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City Streets (1931 film)

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City Streets
Theatrical release poster
Directed byRouben Mamoulian
Written by
Story byDashiell Hammett
Produced byE. Lloyd Sheldon
Starring
CinematographyLee Garmes
Edited byWilliam Shea
Production
company
Distributed byParamount Pictures
Release date
  • April 18, 1931 (1931-04-18) (USA)
Running time
83 minutes
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish

City Streets is a 1931 American Pre-Code romantic melodrama directed by Rouben Mamoulian from a story by Dashiell Hammett and stars Gary Cooper, Sylvia Sidney and Paul Lukas.[1][2]

The story concerns a racketeer's daughter, Nan, who is in love with a shooting gallery showman, who is known as The Kid. Despite her prodding, The Kid has no ambitions about joining the rackets and making enough money to support her in the lifestyle to which she is accustomed. Her father implicates her in a murder, and she is sent to prison. Her father then convinces The Kid to join the gang to free Nan.[3]

In 2008, the American Film Institute nominated this film for its Top 10 Gangster Films list.[4]

Plot

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Sylvia Sidney and Paul Lukas in a scene from the film.

Nan Cooley (Sylvia Sidney), the daughter of racketeer Pop Cooley (Guy Kibbee), is in love with The Kid (Gary Cooper), a shooting gallery showman. Cooley tries but fails to urge him to join the gang to earn enough money to support her in the lifestyle to which she is accustomed. Soon, her father kills the bootlegging chief Blackie (Stanley Fields) at the urging of Big Fella Maskal (Paul Lukas) since Blackie was against Maskal's involvement with Blackie's gun moll Aggie (Wynne Gibson).

After Pop shoots Blackie, he passes the gun to Nan, which implicates her in the murder. She naively takes the rap since she believes the mob will arrange for her acquittal, but she is sent to prison. Pop Cooley tries to convince The Kid to join the gang to free Nan, which he does out of love for her. However, her attitude had changed since she was railroaded to prison. When The Kid visits Nan in prison in a fur coat, she becomes terrified of his involvement with Pop's gang after she witnesses a fellow inmate's mobster boyfriend being gunned down outside the prison gate. When Nan is released, having served her term, she wants nothing more to do with the mob. She tries to persuade The Kid to quit the gang, but he refuses.

Things go downhill from there. She finds that her father is unrepentant and involved with a loose, gold-digging woman named Pansy (Betty Sinclair). Maskal soon takes a strong liking to Nan, throws her a homecoming party, and forces her to dance with him all evening. When The Kid finally asserts his claim over Nan, Maskal threatens him and sends his thugs to kill him, but The Kid successfully disarms them and goes after Maskal.

Terrified that her lover will be killed, Nan goes to Maskal to warn him and offers herself to him in exchange for The Kid's life. Aggie, now Maskal's mistress, shoots him with Nan's gun after he leaves her for Nan, and Nan is accused of murder. The Kid then names himself as mob chief and escapes with Nan in a car with three of Maskal's men, but they aim to kill him. The Kid and Nan are then taken "for a ride" by rival thugs. They race a train and maintain high speeds. Nan pulls a gun on the men and disarms them. Dropping the thugs off with "no hard feelings," The Kid tells them he has quit the beer business and drives off with Nan.[5][6]

Cast (in credits order)

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Production

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Crime writer Dashiell Hammett, under contract to Paramount, wrote a short plot outline entitled “After School" about a girl of 16 who collaborates in crime with her bootlegger stepfather and is sent briefly to reform school. Her teenage boyfriend is enlisted in the operations, and she helps to exonerate him from a murder allegation.[7] By late 1930 a screenplay was completed, the protagonists had been re-characterized as young adults. Gary Cooper was enlisted to play “The Kid” and Clara Bow to play “Nan.” Screenwriters Oliver H. P. Garrett and Max Marcin transformed Hammett’s light “slice of life tale into “a modern-day morality play about the hard lives of the underclass,” in which their futures hang in the balance between “spiritual ascendancy” and “mortal sin.”[8]

Filmmaker Rouben Mamoulian, who had recently completed a one-contract picture Applause (1929) for Paramount was invited to direct by producer B. P. Schulberg.[9]

Mamoulian, to evade studio artistic control, refrained from making any explicit alterations to the Garrett/Marin scenario in advance of filming. Rather, he introduced technical and aesthetic changes during the course of filming without formal authorization.[10]

Late in pre-production, Clara Bow experienced “a much publicized nervous breakdown” and was replaced by Sylvia Sydney.[11]

Technical and aesthetic innovations

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Film historian Marc Spergel reports that City Streets was the first film to demonstrate the use of “voice-over” in a sound production.[12][13] A startling visual and sound montage for its day, Mamoulian recorded two separate sound channels on a single segment of film to create the effect. The voice The Kid (Gary Cooper) is heard speaking when the screen shows only Nan’s (Sylvia Sydney) face, in a sense superimposing Cooper’s spoken thoughts on that of Sydney’s as a dramatic device, a form of “subjective sound.”[14][15]

