MGM’s ‘noir lite’ puts Farley Granger into a murderous bind involving blackmail and his own sticky fingers: an act of petty pilferage accidentally lands him with $30,000 connected to a killing. Director Anthony Mann and some eye-popping action direction on location in New York City make the show a must-see. The surprise is that the efforts of a great cast — Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, James Craig, Paul Kelly, Charles McGraw, Adele Jergens, Harry Bellaver — are topped by a standout new talent, Jean Hagen.

Side Street
Blu-ray
Warner Archive Collection
1950 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 83 min. / Street Date April 29, 2025 / Available at MovieZyng / 21.99
Starring: Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, James Craig, Paul Kelly, Jean Hagen, Charles McGraw, Adele Jergens, Harry Bellaver, Whit Bissell, John Galludet, Richard Basehart, Ben Cooper, Anthony Dexter, King Donovan, Sid Tomack, Herb Vigran, James Westerfield.
Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg
Art Directors: Cedric Gibbons, Daniel B. Cathcart
Stunts: Carey Loftin
Film Editor: Conrad A. Nervig
Original Music: Lennie Hayton
Screenplay Written by Sydney Boehm
Produced by Sam Zimbalist
Directed by Anthony Mann

Director Anthony Mann’s standing was very good after his Eagle-Lion pictures with cameraman John Alton,  T-Men and  Raw Deal. MGM allowed him to film the tough and violent  Border Incident  and the politically angry  Devil’s Doorway, two of the studio’s roughest pictures to date.

But also in his first year at MGM, Mann directed  Side Street, a slightly softer noir centered on a struggling young married couple. The stars were Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell, now better known for their pairing in Nicholas Ray’s classic noir, the fatalistic  They Live by Night. Side Street has its share of danger and jeopardy, but is a much different picture.

MGM made some fine noirs, even though the studio’s bias for glamour worked against the noir ethos. Co-studio head Louis B. Mayer hated murky, morally troubled dramas, along with most everything else promoted by his corporate rival Dore Schary. Schary had become committed to films with darker themes when he was production head at RKO. He brought the team of Anthony Mann and John Alton to MGM, but split them up after two pictures. When Side Street was filming Alton may already have been working on the Technicolor musical  An American in Paris.

Side Street certainly benefits from MGM’s deep-pocket production resources, with extensive location shooting in New York City. The show opens with a stunning aerial shot of the Empire State building, and the thrilling finale features an exciting car chase in the narrow streets of Lower Manhattan. An opening narration too-closely imitates Jules Dassin’s  The Naked City, describing the daily cycle in New York while criminals are doing their dirty work.

Some grisly murders take place, but Side Street doesn’t have quite the ‘dangerous’ edge of other noirs from the same year. In the Nicholas Ray film, Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell played social outcasts, hillbilly outlaws all but born into lives of crime. For MGM they play utter innocents caught in a bind. Our hero takes one foolish step off the moral straight-and-narrow, and becomes the target of ruthless killers. In that respect the film reminds us of the studio’s condescending  Crime Does Not Pay short subjects, that divided society cleanly into ‘nice’ citizens and depraved criminal scum.

The story gives its young couple un-glamorous working-class economic problems, something atypical for MGM. Part-time mail carrier Joe Norson (Farley Granger) needs a better job to replace the filling station he lost. His young wife Ellen (Cathy O’Donnell) will have to give birth in the county hospital, yet he daydreams about buying her a fur coat. Joe cannot resist an impulse to filch some loose cash from the office of a lawyer, Victor Backett (Edmon Ryan). But he later finds that he’s taken not $200 but $30,000. He is so shocked, he at first doesn’t know what to do. He makes up a story for Ellen but then decides to return the money. When Joe walks into Backett’s office and confesses all, the cagey attorney denies any knowledge of the theft.

Joe is of course way, way out of his depth. Backett and his partner George Garsell (James Craig) are crooks and murderers. The money was a blackmail payoff, and the two of them have already murdered their accomplice, playgirl Lucille Colner (Adele Jergens). Joe confesses everything to Ellen, who is recuperating from childbirth in the free clinic. Stubbornly convinced that he can fix things on his own, Joe’s snooping makes him look guilty for yet another murder by Garsell. With the police on his tail, Joe’s only hope is to find Garsell first. He contacts nightclub singer Harriette Sinton (Jean Hagen) for help, not realizing that she sees through him as well.

