Street Scene

Sylvia Sidney was an up and coming Broadway ingenue when she was bought to Paramount as an insurance against Clara Bow, who was experiencing health problems. Interestingly, it was Nancy Carroll who was originally announced for the role of Rose Maurant in "Street Scene". Why she didn't do it I don't know but Sylvia Sidney was excellent in the part. From the now familiar music of Alfred Newman, the camera pans over the New York skyline and starts to follow Beulah Bondi down the street in a typical tenement. Emma Jones (Beulah Bondi) is the street's vicious gossip and she has plenty to gossip about. She is so busy causing trouble but her own son (Matt McHugh) is a thug and a bully. Mrs Maurant (Estelle Taylor) is having an affair with a married man (Russell Hopton). The whole street seems to know except her husband (David Landau) and he certainly has his suspicions. She is just looking for kind words and gentleness - she believes in being a good neighbour and she has been a great help to one of the neighbours who is having a baby. Daughter Rose (Sylvia Sidney) is also becoming involved with her boss (Walter Miller). He is married but wants to set her up in an apartment - he also wants her to go on the stage. Rose is attracted to Sam Kaplan (William Collier Jnr.) who yearns for a better way of life. When Frank Maurant comes home early from a sales trip and shoots his wife and her lover - the whole street is galvanized in a panic. It is an extraordinary sequence under King Vidor's masterful direction. It is a wonderful film that doesn't feel like a play at all. There are lots of different characters - the jovial Italian, with ice creams for everyone, the worried father to be, the socialist, the young girl on a spree with her young man but holding it all together is the incredible Beulah Bondi - you cannot take your eyes from her. Highly Recommended.

This wasn't King Vidor's best 1930 film (he would also direct THE CHAMP that same year) but STREET SCENE is a look at a community full of different ethnic characters in an apartment building. The character-development is deep; Vidor uses different angles very well and perhaps most-perplexing is the fact that Vidor never lets us leave the street and maybe once or twice do we ever leave the apartment front. It's a play, basically, but it's a play that will take you back to more innocent times - yet the innocent times have their flaws as well. Not everyone will like this film; yet those who choose to view it will be rewarded in some way. Perhaps only to 'visit' a side street in NYC in 1930, because Vidor allows us to do just that.

In front of a New York City tenement, on a swelteringly hot summer day, gossipy Beulah Bondi (as Emma Jones) and neighbors gather to swap stories and complain about the heat. The story focuses on the Maurrant family. Pretty young Sylvia Sidney (as Rose) is the lead, as evident later in the running time. Her beauty attracts the opposite sex, most significantly sensitively Jewish William Collier Jr. (as Sam Kaplan). Mother Estelle Taylor (as Anna) is rumored to be having an affair with milkman Russell Hopton (as Steve Sankey). No wonder, as husband and father David Landau (as Frank) is a nasty, loud-mouthed bigot. Roller-skating son Lambert Rogers (as Willie) rounds out the Maurrant family. He has a great run as part of the classic opening sequence... Producer Samuel Goldwyn did well in bringing this Elmer Rice's Broadway hit to the motion picture screen. The play won a "Pulitzer Prize" for drama (1929) and the film placed second in the annual "Film Daily" poll (1931). The play was acted in front of the characters' tenement. The film preserves this gimmick, but stretches its landscape up and down the street. It's artistically directed by King Vidor, fluidly photographed by George Barnes, and features a classic soundtrack by Alfred Newman. We never see the inside of anyone's apartment. Some of the early scenes are stunning, with setting and characters strikingly presented. The great American "melting pot" of various ethnic groups living together in a city is nicely captured; this mixing produced an incredible country, but the stories herein only minimally illustrate a bigger picture. Violence and separation are the rule. As the story progresses, it cools off. "Street Scene" loses some of its sweat, and never its gimmick. ******* Street Scene (8/26/31) King Vidor ~ Sylvia Sidney, William Collier Jr., Estelle Taylor, Beulah Bondi

Yes, this does look like Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti album cover has come to life! That's not a very good album and this isn't a good film. It's not a film with characters to find out about. It's not a film with a plot or indeed a story - this is different. This came about from a more theatrical and quite clever idea - it's intended to give you a taste of a typical New York City street, eavesdropping on the neighbours, catching a few words of secret conversations and realising just how much the world has changed and stayed the same. Although King Vidor absolutely changes the look of the titular stage play to a proper movie, the script still feels awfully like a play. Other than turning it into something different, it would be impossible not to. That's the problem with this. Live theatre can be wonderful but it can't just be superimposed onto film. It may have been great to watch this live, to see the next actor take centre stage and do their monologue but that style does not work on film. Some people might like this but if you're expecting a proper film with a proper story you will be very, very disappointed with this. The script is completely unrealistic and the characters are most definitely just actors.

This movie defines a video treasure. A video treasure for me is a film that is so enjoyable to watch that you wouldn't possible regret it, yet at the same time isn't very well known & isn't very often reprinted on VHS. That is what is this movie. I would almost bet it hasn't been reprinted in the past twenty years yet every once a decade or so you might ketch a viewing on A&E or a late night cinema. & if you ever get a chance to view it take that chance... Sure it has rough parts (mainly the whole movie), yet it is one of the only movies that made no apology for being a monogerie of racial & social bias & prejudice. It is one polack of italian joke to the next... a barrage of interesting & entertaining characters. This is a great movie. i have only been able to find it once, but that was enough (believe me). So search for a viewing & enjoy.

Street Scene (1931) *** 1/2 (out of 4) Hard-hitting drama set in a Bronx tenement building. We are introduced to various groups of people who live at the apartment or are just visiting and soon a vicious rumor is going to have deadly consequences. The film centers on a young woman named Rose (Sylvia Sidney) who is being pursued by a married man while another poor one also loves her. Even more damning is that there's a rumor her mother is having an affair with a milk man. Producer Samuel Goldwyn and director Vidor do a terrific job at bringing Elmer Rice's stage play to the big screen. Even though the budget is obviously incredibly low, that doesn't stop the great acting, directing and the terrific music score by Alfred Newman. The film runs a very fast paced 80-minutes and most of the action is simply dialogue with characters standing in front of their building. The stoop is pretty much the main location as that's where the people are constantly talking and the dialogue is so well written that you can't help but feel as if you're really standing there listening to folks talk. There's a very natural tone to the dialogue that also comes across in the directing and it really does seem as if you're watching a documentary on real people. Vidor does an excellent job at the start of the film where he puts us into the action by showing various objects suffering from the heat. The heat plays a major part in the film and thanks to this prologue we're really put right in the middle of it. The performances by the entire cast are wonderful but it's Sidney who really steals the film with her incredible work. I was really shocked to see how excellent she was her because of how natural she came off. You can just look at her and see her thinking and feeling at every turn her character goes through and this really helps one stay involved in the movie. Walter Miller, Estelle Taylor, Beulah Bondi, William Collier, Jr., David Landau, Matt McHugh and Russell Hopton all deserve being mentioned for their fine work as well. It seems this film never gets mentioned that much any more and that's real shame because this is a nearly flawless production that deserves to be more known.

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 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.

It shows its age, and that's part of its charm. It's filled with old-fashioned ethnic stereotypes, but that makes it even more fascinating. This movie is a time machine; hop into it and you'll see a gritty and realistic picture of working-class New York City life in the early 1930s. It's pre-Code, so the language is blunt and the sexuality more open. The plot isn't Shakespeare, but it grabs onto you anyway, and the characters are so attractive and watchable that you become part of their neighborhood. A piece of cinematic and social history that is well worth your 80 minutes of time.

Moviecut—Street Scene