Paramount publicity personnel warned that audiences would be disconcerted by hearing a character speak without seeing the actor’s lips moving. Mamoulian insisted that viewers would instantly integrate and sound and visual elements, which in fact they did.[16]

Mamoulian also enlisted 19th century European musical classics in an effort to deepen the impact of his cinematography. Rejecting any ersatz facsimiles of grand symphonic recordings, Mamoulian insisted on having genuine masterpieces as musical embellishments. Spergel points out that Hollywood executives were pleased to see “high art” appropriated so as to add luster to their productions. The result was the “rechanneling” of art into commercial endeavors. As such “Mamoulian unwittingly contributed to the debasement of high art” by placing it at the service of his commercial cinema.[17]

Reception

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The New York Times observes that director Rouben Mamoulian “photographic artistry’ trades character and narrative development for “clever cinematic ideas” manifested in “unusual camera stunts and angles” and not without “photographic artistry.” The reviewer finds the actors generally appealing, but regrets the “hapless casting” of Paul Lukas as Big Boy Maskal. This is compensated for by a vaudeville sketch featuring a trained mule, affording “genuine amusement.”[18]

Theme

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Film historian Tom Milne distinguishes City Streets from contemporary films of the violent gangster genre of the Thirties such as the Little Caesar (1930), The Public Enemy (1931), and Scarface (1932). [19] Though the story involves bootlegging and power struggles among mobsters, the stylized treatment of the topic resembles Paramount’s 1927 silent classic “fantasy” Underworld by director Josef von Sternberg. Nowhere in City Streets does a Thompson machine gun appear nor do any gangland-style murders occur. Like Underworld, the film is essentially a love story.[20][21][22]

Mamoulian prided himself on the fact that he avoided any explicit on-screen violence in City Streets. Film historian Mark Spergel reports that notorious Chicago mobster Al Capone saw the film and was favorably impressed.[23]

Thematically “a modern-day morality play.” the protagonists The Kid and Nan are faced with a choice: They can succumb to the savage impulses of greed and lust, or assert their better nature as individuals and rise above a degenerate society: “the country, to which they flee at the end, represents the world of nature, harmony, and hope.”[24][25][26]

Notes

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  1. ^ Milne, 1969 p. 162: Filmography
  2. ^ Spergel, 1993 p. 277: Filmography and Stageography And p. 116: “It remains essentially a romantic melodrama.”
  3. ^ Spergel, 1993 p. 113: Short plot sketch. And: “...high melodrama…” unlike the original story.
  4. ^ "AFI's 10 Top 10 Nominees" (PDF). Archived from the original on July 16, 2011. Retrieved August 19, 2016.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)
  5. ^ Milne, 1969 pp. 29-38: Extended plot synopsis.
  6. ^ Spergel, 1993 p. 113: Short plot sketch.
  7. ^ Jensen, 2024 p. 67
  8. ^ Spergel, 1993 p. 113-114: Hammett’s treatment “had no such moral vantage point.”
  9. ^ Spergel, 1993 p. 112
  10. ^ Spergel, 1993 p. 114-115: “...bypassing accepted channels, thereby challenging the pecking order…Many studio bosses did not want to hire someone with such disregard.”
  11. ^ Spergel, 1993 p. 115
  12. ^ Danks, 2007: “...disembodied voiceover (City Streets, 1931)...”
  13. ^ Spergel, 1993 p. 115: “Technically, City Streets is known for Mamoulian’s invention of the ‘voice-over’”
  14. ^ Milne, 1969 p. 9: “...subjective sound…”
  15. ^ Callahan, 2007: “City Streets is flamboyantly inventive with both sound and image, but its ordinary story is just a pretext for cinematic experiments…”
  16. ^ Spergel, 1993 p. 115: “At first the studio marketing department was concerned that hearing someone on the screen talking without seeing their lips move would cause laughter and bewilderment in the audience.” And: Compared to stage “soliloquy” and confirmation of audience comprehension.
  17. ^ Spergel, 1993 p. 115-116: “Another unique contribution was Mamoulian made in this film was to introduce musical classics to the film’s soundtrack, much as he had done with the background music on stage productions.” See these pages for all quoted material.
  18. ^ "Beer and Crime". The New York Times. April 18, 1931.
  19. ^ Jensen, 2024 p. 68: Mamoulian’s approach reduced the likelihood of censor board interference.
  20. ^ Milne, 1969 p. 29, p. 36: See here for comment by Andrew Sarris.
  21. ^ Danks, 2007: “[E]ven such contemporaneously set films as City Streets…do not really have a genuine feeling for the present day.”
  22. ^ Callahan, 2007: “...City Streets is a rather cheerful gangster film…”
  23. ^ Spergel, 1993 p. 116: Capone “found it to be the best of the gangster films.”
  24. ^ Spergel, 1993 p. 113-114
  25. ^ Danks, 2007: “Mamoulian quickly developed a taste for nostalgic Americana and a suspicion of the benefits of the modern world. In fact, even such contemporaneously set films as City Streets…do not really have a genuine feeling for the present day.”
  26. ^ Jensen, 2024 p. 71: For “nature” symbolism, see here for image of final sequence.

References

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