Street Scene (1931 King Vidor)

Street Scene comes over initially like a filmed play, which it was (Elmer Rice wrote both), with characters in front of a tenement building interacting, but as it goes on, it looks like we're in an actual New York street, the more evident the higher that crane mounted camera sweeps - but in fact it's a giant set. Quite how they then incorporated the climactic scene in which a mass of people flood in and traffic's brought to a halt, I'm not sure.

Young Silvia Sidney's being wooed by both her boss Walter Miller and the son of a Jewish free-thinker  William Collier Jr., who's a bit of a wimp, whilst her mother Estelle Taylor seems to be having quite a public flirtation with Russell Hopton, of which husband David Landau becomes more and more suspicious. (It doesn't help that all the neighbours - including waspish Beulah Bondi - disapprove.) John Qualen's the janitor.

I suppose the characters are quite clichéd - intellectual Jew, Irish bully, easy-going Italian (George Humbert)... Generally well-acted though.

I mentioned that camera - Vidor uses the crane artfully, taking us from window to window - the final shot is one giant pull backwards and up as Sidney leaves - very effective. And the rather over-done montage after the shot's fired and about a dozen people rush into the camera seems like another vestige of twenties cinema. Undeniably exciting scenes, though.

It's shot by George Barnes and scored by Lionel Newman, with some borrowing of Gershwin.

Amusingly, I note the copy we have, a from-VHS TCM transmission, took place at 4.30 a.m.

Kurt Weill made an opera out of it in 1947.