Side Street (1950)

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.

Side Street has it all for a film described as noir: action, romance, danger, mystery, murder. It is one of those films that can pass the test of time because viewers are asked to identify with the main characters and to sympathize with their plight. It’s almost impossible not to identify with Joe and Ellen Norson, and that is one of many factors that make the film and its story a success.