STREET SCENE (1931)

Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer Prize winning play about a particularly eventful day (romance illicit & pure; birth; street games; murder; gossip; music lessons; Italian Ices) on the stoop of a tenement apartment building in Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen, in King Vidor’s trimly faithful film version, seems an unlikely vehicle in which to find the end of the Early Talkie Era. Yet, there it is; at precisely 58 minutes into a 1'18" running time: An affair discovered; A husband’s enraged jealousy; A warning come too late; Shots fired; A crash thru a glass window; Streets alive with panicking passers-by and in the traffic & tempo of the city at large. Suddenly, the era of modern sound film has arrived as if someone flicked a light switch. Before then, the film, a superb example of Early Talkie technique, has bewitched us with a series of wonderfully flavorful archetypes of a churning multi-ethnic scene (though hardly a Black or Hispanic to be found), with Beulah Bondi, John Qualen and the marvelous, otherwise unknown Ann Kostant (as sympathetic spinster Shirley Kaplan) from the original B’way cast, joining Sylvia Sidney and a host of fine character actors you know by face if not by name. (Fun to see Frank McHugh’s brother, Matt, as a tough Irish lout.) The stage conventions of the piece, Rice using the stoop as a ‘single-unit’ stage set, works beautifully by stubbornly not opening up the play; the vast mural of lower and lower-middle-class life still involving. But as film, it truly becomes essential at that 58 minute mark. An unmissable evolutionary marker.

DOUBLE-BILL: Small town Texas boy King Vidor had already made his mark on city life with his classic late silent, THE CROWD/’28, though it looks too carefully composed next to this awkward, rough hewn gem. OR: Producer Samuel Goldwyn must have liked the city mural play, revisiting it in DEAD END/’37, also starring Sylvia Sidney, with a gangster story folded into the mix by playwright Sidney Kingsley and William Wyler’s far smoother, more polished production robbing the sense of verisimilitude Vidor got here. Technical limitations helping rather hurting things.

READ ALL ABOUT IT: (Another HEAR All About It.) The trio of Elmer Rice, Langston Hughes & composer Kurt Weill turned the play into a one-of-a-kind popular opera. There’s a great version of the big tenor aria, ‘Lonely House,’ done as a sort of power ballad by the great Sarah Vaughan once out on Verve Records OR: The whole opera from the English National Opera with Catherine Zeta-Jones in support from back in her musical comedy days.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: That Gershwinesque riff that keeps recurring is by music director Alfred Newman. A favorite of his, and used in many films before it was showcased (and expanded) as a stand-alone prelude (in CinemaScope and Stereo) for HOW TO MARRY A MILLIONAIRE/’53.