SIDE STREET (1950)

 In late April 1949, Anthony Mann’s M-G-M film noir Side Street filmed on authentic New York City locations for the first ten days of its seven-week schedule, returning briefly to Manhattan in June for retakes. This impactful thriller about a part-time mail carrier (Farley Granger) who steals $30,000 from criminals – only to have regrets about his crime – culminates in a searing car chase through lower Manhattan’s financial district. In brief, Granger is first abducted in a Yellow cab and then forced at gunpoint to drive the taxi once several police cars are in pursuit.

As I was preparing my book on Anthony Mann’s crime thrillers, my brother Louis miraculously managed to retrace the locations the taxi and squad cars speed through. Here is a rough approximation of the chase route:

The chase actually begins in Culver City, California, on the M-G-M backlot “New York Street” (below left frame), where the taxi is seen departing with Granger as prisoner. The action then shifts to the cobblestoned Houston Street, where the taxi screeches and turns to drive under the West Side Elevated Highway (below right frame).

At this point, an all-points bulletin is issued to all police cars, and a radio car in an industrial part of lower Manhattan backs away from the camera to join in the chase (below left frame). Cops are then seen getting into squad cars outside the police precinct overlooking South Street that presently houses the New York City Police Museum (below right frame).

The taxi races past decaying dockside buildings on Twelfth Street (below left frame) as a watchman observes from the sidewalk (below right frame).

Then it is back down the West Street elevated highway where the taxi swerves to avoid an oncoming truck (below left frame). At Pearl Street, a police car spots the taxi (below right frame) and pursues it through the Tribeca area (bottom left frame). The vehicles narrowly avoid colliding in front of Honest Dave’s tool store on the corner of West Broadway and Greenwich Street (bottom right frame).

At Centre Street and Park Row, the taxi cuts through a Mobilgas station near the decaying Park Row Elevated Station before steering back onto the road and beneath the Brooklyn Bridge (below left frame). On the other side of the bridge, the taxi barely avoids hitting a truck in an industrial area (below right frame).

After the main villain kills yet another person, the taxi speeds up Jacob Street (below left frame) and down Exchange Place (below right frame) before crossing Broadway (bottom left frame) and speeding along the cobblestones of Warren Street (bottom right frame).

After all the participating cars screech past the old Federal Reserve Building near Maiden Lane and John Street (below left frame), the taxi is finally stopped on Wall Street near Federal Hall (below right frame).

In addition to being a superb film noir, Anthony Mann’s Side Street immortalizes what in many aspects is a lost New York City.

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SCOPE NOIR

When we think of film noir we habitually think black-and-white cinematography. We also think of the classic 1:37 aspect ratio, which translates to a square shape, or, at the very least, the subsequent standard 1:85 aspect ratio, which is slightly rectangular. Nevertheless, there were not only a number of color noir thrillers produced during the 1940s and 1950s, but there were even a select number of noirs photographed in anamorphic CinemaScope.

Nunnally Johnson’s glossy crime melodrama Black Widow (20th Century-Fox 1954) has the luxury of both DeLuxe Color and CinemaScope, and the staging (below two frames), as typical of 1954 ‘scope productions, is designed to emphasize that anamorphic format.

The following year, Samuel Fuller directed House of Bamboo for Fox on location in Japan, and DeLuxe Color/CinemaScope were again the chosen formats, although the hard lighting and shadows are reminiscent of monochromatic cinematography.

In 1955, Warner Bros. remade Raoul Walsh’s 1941 crime classic High Sierra as I Died a Thousand Times, and this time CinemaScope was blended with the (mercifully) short-lived WarnerCrolor:

Forget the 1991 Matt Dillon-Sean Young version. The real A Kiss Before Dying stars Robert Wagner and Joanne Woodward (United Artists 1956) and is filmed in CinemaScope and DeLuxe Color. The young stars are both pictured below (top frame) and seconds before the evil Wagner sends the pregnant Woodward over a building ledge (bottom frame).

During a rare visit to M-G-M, director Nicholas Ray made Party Girl in CinemaScope and Metrocolor. Although the music numbers and women’s hairstyles are strictly 1958, this cult crime thriller is set during the 1920s Prohibition era. Robert Taylor (top frame) plays a mob lawyer and John Ireland (bottom frame) a mob trigger man.

