East Side, West Side

Mervyn Leroy's East Side, West Side is a bad movie, but not an unenjoyable one. The main plus is an accomplished cast: Barbara Stanwyck, James Mason, Van Heflin, Ava Gardner, Cyd Charisse, Nancy Davis (Reagan), Gale Sondergaard, William Conrad (Cannon!), William Frawley and the impressive debut of Beverly Michaels as a hard bitten blonde, the role she would be typecast as. Stanwyck was possibly the best Hollywood actress of her generation. Even in tripe like The Big Valley and The Thorn Birds, she never phoned it in. She is well cast here as a West Side society matron losing her husband to siren Ava Gardner, who is at her most luscious. Unfortunately, Stanwyck has very little rapport with the actor playing her husband, James Mason. Mason is always interesting, but has little to work with here and the main culprit is the anodyne direction. Compare this Mason performance to his work of this era with Ophuls, Reed or even Fregonese and Leroy's limitations become obvious.

Happily, Stanwyck has a better rapport with former co-star Van Heflin, who plays an old flame. Heflin was a fine actor whose malleability let him play sympathetic figures or villains. This versality prevented him from a first rank star since he had no fixed screen image. The highlight of the film is Sondergaard telling off son-in-law Mason. Heflin has a good scene with William Frawley in a bar. That's it for good scenes, though. This would be Sondergaard's last film for twenty years, as she fell victim to the blacklist, and she delivers with the right mix of velvet and steel. It is a typical Hollywood hallucination that Sondergaard is playing Stanwyck's mother, though only eight years her senior.

One of the main flaws of the film is its failure to evoke New York City as a locale. Shot on the MGM backlot, East Side, West Side looks ridiculous every time the action moves outside, especially compared to then current films such as Border Incident, Call Northside 777 and Force of Evil which used location shooting. There is a little more wit and snap to LeRoy's direction indoors. The brief musical interludes and a fashion show break up the general monotony and point to LeRoy's vaudeville beginnings. The fakery of the surroundings are more suited to night club interiors than street corner exteriors. Helen Rose's costumes and Edwin B. Willis' set decoration are often the best and worst things in scenes because LeRoy does not exploit them. In LeRoy's East Side West Side, there is no magic in the melodramatic mirrors.