And sadly, despite the team-up of Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell, the film was a flop at the box office. (Granger's bankability would rebound the following year, of course, in STRANGERS ON A TRAIN.)
In the opening voiceover of Anthony Mann's Side Street, New York is described as an "architectural jungle," and "the busiest, the loneliest, the kindest and the cruelest of cities." With its realistic on-location setting, and Mann's particular brand of visual genius, Side Street is, above all else, about the isolation and the beauty of New York City.
The film opens with a spectacular aerial view of the Empire State Building, with Broadway careening down on the diagonal, creating geometric shapes between, buildings seeming foreshortened and strange from that view. Helicopter shots of this kind were new at the time: Nicholas Ray had used them in They Live By Night, s film that, coincidentally, also starred Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell. The helicopter shots in the beginning of Side Street are vast and impressive, showing the city, its waterfront, its grids of organized streets, from far above. From the start, we can sense the attitude of the picture: man is small, insignificant, helpless against the giant forces working against him.
Farley Granger plays Joe Norson, a mailman, married to a young woman named Ellen (played by Cathy O'Donnell). They are expecting a baby. After a series of financial hardships, Joe and Ellen have moved in with her parents. Ellen is due to have her baby any day, but they can't afford a proper doctor, and so she has to go to free clinics to get her checkups.
Granger doesn't play Joe as a man desperate and at the end of his rope; not in the beginning anyway. He does what he has to do to maintain his job, he suffers in silence under the nosy presence of his in-laws, and he hopes that maybe someday he can save up enough money so that he and Ellen can have their own place.
However, temptation soon arrives in the form of $200 dropped on the floor of an attorney's office where Joe delivers the mail. He finds it hard to resist, unable to get it out of his mind as he continues his deliveries. He returns to the office later, discovers the lawyer is absent, opens the filing cabinet where he saw the money put away, and takes the envelope.
Once he is alone and opens the envelope, he doesn't find only $200--he finds piles of bills, $30,000 to be exact.
So begins Joe Norson's long descent into peril. The money he has stolen is part of a blackmail scheme, worked up between the corrupt lawyer (played with steely aplomb by Edmon Ryan) and a goonish ex-con named George Garsell (played by James Craig).
In spite of its connection with the criminal element, Side Street depicts a deeply moral world: rather than turning Joe into someone who tries to squirrel away his windfall, the film immediately shows him haunted with guilt. This impact on his conscience is immediate, and we see it: he can't look his in-laws in the eye; he can't confide in his wife--he doesn't know what to do.
Meanwhile, bodies start to pile up. The criminals are looking for Joe, and Joe is looking for them because he wants to return the money. He must return the money, if he is to have any chance at all to live a normal life again. Unfortunately, he has stashed the wad of cash with a bartender he trusts (big mistake), and when he returns to the bar he finds it under new ownership.
Side Street then becomes a taut race to the finish, as the cops and Joe, separately, try to put together the pieces of the crime. Joe's wife has her baby, and Joe confesses to her, finally, what he has done, and she begs him to turn himself in. If he could just explain what had happened...surely they would believe him?
There is an escalating inevitability to these events, a fatalistic sense that no matter what one does, it simply won't make a difference. Joe's attempts to track down the blackmailers and their cohorts, in order to return the money, only looks like guilt by association to the cops who are following him: thus the more Joe tries to do right, the worse it looks. It's the "one wrong move" scenario of noir that we know from Detour, only set in Manhattan and not in a lonely, rainy stretch of desert.
One of the the singular things about Side Street is its overt awareness of financial realities and how that operates on the characters. It exists at all levels of the film. Consider:
--Joe's father-in-law was just demoted at his job, forced into a lower-level position; it was either that or be fired.
--A cop on the beat confesses to Joe early on in the film that he is retiring the next week and hopes to move to Florida. He should be able to make do "on half pay."
--Even one of the blackmailers gushes excitedly that with the money they have stolen he will be able to "pay for my kid's college education."
Granger's character is not alone in his desire for a better life, for some ease and comfort. He says to his wife, when he confesses: "I had this stupid notion that a couple hundred dollars could cure everything. You wouldn't have to have the baby in a charity ward. I'd built up a feeling of shame because everywhere I turned people had things I wanted you to have. I hated to admit, I was a flop."
The final showdown of the film goes down in front of the famously recognizable Subtreasury Building in lower Manhattan, a potent evocation of the financial stresses evident in the world of Side Street. It makes perfect sense that thing would end there...
Granger turns in a fine performance, and his increasing guilt and panic are palpable. He spends much of the film clammy with sweat, as he tries to undo his own wrong, but finding himself going deeper and deeper into the vortex. He has a beautiful closeup when he first sees his baby son, in the bassinet at the hospital, and he is in awe of the baby's tiny fingers, his beauty, the miracle of birth. But his momentary bliss is immediately replaced by a renewed sense of anxiety an guilt. What has he done? Has his one foolish act destroyed him? It's a tricky closeup, vulnerable to over-emoting, but Granger breathes real life and real feeling into it.
Jean Hagen has a terrific cameo as a tired drunk nightclub singer named Harriet, an old girlfriend of the goonish ex-con. Joe tracks her down, in his search to find the blackmailers. When he meets her, she sits in the restaurant where she sings, throwing back shots, alone at her table, suspicious of everyone. She is seemingly a tough dame and yet, when she realizes she has a chance to get back together with Garsell, she leaps at it, even if it means betraying Joe. "We can sit around my place like we used to, can't we?" she pleads to her criminal lover, in a display of need that makes us ache for her.
Harriet is not a bad girl: she's just gone sour with disappointment, emptily promiscuous, full of strange memories and bizarre dialogue ("He hit me when I recited Robert Burns," she confesses, in one of the film's best lines i) and willing to do anything to get back into the charmed circle. Hagen creates a touching portrait of what it means to be forgotten in the "architectural jungle" of Manhattan.
Mann's style here reveals the larger budget that Side Street had beyond the aerial shots. There is a spectacular car chase that closes out the film. It is a masterpiece. He switches from low angles to high, creating a radical disorienting effect. The camera is low on the cobblestones as the cars go careening by, and then, suddenly, the camera is high above, 30 stories up, looking down on the events from afar, a symmetrical return to our original view of New York in the film's opening shot.
Only now New York does not seem grandiose and welcoming, the Empire State Building gleaming up into the air. Now it seems claustrophobic, a huge maze, the narrow streets closing in. In Mann's shots (the cinematographer was multiple Oscar-winner Joseph Ruttenberg) the buildings fold in upon other buildings, creating an almost Escher-like effect of negative space, with white buildings collapsing visually into shadowed buildings, layered over one another as far as the eye can see. Those streets in lower Manhattan are so narrow that they become veritable wind tunnels: Side Street captures that feeling of vast and narrow corridors.
Joe survives his harrowing taxi ride, which made Farley Granger "one-for-two" in his noir roles for 1950: his character in Edge of Doom is not so fortunate. But even with a reprieve from the worst possible fate, Joe Norson's journey in Side Street provides a frenetic cautionary tale, reminding us that one wrong step can lead you inexorably into the underworld, where the gleaming promise of the big city becomes a dark, cramped world of windy concrete canyons, with nothing before your eyes but impossibly narrow side streets.
Streets that could, if you take the right one, lead you to escape and freedom. But which one? In that maze, how can you tell?
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