Not all ‘scope noirs were in color. Russell Rouse’s taut prison escape thriller House of Numbers (M-G-M 1957), starring Jack Palance as twin brothers (!), offers an example of film noir in black-and-white CinemaScope.

Jack Arnold’s Man in the Shadow (Universal-International 1957), filmed in B&W CinemaScope, starred Jeff Chandler (top frame) as a small town sheriff investigating the killing of Mexican braceros. His investigation brings him into the unwelcome territory of ruthless land baron Orson Welles (bottom frame). This undervalued film noir received a rare DCP screening in January at Manhattan’s Film Forum.

Two ‘scope noirs released towards the end of the original noir cycle were Murder, Inc. (20th Century-Fox 1960), co-directed by Stuart Rosenberg (top frame), and the guilty pleasure Man-Trap (Paramount 1961), directed by actor Edmund O’Brien and filmed in the then-new Panavision anamorphic process (bottom frame, co-star Stella Stevens).

But the greatest of all ‘scope noirs is Robert Rossen’s masterpiece The Hustler (20th Century-Fox 1961), stunningly photographed in B&W CinemaScope by Eugene Schuftan, and starring Paul Newman as a pool hustler desperate to bring down rival player Jackie Gleason.

Driving Real Cars in Film Noir

There is no mistaking the falseness of interior car scenes in Hollywood crime thrillers of the 1930s through 1950s when rear-projection, or process screen photography, was conceived to convince audiences that actors were actually seated in moving automobiles. In reality, these actors were placed in front of screens displaying rear-projected motion pictures of traffic/street scenes, the results of which almost always looked phony (as the accompanying frame from the 1954 film noir Crime Wave demonstrates), although hardly more phony than most CGI images in commercial releases of this digital age.

When Jean-Luc Godard and cinematographer Raoul Coutard took portable Éclair 35mm cameras into actual autos for their 1960 French “New Wave” collaborations Breathless (À bout de souffle) and Le Petit Soldat (left and right frames below), they were hailed for having “liberated” the cinema from its cumbersome industrial roots.

In actuality, others had made inroads into freeing the commercial cinema from cost-effective yet unconvincing uses of rear-projection, most notably in the crime genre. While filming in moving vehicles was not unusual during the silent era, sound technology had made it all but impossible due to bulky microphones, wiring, and larger film cameras requiring soundproof “blimps.” Still, there were successes many years before the New Wave helped to modernize film production.

At RKO Radio Pictures in 1947, experimentation was taking place. Legendary film noir cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca installed a camera in a real moving car during the opening credits of Jacques Tourneur’s classic Out of the Past (below frame). Others on the lot, however, were taking the technique even further. 

For his début feature at RKO, They Live by Night (filmed in 1947 and released in 1949) Nicholas Ray arranged for cinematographer George E. Diskant to place the camera in an actual car for a bank robbery scene where Farley Granger is driving the getaway car (top left and right frames below). The accompanying hand-held camerawork of Granger behind the wheel (bottom left frame below) gives the film noir a look of movies made many years later. Anthony Mann also collaborated with Diskant that year at RKO on the low-budget noir Desperate, which also uses a real car interior for a scene where gangsters attempt to shoot protagonist Steve Brodie outside a pharmacy (bottom right frame below).

Mann and cinematographer John Alton took this technique to the next level for the 1948 Eagle-Lion noir Raw Deal, in which a real car picks up Dennis O’Keefe during a nighttime prison break (below frame).

The most celebrated “real” car scene of film noir, of course, is Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy (UA 1949), in which criminal lovers John Dall and Peggy Cummins drive to a bank heist wearing rodeo attire. In a 3-minute, eleven-second take which cinematographer Russell Harlan records from the back seat of the couple’s car, the transgressors engage in ad-libbed small talk as they look for a parking space (left frame below), at which point Dall exits the car to carry out the robbery while Cummins keeps tense watch. The camera pans with her as she subdues a nosey policeman just as Dall is exiting the bank (right frame below). He gets behind the wheel of the car to drive as she watches behind with excitement (bottom left frame). This impressive sequence, according to Lewis, captured the curiosity of Billy Wilder, who later mounted a camera to a moving vehicle during the early sections of his 1951 Paramount film noir Ace in the Hole (bottom right frame).