We’ve always assumed that Side Street was a follow-up to RKO’s devastatingly effective They Live by Night, but expert Eddie Muller tells a different story. Howard Hughes delayed the release of Nicholas Ray’s film for so long that Dore Scary put Side Street into production hoping to get his Granger/O’Donnell film out first. As it is, the young lovers in this film have little in common with the grubby, uneducated hillbilly outlaws of They Live by Night. As filmed, they are idealized semi-innocents, the ‘little people’ depicted in other films Dore Schary supervised:  Joe Smith, American,  Mystery Street and even the revivalist parable  The Next Voice You Hear…

Joe has a really bad judgment problem. He’s a decent citizen, yet bends to the temptation of easy money as if he were a teenager. His minor sin swiftly snowballs to life-threatening proportions. The next year’s  Quicksand had Mickey Rooney repeat Joe’s story. Foolish employee Rooney takes some cash from his boss’s till. In both pictures the basic message is conservative — the System is solid and private property is sacred. Lumpen proles need to keep their noses clean and forget about things like fur coats.

The problem is that, within that framework, neither Joe nor Ellen is particularly consistent. Joe shows all his cards to the bad guys and makes himself look incredibly guilty to the law. But when he contacts a lounge singer to get information on Garsell, he suddenly behaves like a shrewd operative, self-possessed and in control.

Ellen Norson is similarly inconsistent. She is at first wary of Joe’s tendency to exaggerate and fantasize, yet swallows his flaky story about how he got money for a doctor, and accepts his announcement that he has to go away for a few days, just as their baby is due to arrive. Under a bit of pressure, the level-headed Ellen suddenly has the hard-boiled notion that cops kill indiscriminately, as Wallace Ford wails in the later  He Ran All the Way. She panics and tells Joe to flee, when his only hope is to go to the cops and tell all.

Joe and Ellen’s predicament was given a different treatment in Cy Endfield’s  Try and Get Me! from the next year. Its Frank Lovejoy also plays an unemployed and desperate husband whose wife is expecting a baby he can’t afford. Lovejoy doesn’t submit to temptation like a schoolboy, but gives up and abandons his principles to drive a getaway car for an unstable holdup man. Side Street’s tagline pretends that Joe Norson is an innocent: “Fate dropped thirty thousand dollars in his lap,” not “Joe Norson CHOSE to steal.”  Cy Endfield’s film may be too eager to indict the American social system, but Anthony Mann’s picture is much too eager to exonerate ‘innocent’ Joe Norson.

As much as we like actor Farley Granger, we lose impatience with his Joe, whose lack of common sense is more appropriate for a sixteen year-old. He’s owned a business and lived in NYC all his life yet is a babe in the woods in his interpersonal dealings. Even a newsboy would intuit that $30,000 stashed in a file cabinet in a cheap office must have something fishy connected to it. When his life is on the line, Joe parks a mystery package with a casual acquaintance, a bartender, yet.  He’s too foolish to qualify as a good noir loser character, like Al Roberts in  Detour. We lose respect for him, and just wish that Ellen had fallen in love with somebody more sensible.

The show is saved by Mann’s direction, the stunning backdrop of NYC and the fine performances on view. Farley Granger is suitably gullible and sentimental; his good looks and fresh style would attract  Alfred Hitchcock and even  Luchino Visconti. Cathy O’Donnell is again sympathetic, even though she must play yet another sweet woman in love with a kid she can’t depend upon. The actress has always been defined by her flawless performance in William Wyler’s  The Best Years of our Lives, but her top characterization remains her Keechie Mobley in the classic Nicholas Ray noir.

Edmon Ryan is excellent as the cagey lawyer; he became the main antagonist in the next year’s superior MGM noir  Mystery Street. James Craig’s Georgie Garsell is a dangerous man, and ruthless with his lady friends. Like most of MGM’s contract players, he’d be let go sometime in 1953. Adele Jergens is one of Georgie’s unlucky women, a crooked blonde beauty who makes an early exit. The most sympathetic bad guy is Harry Bellaver’s Larry Giff, a taxi driver moonlighting as Georgie’s henchman.

