No Turbilhão da Metrópole

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.