Mamoulian, Sylvia Sidney, and "City Streets"

In 2011 I was com­mis­sioned by a home video label to con­trib­ute a book­let essay to its edi­tion of Rouben Mamoulian’s City Streets. The release was can­celled after it proved impossible to cre­ate a viable disc. I thought, since today Turner Classic Movies is show­ing the pic­ture as part of its 24-hour trib­ute to Sylvia Sidney, it might not be the worst idea to take the essay out of moth­balls, so to speak. 

“Film crit­ics hate film his­tor­i­ans,” a film his­tor­i­an and arch­iv­ist told me in con­ver­sa­tion about twenty years ago. He wasn’t bit­ter about it; it was his under­stand­ing that the his­tor­i­an and the crit­ic had dif­fer­ent aims. “Critics like to base their assess­ment hier­arch­ies on ‘firsts.’ A great dir­ect­or, or an auteur, might be at least par­tially not­able, crit­ic­ally, for being the ‘first’ to use extens­ive close-ups, or some such thing. Then a film his­tor­i­an dis­cov­ers, or uncov­ers, or restores some obscure, maybe even dis­rep­ut­able, two-reeler seri­al install­ment by an unknown and uncel­eb­rated dir­ect­or that’s replete in…close-ups. And then it’s ‘so much for that.’ If the dis­cov­ery is even acknow­ledged by the crit­ic in the first place, which it’s fre­quently not.”

These obser­va­tions don’t quite haunt me as I pre­pare to write about Rouben Mamoulian, but I do intend to be mind­ful of them. The Tblisi-born one-time theat­er dir­ect­or is fre­quently cited as an innov­at­or, a cre­at­or of firsts, even, in his film work, par­tic­u­larly his sound pic­tures, those made in the early (and often his­tor­ic­ally muddled, as it were) trans­ition peri­od between silent films and “talk­ies.” His melo­dra­mat­ic 1929 back­stage music­al Applause, star­ring the now-all-but-forgotten chanteuse Helen Morgan (reputedly—here we go with cit­ing “firsts”! —the ori­gin­at­or of the draped-across-the-piano-top singing pos­ture) is not­able not only for the rel­at­ive fluid­ity of its camerawork—Mamoulian was one of many dir­ect­ors who refused to swal­low the con­ven­tion­al wis­dom that the cum­ber­some and sens­it­ive new sound-recording tech­no­logy, com­bined with the dol­lies and cranes and tracks used to move the cam­era, made a fixed, stat­ic per­spect­ive the best way to get a par­tic­u­lar shot done—but for its fleet­ing loc­a­tion shots of New York City, in scenes wherein the film’s young lov­ers vis­it the Brooklyn Bridge and oth­er land­marks. But its innov­a­tions have by now been so firmly estab­lished in main­stream film lan­guage that they can per­haps only be appre­ci­ated from the historian’s per­spect­ive; if you’re watch­ing the pic­ture for pleas­ure, it plays by turns stodgy, delib­er­ately grot­esque, mor­al­ist­ic and at times strangely sur­real, all those qual­it­ies com­ing togeth­er in a strik­ing there’s‑no-business-like-show-business mont­age in which the film’s exem­plar­ily pure convent-raised heroine shrinks in hor­ror at an array of increas­ingly gargoyle-like chor­us girls, their faces, in one gar­ish close-up after anoth­er, look­ing less like mug shots than as examples from a med­ic­al text­book on deformities.

Mamoulian’s next film, 1931’s City Streets,  “plays” quite a bit dif­fer­ently, not just because it stars two then very fresh soon-to-be-Hollywood icons, the broad-shouldered and lac­on­ic Gary Cooper, and the ser­i­ously gam­inesque, ever wide-eyed Sylvia Sidney, whose career and life exten­ded long enough for her make cru­cial impres­sions in a couple of Tim Burton films, Beetlejuice among them. The film boasts a scen­ario by anoth­er innov­at­or, Dashiell Hammett, although truth to tell the storyline as such is both not inor­din­ately mem­or­able and a repos­it­ory of genre tropes/conventions/clichés that movie­makers con­tin­ue to fall back on today. But Hammett’s par­ti­cip­a­tion points to a cru­cial aspect of its appeal; City Streets is a gang­ster pic­ture, and the gang­ster pic­ture is a thriv­ing or at least act­ive genre to this day. But it’s an unusu­al gang­ster picture—an unsigned review of the film in Variety touts it as “Probably the first soph­ist­ic­ated treat­ment of a gang­ster pic­ture.” This is attrib­ut­able to two dif­fer­ent styles: Mamoulian’s own per­son­al one, and what could be called the house style of its pro­duc­tion stu­dio, Paramount, a house style that was more read­ily dis­cern­able in what’s now referred to as the pre-code era.

