This film translates Elmer Rice's Pulitzer Prize-winning play to the screen extremely well, maintaining the play's action in one set, the front stoop of a New York apartment building. It's sort of a transitional zone, where people linger just outside their private spaces. To the right of the door is a jovial Italian couple, to the left of the front door live the Kaplans, the father an old-fashioned Forward-reading Marxist, the daughter a school-teacher, the son Sam (William Collier Jr.) a timid law student in love with the pretty girl upstairs, Rose (Sylvia Sidney). Rose's mother Anna (Estelle Taylor) is desperately lonely in her marriage and there's lots of gossip about her link to a tall, skinny married man who keeps walking past nervously. The father, Frank Maurrant (David Landau) is rolled up very tight, cold, and so forth. There's a Swedish couple downstairs, a woman deserted by her husband with two little kits is being evicted, a woman upstairs is having a baby, Rose's boss wants her to be his mistress, Mrs. Jones (Beulah Bondi) is a terrible gossip and her son is a creepy, laughing bully, and her daughter Mae (Greta Granstedt) is pretty and likes to drink and stay out all night. Anna Maurant is kind to the woman giving birth. Her husband goes off on a business trip, but returns a couple of hours later to discover his wife and the thin manand he shoots them. The neighbourhood story slides into tragedyand Rose gently tells Sam they need to work things out on their own. She's brave and determined to be strong; Sidney is awfully good hereshe is dewy-eyed but she has character. At the beginning of the film there are nice shots of the skyline, and a lot of neighbourhood shots, too, including the elevated train platform. Where? I'm not sure, but it's on the east side.. The play takes place on a record-breaking hot day, just 24 hours. There are some painful moments of antisemitism, not unusual, I suppose, for that day. And there are some excellent pieces of film-making (close-ups of faces, vigorous editing) and of playwriting (little children sing "Farmer in the Dell" at the beginning and at the end, but as the camera moves away down the street they are singing, "The farmer kills a wife.")
Review of Street Scene
