Side Street
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (1953) Dir. Anthony Mann
83 min. / B&W / 1.37:1 / DTS: HD 2.0 Mono / SDH
Warner Archive Blu-ray $21.99
After his business goes bust, luckless father-to-be Farley Granger moonlights as a temp postal carrier, and when he spots two $100 bills in a file in a lawyer's office, he absconds with it so that his wife can get decent medical treatment. (I’m not certain, despite the quote that opens this review, that “all of us” would steal a tickler file from an attorney’s office, although $200 in 1949 money is $2,652 in today’s money, so a whole bunch of you gentle readers just mentally joined the dark side, I’m certain.)
When Granger opens the file, however, he discovers there are an additional 298 hundred dollar bills in there, which is $397,800 in 2025 dollars and even in 1949 dollars, that ain’t hay, leading to some very angry gangsters who have extorted the money from a randy bigshot and then killed the girl who helped them - so Farley is suspected of the murder, tracked by the real killers for the dough, and the self-pitying object of a lot of second guessing as to some of the life choices he’s making. Meanwhile, faithful wife Cathy O'Donnell is about to give birth and tough cop Paul Kelly is going to pinch somebody if he can stop narrating the movie long enough to figure out the plot.
From the opening skyward-looking view of the skyscrapers of Manhattan to the final chase sequence through lower New York, I loved every second of this one, odd because I have never heard a lot of praise for it (no bad reviews either, more of the "not bad, not great" variety). Quintessential noir, with a man making a bad decision and compounding his troubles hour by hour by doing the wrong thing. And if you're wondering why Granger just doesn't go to the police, remember Hitchcock's admonition: "Because if you go to the police, it's boring". Speaking of Hitchcock, Granger learns the same lesson Janet Leigh learned in Psycho: when you decide to give back that stolen money, everything gets worse.
Million-dollar Dialog:
Bartender to our hero: "Bring the missus in some night. We're puttin' in a TELEVISION next week!"
Granger and O’Donnell of course had previously starred as doomed lovers trying to get out of a noir film and into a love story in Nicholas Ray’s debut, They Live by Night; here we find that even if they’d made it, trouble would still find them. It’s a fairly thankless role this time for Miss O’Donnell, and rather than feel sympathy for Mr. Granger, there are several times in this movie we simply want to whack him with a broom and yell “WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!?!”
Paul Kelly is a favorite of ours, and he’s good here, and some familiar faces (Adele Jergens, Herb Vigran, King Donovan, Whit Bissell) come and go, but the wow is drunken nightclub singer Jean Hagen in only her third film; she’d go straight from this to The Asphalt Jungle and it’s a shame she didn’t make more noirs before ending up in Singin’ in the Rain and Danny Thomas’ TV show (she left the show and her character surprisingly was killed off; they should’ve filmed THAT as a noir). Incidentally, she almost tops Farley in the “making bad life choices” department.
And now we get to arguably the REAL star of the movie: the streets of Manhattan, as presented by director Anthony Mann and cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg (who’d won two Oscars previously and had two in his future, as well as six other nominations). It’s one of the finest looks at bygone New York (I lived in the city for many years, trust me on that) ever filmed, and the climactic car chase ending on Wall Street set the standard for car chases on city streets for many movies to come. The decision to actually film on the streets of New York as opposed to MGM backlots makes the movie unforgettable. It’s a great, underrated movie that'll remind you of several good movies made in its wake, not least of all No Country for Old Men. I loved this one.
The Blu-ray is up to Warner Archive’s impeccable standards and includes a couple of bonuses ported over from the old DVD release, a featurette on the making of the film and a folksy commentary by Richard Schickel, plus the Crime Does Not Pay short The Luckiest Guy in the World (that series was very nourish, too) and a pair of cartoons, one Tom & Jerry that we liked and one Barney Bear that we didn’t. All in all, an under-rated and highly enjoyable noir and remember, it’s only $21.99 at Movie Zyng, which is $1.63 in 1949 dollars. Such a bargain!