Censorship, self-censorship included was always a real­ity in Hollywood, but up until the adop­tion and impos­i­tion of a “Production Code” circa 1933 it was pretty catch as catch can. With the bene­fit of hind­sight, cinephiles of later gen­er­a­tions gleaned that ’33 and pre-‘33 pic­tures of the sound era had a loose­ness and brash­ness that can still shock naïve view­ers who pre­sume that “old” movies are by neces­sity prig­gish. The sight of a char­ac­ter giv­ing the fin­ger to a passing cab in Raoul Walsh’s rowdy Sailor’s Luck can eli­cit gasps from a con­tem­por­ary audi­ence that wouldn’t blink twice at such a thing in a cur­rent film. Again, it’s a bit reduct­ive to make sweep­ing gen­er­al­iz­a­tions about such a sub­stan­tial swath of Hollywood his­tory, but for the pur­poses of this piece, let’s say that the house of Warner excelled at snappy vul­gar­ity in gang­ster pic­tures, glitzy, often Busby-Berkeley-supervised music­als, and lur­id big-city melo­dra­mas set in buzz­ing news­pa­per offices and depart­ment stores. Fox fare was a little more burly; bois­ter­ous tales of he-men on the make, as in the afore­men­tioned Walsh pic­ture. And Paramount, also home at the time to dir­ect­ors Ernst Lubitsch and Josef von Sternberg, was a little more chic, a little more soigné, a little more European. (While oth­er ver­sions of the quote merely spe­cify “Paris, Hollywood,” Peter Bogdanovich cites Lubitsch telling Garson Kanin, “I’ve been to Paris, France, and I’ve been to Paris, Paramount. I think I prefer Paris, Paramount.” Lubitsch’s own jour­neys through “Paris, Paramount” and there­abouts are col­lec­ted in the Eclipse box set “Lubitsch Musicals,” and Mamoulian him­self explored that spe­cif­ic ter­rit­ory in 1932’s Love Me Tonight, star­ring fre­quent Lubitsch leads Maurice Chevalier and Jeannette MacDonald.)

This, com­bined with Mamoulian’s par­tic­u­lar sense of refine­ment, make City Streets an unusu­al gang­ster pic­ture even today. The Variety review sniffed at the picture’s “plat­it­ud­in­ous attempt to arti­fy bey­ond a desir­able lim­it,” but again, the bene­fit of hind­sight allowed one more recent crit­ic to observe that City Streets is “com­posed like a tone poem.” “Composed” is indeed an apt term, and Mamoulian fre­quently lets Hammett’s tale—gangster’s daugh­ter loves vir­tu­ous fella, still takes the fall for her no-good dad, fella mis­un­der­stands and becomes gang­ster him­self while gal is in the pen, all gets straightened out (sort of) in the end—have a rest while let­ting run an elab­or­ate string of nitrate notes with baroque accents. A dis­solve of two close-ups of a wink­ing Sidney; cut­aways to silent, beau­ti­ful por­cel­ain cats dur­ing an argu­ment between a thug and his moll; the huge shad­ow of Guy Kibbee’s sleazy Pops oppress­ing Sidney’s Nan (pres­aged by a sim­il­ar shot of a grasp­ing bad­die in Applause); the change of sea­sons seen through the impos­ing black bars of a pris­on win­dow; the loom­ing, then vertigo-inducingly steep stair­case that becomes a ver­it­able motif in the film’s buildup to its cli­max; and so much more, all gor­geously cap­tured in sil­very black and white by Lee Garmes (the only man in Hollywood that pro­fes­sion­al cyn­ic Ben Hecht con­sidered a  genu­ine artist), who also made great images for Sternberg, Hitchcock, Wyler, Ophuls, and Selznick. So near-relentless is the use of such effects that one thinks, of course, of Sternberg, but the exper­i­ence of watch­ing City Streets is much dif­fer­ent than that of watch­ing a Sternberg film, and again that word “com­posed” comes to mind; Mamoulian’s use of effects is much more con­trolled, there’s little under­ly­ing sense of deli­ri­um to it, that sense you get in cer­tain Sternberg films that everything can go off its axis at any time and spin into sexu­al and mor­al chaos. No, Mamoulian’s more con­trolled, he could be Mallarmé to Sternberg’s Rimbaud, and that’s also per­haps why the pleas­ures of his work are more obscure. But not too obscure.

