Street Scene (1931)
Street Scene Photos
Movie Info
Cast
as Rose Maurrant
as Sam Kaplan
as Sam Kaplan
as Emma Jones
as Mrs. Maurrant
as Abe Kaplan
as Frank Maurrant
as Vincent Jones
as Steve Sankey
as George Jones
as Mae Jones
as George Jones
as Olga Olsen
as Karl Olsen
as Shirley Kaplan
as Filippo Fiorentino
as Dick McGann
as Greta Fiorentino
as Alice Simpson
as Harry Easter
as Willie Maurrant
as Mary Hildebrand
as Laura Hildebrand
as Charlie Hildebrand
as Dan Buchanan
as Dr. John Wilson
as Officer Harry Murphy
as Marshal James Henry
as Fred Cullen
as Minor Role
as Minor Role
as Minor Role
as Mr. Bert Easter
Critic Reviews for Street Scene
All Critics (5) | Fresh (5) | Rotten (0)
A theatrical snapshot that's also a heaving Vidor vision
Too stage-struck and mired in generalities to be a moving experience.
Dated but moving melodrama
Audience Reviews for Street Scene
Wearing its heart on its sleeve, this slice-of-life (whose message is the question "why can't we all just get along?"), set in front of a New York apartment building in a poor neighborhood, is about social justice and hangs it's coat on one family where the husband both ignores his wife and derides her. The production shoots for the stars and aims for the heart, though the effort hasn't aged well. Still, its a quality effort. Bealah Bondi, trusty character actress, carries the thing as the well-meaning neighbor you love to hate.
Super Reviewer
Tensions run high in a multi-ethnic neighborhood during a New York heatwave. It sounds like the plot of Spike Lee's "Do The Right Thing" yet this was filmed some sixty years prior. As well as Lee, it appears to have had a major influence on Woody Allen. If you've seen "Manhattan" (and if you haven't, stop reading and go watch it) several sequences will be familiar. The opening and middle montages of New York at sundown and sunset with their Gershwin-esque score by Alfred Newman bear more than a passing resemblance to Allen's great opening. Likewise the movie's final scene, involving a rebuttal of a lover by a young girl who is a lot more mature than he had thought. It's adapted by the writer Elmer Rice from his Pulitzer winning stage play and in the hands of an average director of the time it would probably be no more than a filmed play. Vidor is not average thankfully and this is a beautiful film in the visual sense. His camera is constantly on the move, probing the nooks and crannies of a very convincing set. He finds inventive angles which reveal subtle information such as the low shot which reveals the outwardly prim and proper Bondi adjusting her underwear out of sight of the neighbours she disrespects. Had this been made after the introduction of the code it would have been a very different film. Characters throw racial insults around casually and the local good-time girl flaunts her bra-less cleavage in a manner which must have provoked outrage at the time. Thanks to the pre-code dialogue, the movie has aged extremely well. The New York Times complained at the time that the dialogue was "spoken without sufficient pause". This of course was made a good decade before Hawks and Sturges would turn quickfire banter into an artform. The realistic language seems however to enable the actors to relax into their parts and the performances are so natural it feels like it was made thirty years later. Sidney is particularly good and looks fantastic. I actually came across this purely by mistake while searching for another of Sidney's movies, "City Streets". You can view the movie in it's entirety on Youtube and I thoroughly suggest you do.
Super Reviewer
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