Side Street (1949)

Side Street
Directed by Anthony Mann
Written by Sydney Boehm
1949/USA
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
First viewing/Film Noir Classic Collection Vol. 4 DVD

[box] [first lines] Capt. Walter Anderson: 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.[/box]

This movie has everything you could possibly ask from a fillm noir except the femme fatale.

Joe Norson (Farley Granger) has lost his gas station and is now living with his in-laws in New York City and working as a part-time mail carrier.  His wife Ellen (Cathy O’Donnell) is about to deliver their first child.  One day, he makes a delivery to law office and sees a couple of hundred dollar bills on the floor.  The next day he comes when nobody is in and cannot resist the temptation to break into a file cabinet  Big, big mistake.

When he has a chance to look inside the file folder he snatched, he finds that instead of the few hundred he expected there are $30,000 in carefully batched bills.  Terrified, he goes back to the law office to return the money.  Second big mistake.  The lawyer denies that it is his money or that he even had a file cabinet.   Joe leaves and stashes the loot, in a gift box, with a bartender.  Worse and worse.

After checking with his sources that Joe is not a cop, the lawyer sends his goons after Joe. Joe finds he is a suspect in two murders.  The rest of the story is taken up with Joe’s frantic search for the money and its origins and flight from the goons and the police.  With Jean Hagen in a small but choice part as a boozy nightclub singer who is the girlfriend of one of the goons.

Anthony Mann is becoming one of my very favorite noir directors.  With Academy Award winning cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg, he creates a visual feast in Side Street. Mann loved to experiment with camera angles and a variety are used here without distracting from the story.  The car chase that ends the film is very innovative, including helicopter views of the tiny cars winding through crowded city streets.  The lighting is rich and expressive.   Granger makes an excellent angst ridden noir hero and O’Donnell and Hagen do what they do best. Recommended.

Trailer – cinematography by Joseph Ruttenberg