Curiously, Gun Crazy did not open the floodgates for more authentic uses of automobiles in crime cinema. During the 1950s in fact there are only a handful of such cinematic applications, each memorable in its own way. While director André de Toth may have resorted to conventional rear-projection car scenes during portions of his 1954 Warner Bros. noir Crime Wave, the film boasts numerous authentic car shots from cameraman Bert Glennon, including night locations (left frame below) and a daylight bank robbery sequence (right frame below). These, coupled with handheld location photography, must certainly have influenced such New Wave filmmakers as Godard in subsequent years.

Two brilliant powerhouse film noir productions from the 1950s also make electrifying uses of real cars: Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (UA 1955, left frame below), photographed by Ernest Laszlo, and Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (Universal-International 1958, right frame below), photographed by Russell Metty.

Although not in the same artistic class as the Aldrich and Welles pictures, Andrew L. Stone’s Cry Terror! (M-G-M 1958) also features some impressive pre-Godard backseat views of a panicked woman driving through New York City’s Lincoln Tunnel (below frames).

These historic works demonstrate that others had slaved to “liberate” the cinema years before it became fashionable to do so.

When Crime Films Have Title Troubles

When it comes to crime films, powerful, impactful titles are essential. Think Kiss Me Deadly, Chinatown, Touch of Evil, Criss-Cross. A bland, misleading, or just plain cheesy, movie title can confuse or alienate potential viewers and relegate otherwise solid thrillers to virtual obscurity.

Imagine how different history might have been had RKO Radio Pictures released a 1949 couple-on-the-run thriller from Nicholas Ray called Your Red Wagon – instead of changing the title to the infinitely superior They Live by Night. Then imagine how Ray’s flashy 1958 Jazz Age thriller Party Girl might have benefitted from a grittier title that made it appear less like an Allied Artists “C” entry toplining Mamie Van Doren.

TRY AND GET ME! [THE SOUND OF FURY] (1950)

My dear friend Vivian Utterman passed away this week in Kensington, Maryland, at the age of 88. As a loyal patron of my Smithsonian film talks back in Washington, D.C., I owe Vivian a great deal for expanding my film noir knowledge. She was a therapist who adored noir and had generously shared her extensive VHS-DVD collection with me many years ago, which immediately whetted my appetite for wanting to see everything and anything on the subject.

In memory of Vivian, I would like to bring attention to an undervalued film noir I discovered through her generosity, Cy Endfield’s brilliant The Sound of Fury (Try and Get Me!), an independent production which United Artists barely released in 1950 and 1951. It has never, to my knowledge, ever aired on Turner Classic Movies and is available only on VHS and unauthorized DVD bootleg copies, although Thom Anderson and Noël Burch gave the film extended focus in their superb 1996 documentary thesis, Red Hollywood.

FILM NOIR RECYCLED

We know studio backlot streets and overdressed Hollywood sets when we see them, but even the canniest among us are still fooled to a certain extent when viewing movies from the ancient studio era, particularly films noir. Yes, we may say to ourselves, “Oh, that is clearly a studio backlot!” or “That chair seems strangely familiar,” but how many of us know precisely when we last saw a particular backlot street or piece of studio furniture? The following are some sightings from my countless classic movie viewings.

STRANGE IMPERSONATION (1946)

Anthony Mann’s Strange Impersonation is a strange film noir indeed, but there is no denying its twisted impact. Although Mann would have preferred this 1946 “B” to be completely forgotten (he was not a fan of his early bread-and-butter genre assignments), the 68-minute low-budget Republic Pictures suspense drama is one of his most intriguing and unsettling. It also boasts in beautiful Brenda Marshall one of the more complex female roles to be found in any Mann production, noir or otherwise.

Desperate (RKO 1947)

Anthony Mann’s 1947 film noir Desperate (whose star Steve Brodie is pictured on the front page of this blog in an original publicity still provided from Photofest) holds a special place in my heart because it was the first of his crime thrillers I researched while preparing my book proposal. My investigations into the making of this lower-tier “B” programmer took me to the UCLA Special Collections library in Los Angeles/Westwood, which houses the invaluable RKO Radio Pictures corporate papers.