This is a remark­ably beau­ti­ful film in so many ways, the then twenty-one year old Sidney being high among them. City Streets was the actress’s first film; the pic­ture was ori­gin­ally meant to star silent “It” Girl Clara Bow, who was hardly the one-note per­former that reduct­ive self-proclaimed pop cul­ture experts are inclined to cat­egor­ize her as, but who non­ethe­less would have brought a dif­fer­ent qual­ity to Nan. (Bow at the time was ill and exhausted over a scan­dal involving her one-time busi­ness man­ager, and she forever regret­ted the loss of the role.)  Sidney’s enig­mat­ic beauty and idio­syn­crat­ic approach to both the hard-boiled and the tra­gic not only provides con­text for but also adds dimen­sion to Mamoulian’s flour­ishes; she’s an exem­plary sub­ject for his and Garmes’ cine­mat­ic brush. As for Cooper, he is at his most charm­ing and con­vin­cing, I think not in spite of, but exactly because he’s not really required to do much of any­thing, except be present. His “Kid” (the con­ven­tion of the name­less lead char­ac­ter hadn’t ossi­fied into a pre­ten­tious affect­a­tion at this point) starts off a naïve romantic (“I used to want to be a sail­or before I joined the cir­cus”), becomes a cocky prag­mat­ist, and finds redemp­tion by cast­ing away everything besides Nan and, pre­sum­ably, turn­ing back into a naïve romantic again. While the tone of Applause sug­ges­ted that Mamoulian found that story’s young lov­ers fairly pro forma, is not sappy (when he’s shoot­ing the two strolling over the Brooklyn Bridge, it’s clear he finds the bridge the most inter­est­ing char­ac­ter in his com­pos­i­tions) he clearly sees much more in Nan and the Kid, stop­ping the story dead almost before it’s even begun to spend sev­er­al minutes (in a pic­ture barely 80 minutes long) with them enjoy­ing an idyll­ic beach stroll. Paradise is theirs for the tak­ing, but only when they’re alone; this notion is reit­er­ated at the film’s end, by which point the couple have cast off everything and every­one that was hold­ing them back or keep­ing them apart; and they may have ended up nowhere, and nowhere may be all that is in front of them, but that’s all right with them. (Had the Production Code been in place when the pic­ture was made, at least one of the two lov­ers would have been obliged to return to the slammer.)

Mamoulian spent the remainder of the ‘30s going from strength to strength, nev­er set­tling on a par­tic­u­lar genre or even style. He dir­ec­ted Fredric March in a still-convincing ver­sion of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, an early sound hor­ror land­mark; made the afore­men­tioned Love Me Tonight; guided Garbo and her long­time silent cost­ar John Gilbert through Queen Christina; moved the refine­ment of Technicolor fur­ther along with Becky Sharp; and handed a break­through role to William Holden and an import­ant trans­ition role to Barbara Stanwyck with Golden Boy. He nev­er for­sook the theat­er, where he had begun dir­ect­ing (he staged both DuBose Hayward’s Porgy in 1927 and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in 1937) and the level of overt styl­iz­a­tion he brought to his early films was largely sub­sumed and/or adap­ted by dir­ect­ors who could more eas­ily accli­mate them­selves to being part of a stu­dio “unit;” the very def­in­ite Mamoulian was him­self fired from his last two film assign­ments, Porgy and Bess (taken over by Otto Preminger) and Cleopatra (giv­en to Joseph Mankiewicz). He lived for anoth­er quarter-century after that, a repos­it­ory of Old Hollywood lore, wis­dom, and craft, always remind­ing his inter­locutors of what had drawn him to film in the first place, the thing he thought it had lost: “magic.”