Side Street

SIDE STREET             B                     

USA  (83 mi)  1950  d:  Anthony Mann

This is New York, where two persons living twenty feet apart may never meet.  

Fear, confusion, and panic are setting in.  Reason and judgment are going.             

— Police Captain Walter Anderson (Paul Kelly)   

Mann is known for his tense, psychological westerns, many starring Jimmy Stewart in roles that went against type, playing men whose obsessions nearly got the better of him, becoming slightly unhinged for the first time in his career, also for his penchant of shooting on location in order to enhance the element of realism of his stories.  Mann’s earlier works are known for their tough, highly stylized noir component, also for his tightly compacted brevity, as one could easily use excerpts of his earlier films like DESPERATE (1947) or RAW DEAL (1948) to teach the fundamental basics of cinema, much like a master class of film construction from Robert Bresson, where A MAN ESCAPED (1956) and PICKPOCKET (1959), for instance, are legendary examples of minimizing the technique down to only the essential ingredients.  SIDE STREET is another take on Jules Dassin’s NAKED CITY (1948), where “There are eight million stories in the naked city,” and this, apparently, is another one of them.  Centering on the city of New York itself, perhaps the most significant character in the film, there are masterful shots highlighting the city from every possible angle, including opening aerial shots, which are used again later in a spectacular climaxing car chase.  Mann also captures the bustling energy of street scenes, using a near documentary style to show construction workers at their jackhammers, cops on the beat spending idle time chatting with residents, dreaming of the day when they can retire, neighbors sticking their heads out of walk up apartment windows, or mailmen who hand deliver the mail directly to the intended whenever possible instead of sticking it in the designated slots.   

Teaming together the doomed lovers from Nicholas Ray’s THEY LIVE BY NIGHT (1949), Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell play young newlyweds for the second and final time in their careers.  Mann offers them just the briefest window of hope, which makes all the difference in the world, leaving the cynical element to the seedy characters who are career criminals.  Told from the perspective of the city’s police inspector, who actually narrates the film, calling New York City “an architectural jungle where fabulous wealth and the deepest squalor live side by side. New York is the busiest, the loneliest, the kindest, and the cruelest of cities—a murder a day, every day of the year, and each murder will wind up on my desk.”  Suggesting it would help if he could get inside the minds of the public citizens, weaning out the good from the bad, the film proceeds to do exactly that, choosing Granger as Joe, a part-time mail carrier, a guy down on his luck still living with his in-laws while his pregnant wife (O’Donnell) is expecting any day.  Seemingly an ordinary, everyday kind of guy who dreams of giving his wife more, he falls victim to the lure of temptation and immediately gets mixed up in foul play.  Thinking he’s stealing $200 dollars from the file cabinet of a corrupt attorney’s office, a place he visits regularly on his mail rounds, he’s stunned to discover he’s stolen $30,000, far and away much more than he knows what to do with, where his dreaded, panic-stricken thoughts start spinning out of control, setting the wheels in motion for a man-on-the-run police procedural.  Here the bad guys feel surprisingly standard and underdeveloped, as compared to their fallen women who couldn’t be more intriguing, for instance, and there are occasional hysterical moments, especially from the overacting O’Donnell that feel strangely out of place.  But perhaps the inevitable mystery is observing the tenuous ethical line of human conduct that allows some to cross while others refuse to ever be enticed.  This is a film about a man who makes a misstep and straddles both sides.   

Quickly disappearing from sight, falling into a deep, existential gloom, living in the shadows, afraid of his own existence, becoming a stranger even to his own wife, Joe decides he needs to set things right, but unbeknownst to him, the money is stolen right back out from underneath him, which sets off a murderous killing spree of any and all people connected to the original extortion.  Newspaper headlines charging him with the murders send Joe back into the teeth of the squalid underworld, where he finds Harriet (Jean Hagen), a lonely and downhearted nightclub singer with a fondness for a drink singing “Easy to Love,” describing her lug of a boyfriend:  “He hit me when I recited Robert Burns.”  Joe’s plans immediately go awry, becoming even more deeply ensnared than he could ever possibly imagine, where he’s soon looking down the barrel of a gun  instructing him to drive a getaway car.  A brilliantly composed high speed chase ensues through the tight alleyways and nearly empty streets of an early New York City Sunday morning, past the Washington Street Market on their way to the East River where Joe’s supposed eventual fate lies, trapped like a mercilessly hounded prey attempting to claw its way back out of a life-threatening situation with the hunter steadily closing in.  The tense, oppressive atmosphere is beautifully captured by cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg, making excellent use of the city’s towering skyscrapers, continually changing the angle from the quiet space high above to the more frantic pace below, where the pulse of the city matches Joe’s growing sense of desperation and horror.  Mann has always used his landscapes to reflect the interior psychological turmoil of his characters, where nothing could feel more helpless than getting sucked directly into a den of evil, the supposed side street of this film.  Laying in the wreckage of his mistakes, the audience may feel cheated when things wrap up all too neat and clean.  Granger’s pleasant opening demeanor is reduced to a dark shadow of his former self, his face roughed up with bruises and an everpresent layer of sweat and grime, where the Dostoevskian guilt-laden Crime and Punishment angle is barely touched upon, providing little insight into what drove the man in the first place and what lies in the emptiness of his now damaged soul. 

O’Donnell, by the way, worked with Mann again in THE MAN FROM LARAMIE (1955), the last of the James Stewart collaborations with this director as well.