringly hot summer day, gossipy Beulah Bondi (as Emma Jones) and neighbors gather to swap stories and complain about the heat. The story focuses on the Maurrant family. Pretty young Sylvia Sidney (as Rose) is the lead, as evident later in the running time. Her beauty attracts the opposite sex, most significantly sensitively Jewish William Collier Jr. (as Sam Kaplan). Mother Estelle Taylor (as Anna) is rumored to be having an affair with milkman Russell Hopton (as Steve Sankey). No wonder, as husband and father David Landau (as Frank) is a nasty, loud-mouthed bigot. Roller-skating son Lambert Rogers (as Willie) rounds out the Maurrant family. He has a great run as part of the classic opening sequence...

Producer Samuel Goldwyn did well in bringing this Elmer Rice's Broadway hit to the motion picture screen. The play won a "Pulitzer Prize" for drama (1929) and the film placed second in the annual "Film Daily" poll (1931).

The play was acted in front of the characters' tenement. The film preserves this gimmick, but stretches its landscape up and down the street. It's artistically directed by King Vidor, fluidly photographed by George Barnes, and features a classic soundtrack by Alfred Newman. We never see the inside of anyone's apartment. Some of the early scenes are stunning, with setting and characters strikingly presented. The great American "melting pot" of various ethnic groups living together in a city is nicely captured; this mixing produced an incredible country, but the stories herein only minimally illustrate a bigger picture. Violence and separation are the rule. As the story progresses, it cools off. "Street Scene" loses some of its sweat, and never its gimmick.

******* Street Scene (8/26/31) King Vidor ~ Sylvia Sidney, William Collier Jr., Estelle Taylor, Beulah Bondi