Side Street

Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell

Anthony Mann's Side Street, released in 1949, is a solid if unspectacular noir, the director's last film in that genre. Sydney Boehm's script has postal worker Farley Granger filching some ill-gotten gains from the filing cabinet of a crooked attorney. Soon, he is a man on the run around Manhattan, sought by the mob and the police. Cathy O'Donnell, reuniting with Granger after the critical success of They Live By Night, plays his pregnant wife. Since her character has a baby during the course of the film and Granger is otherwise engaged, they hardly have any onscreen time together. Ms. O'Donnell gets to employ her patented luminous masochism as her character worries herself sick about her beleaguered spouse. The vulnerability of Granger's character is a good fit for his limited talents. Hitchcock would seize upon the vulnerability locked within Granger's stiff pretty boy routine in Strangers on a Train. The only time Granger gets to act butch in Side Street is when he bullies bank clerk Whit Bissell, who whimpers convincingly.

The supporting cast is more interesting than the leads in this flick. Paul Kelly narrates the film and ably portrays a homicide chief. The narration hammers home Boehm's theme, that a deterministic world where mammon is king can deviate any man from the path of righteousness. The visuals render the narration somewhat redundant. James Craig is properly cold and menacing as an unrepentant thug. Paul Harvey, Edmon Ryan, Charles McGraw, and Adele Jergens all offer memorable vignettes. The most exciting performance is by Jean Hagen (Lina Lamont in Singin' in the Rain) who portrays a third rate lounge singer and gangster's moll. Granger's character is pretending to cotton to her in order to find out info, but it is Hagen who steals the scene in a grandly larcenous manner.

Jean Hagen

Mann's direction is assured from the get go. His low angle shots in the shady lawyer office, making James Craig look even more looming, immediately establishes a corrupt and foreboding environment. Cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg (The Philadelphia Story, Gigi) doesn't use expressionistic shafts of light like John Alton, but his framing of dark tenements and Greenwich Village at night are striking all the same. I found Lennie Hayton's score to be forgettable, but the art direction by Cedric Gibbons and Daniel Cathcart to be exemplary. The trompe l'œil look of Adele Jergens pad gives us such a sense of faux domesticity, hipping the audience that a scam is being perpetuated. The end of Side Street, a frantic car chase across location in Manhattan, points to Mann's future in outdoor action films such as his many Westerns with Jimmy Stewart. Side Street displays that he was just as adept indoors.