The cops on the case are honest and conscientious. The dependable Paul Kelly is Detective Captain Anderson, who lands a twisted case that begins with the murder of a playgirl, just as in The Naked City. Anderson’s main detective operative is played with smooth professionalism by favorite Charles McGraw. Key clues come from a frightened bank teller (Whit Bissell), an honest bartender (John Galludet) and a punk kid (un-billed Peter DeBear) whose greed leads directly to a series of murders.

All the talent is good, but most viewers agree that actress Jean Hagen steals the show as Harriet Sinton, an alcoholic torch singer. Hagen arrives deep in the third act and lights up the drama, talking in a very specific, very boozy NYC accent that carries a hint of Judy Holliday. Harriet sees through Joe right away, but she has the bad luck of being yet another of Georgie Garsell’s foolish girlfriends. Perhaps Side Street led to Hagen’s casting in John Huston’s never-bettered noir caper  The Asphalt Jungle. It’s a crime to think that her great role in  Singin’ in the Rain didn’t lead to even better things.

Anthony Mann’s keen visual sense is active even without John Alton behind the camera. He finds renewed dynamism in the New York locations. The many tight, odd camera angles can’t be bettered — they must have been carefully pre-planned and then perfected on location. Director of Photography Joseph Ruttenberg had begun early in the silent era. He fashioned impressive images for everything from Fritz Lang’s  Fury to Vincente Minnelli’s  Gigi.

Director Anthony Mann had a reputation for what in late ’40s terms qualified as grotesque violence. The vicious George Garsell murders in a cold-blooded, business-as-usual fashion, even if only one killing is depicted on-screen. The final car chase also feels unusually violent, with the cars taking tight corners at high speeds. In the claustrophobic narrow streets at the lower tip of Manhattan, the speeding taxi looks like a metal rat in a concrete maze. The high camera angles remind us of the CinemaScope  The World, The Flesh and The Devil made ten years later. It was filmed just pre-dawn, before the commuters arrived. This show somehow blocked off streets in broad daylight.

We’re told that when Howard Hughes realized that MGM’s own Granger / O’Donnell film was on the way, he made sure that RKO’s They Lived by Night beat it into the theaters. Of the two only Nicholas Ray’s show is now judged a genuine all-time classic, but we’re told that both pictures lost money in release. Not all the films we revere 50 years later, were popular when new.

Spoiler:  Remember the finale of Henry Hathaway’s  Kiss of Death, in which a quick switch of voiceover copy transforms an obviously fatal shooting into a hopeful survival story?   Side Street’s fade-out does the same with Joe Norson’s legal future. The soft-hearted look on Captain Anderson’s face tells us he’s convinced that Joe is just a victim of circumstances.  Considering the bloody mayhem and chaos he’s caused, were not so sure Joe deserves to walk away from this. We aren’t told what the future holds for the creep attorney Victor Brackett — George had all the money, and every person that could offer first-hand testimony against Brackett is dead. What kind of case could be made against him?

The Warner Archive Collection Blu-ray of Side Street has always looked good, but the HD encoding has a field day with Joseph Ruttenberg’s crisp B&W cinematography. A doorstep here and there was likely recreated at the studio, but the show must have a solid 15 minutes of quality location footage. Fans of New York will want to examine the views of busy streets, some of which are no longer covered by El trains. That car chase finale must have a hundred carefully-filmed shots in the impossibly narrow streets. The taxicab fishtail-skids through at least a dozen sharp corners; it may be stunt driver Carey Loftin who rolls it in the middle of Wall Street, a perfect shot. Audiences in retrospective screenings usually applaud this chase, one of the most elaborate until the films of  Don Siegel and  Peter Yates.

The extras begin with a casual, sparse audio commentary by Richard Shickel, who gives a critics’ account of the picture, not in the greatest detail. On video we get the older WB noir featurette Where Temptation Lurks with Shickel and other talking head experts Patricia King Hanson and Oliver Stone. Following that are two remastered Technicolor cartoons, a trailer, and an appropriate ‘Crime Does Not Pay’ short subject called The Luckiest Guy in the World.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Side Street
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Very Good ++
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary by Richard Schickel
2007 featurette Where Temptation Lurks
‘Crime Does Not Pay’ short subject The Luckiest Guy in the World
2 animated cartoons: Goggle-Fishing Bear and Polka Dot Puss
Original Theatrical Trailer.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: May 18, 2025
(7329side)

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