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"City streets" (1931) directed by Rouben Mamoulian introduced in the transition from silent movies to the era of talkies on the soundtrack the figure of style that was named as the so-called intern monologue, when a character thinks out of the frame composition of the shot, but supposedly inside the universe of the fiction, which we saw on the screen. This movie about the anti-drink law of the time of gangsters is historical also from this point of view and Mamoulian, as filmmaker coming from Georgia - belonging to the minority of Armenians there then - as republic belonging to Russia, at the time was considered as a Russian coming to Hollywood. There is a scene where the stream of conscientiousness for instance is shown by the character when watching in the jail, thinking how it was good if outside, also showing the paradox of the prisoner waiting for freedom, even illegally obtained as it would be : is she who is in prison because another intriguing affair with her boss and accomplice, but is another than him for whom she thinks as affect for liberating her from this imprisonment. It seems that it was the first time in a talkie movie where this kind of speech out but within the thinking of another character it was practiced, as unknown so far before it happened till then of course. One of the characteristics of the direction is the poetry of the stream in editing, as imagining the flow of desires and feelings about pacific wild nature, as surviving mind of a country mentality in the urban brutality. Also as an off country, remembering far away in the vicious present of battle of sexes, in between struggle for the control of the town during the period of bootleggers, as a reign where women here are hers, whom their thinking way in gown steady by them in loving cure against killings. The many visual effects bringing another interpretation of gangsterism as phenomena of the fast urbanization it is the strength of this movie, when it was made from a novel written by Dashiel Hammett during the Depression with its social and esthetic's implications on a plot concerning family disaggregation. Altogether, the pity that this fact switches in a new generation by an ironic love story, where the place of hate feelings about it were out of the rule of law. This was considered enough scandalous for attracting the audience at the time, as picturing the thieves more sympathetic than the corrupted society itself : in its old institutions not very appropriated for the transformations of this new standing of life before a new deal, adapted from this inspired novel.
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