Weekend Watch 7/11-7/12

What I’m watching this weekend: Side Street (1949)- 1 hr 23 mins

Joe Norson (Farley Granger) is down on his luck. He's lost his business and is finding it hard to make ends meet on his part-time salary as a mailman. With the birth of his child approaching, he’s finding things far more pressing than usual and impulsively steals what he thinks is just a few hundred dollars. In fact, it’s $30,000 and it’s part of a shady transaction. Joe wants to return the money and start fresh, but it’s going to be harder than he thought with the police and mob both on his tail.

Thoughts after watching the film

Side Street pulsates with intensity. Film critic Ed Gonzalez put it best when he said, It’s “a triumph of visual savvy and moral exactitude-a scurrying spectacle of dog-cat-and-mouse throughout the veiny streets of New York City. The Big Apple comes alive via a nervy mix of photojournalistic shots of people on the move and hieratic [formal] compositions that give the squeeze to Farley Granger's Joe Norton...” New York really is an indispensable character in this film. It propels the audience as well as Joe along the side streets of New York to a ready conclusion.

If there is any criticism to be made, I think all I’d say is that the plot feels more akin to that of a B-movie. If you also watch Granger and O’Donnell in They Live By Night (1948), it can be hard to go back to this film. It lacks much of their well-developed chemistry. However, what Side Street may lack in chemistry, it makes up for in individual character study.