Side Street (1949)

Director: Anthony Mann
Writer: Sydney Boehm
Stars: Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, James Craig, Paul Kelly, Jean Hagen, Paul Harvey, Edmon Ryan and Charles McGraw

Index: 2025 Centennials.

Farley Granger was tempted into all sorts of trouble as the forties became the fifties. Alfred Hitchcock made him a murderer in Rope, then Nicholas Ray put him on the run for murder in They Live by Night and Hitch put him right back in the murder game in Strangers on a Train.

He’s a thief here—“no hero, no criminal, just human like all of us, weak like some of us but foolish like most of us”, as the Chief of Police tells us at the end. He sees an opportunity and he takes it, but then he feels guilty about it so does all he can to fix what he did. His problem is that he does all the wrong things, even if he does them for the right reasons.

Side Street has all sorts of flaws, but it works for me on two fronts. For one, it’s a beautifully shot exploration of New York, the city being a deeper and more substantial character than a bunch of the supposed leads. And for two, it’s a great unwitting descent, where we watch Joe Norson jump into a hole, then continue to try to dig his way out of it until he almost makes it to Australia. If you’re one of those moviegoers who likes shouting at characters on screens to not do the stupid thing they’re about to do, I’d highly recommend this one to you.

Joe is a decent sort of fellow and he’s doing what he can, but life has thrown him a bunch of curveballs. He’s lost his job at a gas station, so is delivering mail part time. He has a lovely wife, played by Cathy O’Donnell, his co-star in They Live by Night a year earlier, but they have to live with her parents and she’s expecting a child. He dreams of buying her a fur coat from a storefront but can’t bring home the bacon.

So, it’s not a huge stretch when he makes a poor snap decision to take a couple of hundred dollar bills from a lawyer’s office. He saw them on the floor while he delivered the mail, but Victor Backett put them into his filing cabinet, casually as if they meant nothing to him and a set of circumstances makes them easy to take.

Because he isn’t a crook, he feels guilty even as he leaves and we know that there’s no way he’ll withstand any pressure. That’s only made worse when he finds the folder he took didn’t just contain two hundred but thirty thousand dollars. That’s plenty now, let alone in 1949! In another film, maybe he could own up and give it back and everyone could pretend it never happened, but not in this one and he does try.

That’s because Victor Backett is a crook and the thirty grand is the take from the latest in a series of blackmail demands on important and married men seduced by his partner in crime, Lucky Lucille Colner. Oh, and he’s just had her bumped off and thrown into the East River, so there’s a murder rap attached to that cash and Backett can’t admit to even being robbed.

In fact, honesty soon proves to be the worst policy because nobody’s looking for the cash until he owns up to Backett and hands him his address in the process. Oh yes, he’s in the hole and he’s digging deeper!

What really grows the hole is the discovery that he no longer has the cash. He left it with a barkeep who promptly retired out of the blue. I wonder why! And so the chase is on!

Joe’s looking for the money to give it back. Backett and his hired muscle, Georgie Garsell, are looking for it too. The cops are looking for Lucky’s killer and Garsell happily increases the body count for them. Who will find who first and who will still be alive by the end?

If it wasn’t so overtly framed with narration as a morality tale—trust the police, kids, and it will all be OK—this would be a better film, but it’s not without its merits. Mostly, it works as a character study of a man who makes a mistake and can’t fix it whatever he tries. Granger is a good everyman and it’s easy to see why Hitch brought him back for Strangers on a Train.

Few other characters are memorable, Cathy O’Donnell getting a particularly one note part as Joe’s wife, Ellen. She’s adorable but that’s it. Jean Hagen isn’t remotely as adorable as a lush of a nightclub singer but she’s got plenty more substance. The cops are capable, as they ought to be in a propaganda piece like this, but they stay in the background, just like the bad guys. This is fundamentally about Joe and the city so nice they named it twice.

New York is palpable in this movie, courtesy of cinematography by Joseph Ruttenberg, who had won two Oscars at this point, for The Great Waltz and Mrs. Miniver, with two still to come. We see a lot of the city and we even get a tense car chase of a finalé, with a corpse in a taxi heading for the docks. I don’t buy into streets being that empty in the city that never sleeps, even in the wee hours, but it all looks big and impressive, especially shot from above.

Maybe Granger brought his own life to bear when building the character of Joe. His family were doing well for themselves, with an auto dealership and a beach house, but they lost it all in the stock market crash in 1929, having to sell everything and move into a rough part of Los Angeles, while they drank and argued. It’s not hard to see young Farley being tempted as Joe was by a couple of hundred dollar bills.

Fortunately, his dad found another job, they moved next to Donald O’Connor and met the comedian Harry Langdon, who recommended that Farley try out at a local theatre. He played a few parts on opening night in front of agents and casting directors and suddenly he was in a movie, The North Star, as a teenage Russian.

If that sounds like a crazy amount of luck, it was soon countered by World War II, because, a single movie later, he signed up for the U.S. Navy. Only after that did his career take off in earnest, landing They Live by Night then Rope and, not much later, Strangers on a Train, which was his first hit and best acting experience.

Unfortunately, while it was followed by a lot of parts, the industry keeping him busy, none of them really matched that. By the late fifties, he was mostly working in television and it’s a telling note that he only has a Hollywood Walk of Fame star for his television work. He landed a Daytime Emmy nod for One Life to Live.

He spent much of the sixties on stage, after buying out his contract from Samuel Goldwyn, and won an Obie for Talley & Son. He moved to Rome for the seventies, with his lover, Robert Calhoun, and made a set of Italian films, with the spaghetti western They Call Me Trinity one particular favourite.

His final screen role was in 2001 in The Next Big Thing, a decade since his prior credit and another before his death at 85 in 2011.