Palcoscenico nella strada

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.

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 film adaptation of Edgar Rice's Pulitzer Prize winning play about the denizens of a tenement on New York's West Side is a gracefully crafted well paced story balanced by an abundance of humor and sadness. As lives intersect in front of the stoop we are presented a cross section of the great melting pot with accents and biases in place arguing politics, dispensing philosophy, bragging, fueling stereotypes ,gossiping and complaining about the heat.

In less skillful and ambitious hands Street Scene might have made for a more than passable filmed stage play by working in the confines of a studio sound stage but Vidor takes it to the streets in more than one scene giving the film a more gritty and realistic feel as well as using the expanse for symbolic purpose. He also eschews back projection by cleverly erecting a set off of an actual city street to provide realistic backdrop. His camera movement is breathtaking and powerful without being self indulgent as his signature crane shots unveil the neighborhood to establish time place and elevate drama. Working in a limited space he keeps things fresh and energized by changing angles and using natural transition by tracking characters into other conversations. His languorous but deliberate pace befitting a summer in the city heat wave that leads up to the stunningly edited climactic scene is perfectly measured for maximum effect. Alfred Newman's score as well as the ambient music of children playing and singing in two separate scenes of dark irony seamlessly contribute to the films mood. While a general gloominess pervades and bigotries are ungoverned the stoop is the scene of great joy and humor much of it dark.

The cast of various ethnic types run from comic to ugly as they freely spout superstitions, bravado, rumor, bigotry and revolution. Some have dreams but most are filled with cynicism. Beulah Bondi as busy body Emma Jones is a sidewalk Cassandra with nothing good to say about anything or anyone. Sad eyed Sylvia Sidney gives a heartfelt performance as the daughter in the tragic Maurant family. Pulled from all sides she struggles to keep her family together while fending off the the seduction efforts of her boss who dangles a place of her own in front of her.

Street Scene is a microcosm in part of the immigrant experience in America during the first half of the last century and though some of the characterizations may be broad it retains an important historical significance. But it is King Vidor's master class( greatly assisted by the lensing of Barnes and Toland) in cinema grammar that awes and makes Street Scene a superb work of the early sound era.

In a hot summer afternoon in New York, Emma Jones (Beulah Bondi) gossips with other neighbors of her residential building about the affair of Mrs. Anna Maurrant (Estelle Taylor) and the milkman Steve Sankey (Russell Hopton). When the rude Mr. Frank Maurrant (David Landau) arrives, they change the subject. Meanwhile, their teenage daughter Rose Maurrant (Sylvia Sidney) is sexually harassed by her boss Mr. Bert Easter (Walter Miller); however, she likes her Jewish neighbor Sam (William Collier Jr.) that has a crush on her. On the next morning, Frank tells that is traveling to Stanford on business. Mrs. Maurrant meets the gentle Sankey in her apartment, but out of the blue Frank comes back home in an announced tragedy.

"Street Scene" is an unknown early sound movie directed by King Vidor based on a play of Elmer Rice that explores the new technology to the maximum. The awesome story of gossips, small talks, adultery and murders in a hot day in New York has witty and feral dialogs associated to excellent performances and magnificent camera work. My vote is eight.

Title (Brazil): "No Turbilhão da Metrópole" ("In the Whirlpool of the Metropolis")

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.