March 23,
1950, release date
Directed
by Anthony Mann
Screenplay
by Sydney Boehm
Based on
a story by Sydney Boehm
Music by
Lennie Hayton
Edited by
Conrad A. Nervig
Cinematography
by Joseph Ruttenberg
Farley Granger as Joe Norson
Cathy O’Donnell as Ellen Norson
James Craig as George Garsell
Paul Kelly as Captain Walter
Anderson
Jean Hagen as Harriette Sinton
Paul Harvey as Emil Lorrison
Edmon Ryan as Victor Backett
Charles McGraw as Detective Stan
Simon
Edwin Max as Nick Drumman
Adele Jergens as Lucille Colner
Harry Bellaver as Larry Giff,
cabdriver
Whit Bissell as Harold Simpson,
chief teller
John Gallaudet as Gus Heldon, bar
owner
Esther Somers as Mrs. Malby, Ellen’s
mother
Harry Antrim as Mr. Malby, Ellen’s
father
Ben Cooper as the young man at the
drycleaner’s
King Donovan as Detective Gottschalk
Distributed
by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
The
first time that I started watching Side
Street, I caught it on television and started somewhere in the middle. And
I couldn’t bear to finish it: I couldn’t bear to see Joe Norson, the main
character, in so much trouble. The second time that I watched the film (from
start to finish), I realized that the ability of viewers to identify with Joe,
his wife Ellen, and their newborn son is the film’s best feature. I cared about
Joe, in spite of the fact that he made one bad decision and spent the remainder
of the screen time trying get out of serious trouble.
(This blog post
about Side Street contains spoilers.)
Captain
Walter Anderson (played by Paul Kelly) is the narrator of the film. He’s the
voice of reason, and he’s the clue that Joe and Ellen will be fine at the end.
His voice-over narration describes New York City as a city of opposites, good
and bad, and it reminded me of the television show The Naked City (it also added to the semidocumentary style of the
film). Here is the beginning of Captain Anderson’s opening voice-over:
New York
City: an architectural jungle where fabulous wealth and the deepest squalor
live side by side. New York, the busiest, the loneliest, the kindest and the
cruelest of cities. I live here and work here. My name is Walter Anderson. I’m
one of an army of 20,000 whose job is to protect the citizens in this city of 8
million. So twenty-four hours a day, you’ll find our men on Park Avenue, Times
Square, Central Park, Fulton Market, the subway. Three hundred and eighty new
citizens are being born today in the city of New York. One hundred and
sixty-four couples are being married. One hundred and ninety-two persons will
die. Twelve persons will die violent deaths and at least one of them will be a
victim of murder. A murder a day, every day of the year. And each murder will
wind up on my desk. . . .
And here
is how Captain Anderson closes the film:
This is
the story of Joe Norson. No hero, no criminal. Just human, like all of us.
Weak, like some of us. A bit foolish, like most of us. Now that we know some of
the facts, we can help him. He’s gonna be all right.
Even
though Joe’s story is told in a factual, impartial style, Captain Anderson’s
reassurance about Joe’s fate was a great relief to me. It’s hard not to root
for a family man who loves his wife and child and would do anything to make
both of them happy. And Side Street
shows us one story, out of so many, which makes viewers’ investment personal. (The
same could be said about The Naked City,
in which each television episode closed with the following line: “There are
eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”)
Fate
plays a large role in Side Street and
is almost like another character. Joe Norson makes one really bad decision
because he wants the promise of a better postwar life, because he wants the
best for his wife and son. Instead, he initiates a series of related
coincidences that escalate quickly out of his and anyone else’s control—until
the law steps in and promises to do what it can to correct his mistake. At the
end of the film, Captain Anderson’s voice-over could also stand as a warning:
What happened to Joe Norson could happen to anyone.
Side Street also opens with a lot of foreboding that the voice-over
narration merely accentuates. The opening music lets viewers know the tone of
the film from the beginning. The movie title and opening credits are shown over
beautiful but dizzying—and disorienting—aerial shots of Manhattan. After the
overhead shots, the camera goes down to street level and viewers see street
scenes. One of them is the sub-Treasury building, where the chase scene at the
end of the film comes to a halt. Coming down to street level brings viewers
into the city and into Joe Norson’s story, again on an intimate level.
The chase scene near the end of the
film deserves particular notice. According to film historian Richard Schickel,
who provided the audio commentary on the DVD, the car chase, when Joe Norson,
George Garsell, and the cabdriver Larry Giff are pursued by numerous police
cars through Lower Manhattan, was filmed entirely on location. It all ends in
front of the sub-Treasury building. The bells of Trinity Church start to ring
during Joe and Ellen’s reunion, while Captain Walter Anderson gives his
reassuring closing lines.
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