A “Mean Quarter” of New York: King Vidor’s Street Scene (Preview)
by Art Simon

There is no great insight in claiming that Hollywood in the Thirties produced a significant number of somber films. From Mervyn LeRoy’s I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and They Won’t Forget (1937) to Leo McCarey’s Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), the decade, pre- and post-Code, offered filmgoers stories of desperation, injustice, and loneliness in films that denied them happy endings. But there is a particularly painful mix of unhappiness, violence, misanthropy, and fatalism in Street Scene, Elmer Rice’s story of a tragic day in the life of a New York City apartment building. It was a story that reached American audiences well beyond the Thirties, and, given its portrayal of ethnic animosities and city-bred loneliness, it seems like a film worth recalling today.

Prior to being brought to the screen by independent producer Samuel Goldwyn in 1931, Street Scene ran for three years on Broadway before touring the country. Almost twenty years after its Broadway premiere, it returned to the New York stage as an opera in 1947 with music by Kurt Weill and lyrics by Langston Hughes. That production was recorded by Columbia and sold as a six-record set. Adapted as a radio drama in 1949 featuring Richard Conte and Shirley Booth, Street Scene was also broadcast live on the Philco Television Playhouse in 1948 and the Celanese Theatre, an anthology television series, in 1952.

In short, Street Scene circulated as widely as any cultural text in America for close to a quarter century. Yet its author Elmer Rice is largely forgotten today. Once one of Broadway’s brightest talents, and the author of The Adding Machine (1923), a celebrated work of the American expressionist theater, Rice was part of a generation of heralded playwrights not liable today to be part of any canon or college course. Those with whom he founded the Playwrights’ Company—Robert E. Sherwood, S. N. Behrman, and Maxwell Anderson—have suffered a similar fate, despite their words being widely heard and applauded on American stages and adapted for the Hollywood screen.

Street Scene is set in an “ugly brownstone…in a mean quarter of New York,” to quote Rice’s stage directions, and all the action takes place on a hot summer evening and the day after, during which we get to know a menagerie of city-dwellers. There is Anna Maurrant (Estelle Taylor), a kind-hearted woman trapped in a loveless marriage with her brutish and suspicious husband Frank (David Landau), their son Willie (Lambert Rogers), and, in a central role, their daughter Rose (Sylvia Sidney), a pretty and sensitive young woman too much the object of flirtation from her boss Bert Easter (Walter Miller) and her loutish neighbor Vincent Jones (Matt McHugh). There is Abraham Kaplan (Max Montor) who sits in his window reading the Yiddish press and telling all who will listen about the need to overthrow the capitalist system, his daughter Shirley (Ann Kostant), a schoolteacher, and his son Sam (William Collier Jr.), a young man in love with Rose, whose book-loving sensitivity puts him at odds with every other man in the building. There is a veritable chorus of neighbors, most significantly, the warm-hearted Filippo Fiorentino (George Humbert), the anxious Daniel Buchanan (Conway Washburne) whose wife is about to give birth, the building superintendent Karl Olsen (John M. Qualen) and his wife Olga (Adele Watson), and the sour and carping busybody Emma Jones (Beulah Bondi).

Besides the oppressive heat, most of the neighbors have one thing on their mind—the poorly kept secret of a romantic relationship between Anna Maurrant and Steve Sankey (Russell Hopton), a clerk for the milk company, married and father of two. When Frank Maurrant returns home unexpectedly early from an announced work trip to Stamford (a ruse since he only visits the local bar), he finds his wife and Sankey in flagrante delicto and, fueled by his long simmering suspicions and alcoholic abuse, shoots and kills them both.

Frank flees the murder scene but is found the next day and dragged away by the police, confessing to a distraught Rose that he knows he hasn’t been a good father. In the wake of the violence that overcomes the building, now surrounded by a crush of police and curious onlookers, Sam Kaplan pleads with Rose to run away with him, insisting he is eager to abandon his law school hopes if she will escape with him anywhere. But Rice refused to recuperate the grim portrait of the apartment-dwellers with a romantic happy ending, and Rose rejects Sam’s plea with a tender explanation of their need for independence before any possible commitment…

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Art Simon is an emeritus professor of film studies at Montclair State University.

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Cineaste, Vol. LI, No. 4