Side Street

A dazzling aerial shot taken high above the Empire State Building opens Anthony Mann's Side Street, and, throughout the movie, glimpses of that New York obelisk recur – sometimes dark and menacing, sometimes caught at the vanishing point of an urban canyon. It's a subtle image of the wide gulf on a narrow island between the pride and power of the haves and the borderline, hand-to-mouth lives of the have-nots for whom it's a distant and alien totem.

War veteran Farley Granger tries to make ends meet by shouldering a mail bag part-time; he and his pregnant wife Cathy O'Donnell (the pair reunited from the previous year's They Live By Night) live in a bedroom of his folks' railroad flat. Delivering one day to a shyster lawyer (Edmon Ryan), he spots a few big bills strewn carelessly about; the next, when he finds the office empty, he succumbs to temptation, only to find that the couple of hundred he thought he copped is really about $30-grand. Out of his depth, he wraps up the cash and gives it to a bartender to keep, while he checks into a fleabag hotel to think things out.

The money's a payoff in Ryan's blackmail racket, whose chief lure is Adele Jergens (misnamed `Lucky,' as she's soon fished out of the river). When Granger decides to come clean and return the money, Ryan denies all knowledge of it (it could link him to Jergen's murder). But he sets his loose cannon of a goon (James Craig) to retrieve the cash any way he can. Granger finds that his trusty barkeep has absconded with his package; when he tracks him down, he finds him dead, too.

A cadre of police assigned to the murder (Charles McGraw and Paul Stewart among them) thinks Granger's the prime suspect, so he has to turn sleuth to clear himself. His trail leads him to a Village dive where one of the numbers in Craig's little black book (Jean Hagen) croons `Easy to Love....'

Side Street hews to the classic noir narrative of the average guy caught up in dark forces he can neither understand nor control, and Granger gives it one of his finer performances, perplexed and terrified at what he's unleashed. And while O'Donnell's role is conventional and secondary, Hagen gives her brief sequence as a boozy moth drawn to a fatal flame a poignant spark (Jergens, platinumed and sequined, does her even briefer sequence proud).

To the extent that Mann indulges in social comment, he leaves it to be inferred (the same year, Granger appeared in the far more explicitly leftist Edge of Doom). At the end, the shots of the opening are rhymed with an eagle-eyed view of a police chase through the deserted streets of lower Manhattan early on a Sunday morning. It's a Bullitt-like ending for a movie that, while gripping, shows far more texture and nuance than Bullitt.

Tight plot, good acting, sustained suspense, but above all, terrific shots of NYC. We were given a tour of lower Manhattan, including Wall Street (where the movie ends), the City Hall area, Greenwich Village, and the Lower East Side. The photography was dark, gritty, and realistic, and we current and former New Yorkers are given a visual treat by Anthony Mann.

Side Street opens with narration that is practically omniscient, or at least as much as a New York City cop can get, and put over a very explicitly edited sequence showing various workers and people all across the city. Then it moves right into the saga of Joe (as in 'Average Joe' one might think), who is a postal delivery man who gets tempted by greed when he realizes the same amount is left in a drawer of one of the people he drops off for- $200- which would be just enough to get some new things for his wife and their kid on the way. He takes what's in there (a little grin for when he finds the crowbar to pry open the drawer as a cat watches), but later discovers it's $30,000, which as the narrator tells us is "much too much" for Joe to even think about ever having. He hides it, but it gets switched around from the bartender he left it with, and a nefarious criminal is out to get it as well, who originally left it in the drawer. Joe is racked with guilt, but can't turn himself in all the way: he'll do into part of the seedy underbelly to get it back and clear his name.

And so goes one of those stories that one might find under the dictionary if one went to look for B-noir archetypes (A-noir would probably be Double Indemnity, if it could be considered as such). Even if the femme fatale is reduced to a supporting role (Jean Hagen as the floozy Harriet, a nightclub singer who has a great scene with Granger's Joe), you've got the existential protagonist who's down on his luck and can't stand being a criminal for too long, and the cops who are out to get him and whomever, and the real villain (George played by James Craig fairly typically) who is the most desperate of all to escape at all costs. Granger and O'Connell come close to doing a reprisal of their parts in They Live By Night, only this time with the complication of a baby thrown in right away, and the sides of good conscience always present except for an instance (really amusing) when she screams on the phone to Joe "RUN, RUN AWAY" when prodded to talk him out of what he's doing by the cops.

A lot of this, to those who are only somewhat familiar with the attitude of a solid noir thriller, isn't too surprising, and comes close to being average in story material. But it's heightened terrifically by Anthony Mann's direction; it would be one thing if material like this, which could be found in any pulp mystery magazine of the period for ten cents, was filmed with only competence and some skill in the storytelling. But many of the images in Side Street are indelible and essential for the sub-genre. If for nothing else it's a tour-de-force as far as pure film-making goes, as shots in the shadows are incredible (I loved the nightclub scene in the first images, cutting back and forth between Joe and Harriet), and the editing to go along with it is taut and hard-edged for the period and budget, particularly in the climactic chase through New York City's downtown areas. And, if nothing else should strike as a reason to see it, as far as NYC movies go it's a keeper, with the feeling as gritty as possible through the use of real streets and people and cars and accidents and dark alleys.

It's always fun to watch Farley Granger sweat bullets over a screw-up. This time the part-time letter carrier stumbles upon a quick way to pick up a couple of hundred bucks so that his pregnant wife can have all the good things in life, namely a private room at the hospital. When he ends up with a bit more cash than he bargains for, he begins to behave every bit as stupidly and nonsensically as you would expect him to. Anthony Mann skillfully keeps the usual suspect noir elements in the mix. Jean Hagen plays the saloon singer who prefers to drink her meals at the improbable club Les Artistes. James Craig plays the big lug with a shady past and the police detectives including the frog throated Charles McGraw have plenty of colorful characters to question. But it's Farley Granger who keeps the ball rolling. You never know what dumb move he'll make next.

So who does impulsive thief and part-time mail carrier Joe Norson (Granger) entrust with the $30,000 he's just stolen? Why that well-known paragon of virtue, the friendly neighborhood barkeep, of course. Then, when the latter disappears, a lot richer, guess what-- Joe is surprised! Let's hope the baby his wife just delivered got her genes instead of his. Now Joe gets to chase after the money before either the cops or the crooks get him first. Frankly, my money's on the crooks who certainly know how to surprise us with a broken-down lounge singer (Hagen). But then this is Production Code 1950 with the sweetfaced Granger, so better bet on the kid.

This is Dore Schary's MGM playing catch-up with post-war noir, and they've hired the best— director Anthony Mann. That means the New York street scene never looked grittier, nor the great stone canyons more threatening. And that car chase down empty city corridors looks downright science-fiction eerie. Too bad they've saddled Mann with boring cops and a bad guy (Craig) about as scary as a TV salesman. And was there ever an actress whose sheer sweetness could melt the screen faster than O'Donnell. Together with the artless Granger, Mann's tough-guy cynicism never stood a chance. The visuals tell one story; the characters another. This is hard-shell noir with the softest of cores, but will still keep you stapled to the screen.