Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Street Scene (1931)


United Artists
Directed by King Vidor
My rating: 3 stars out of 4
IMDb
(Turner Classic Movies)

A realistic depiction of a day on a New York City street. The drama takes place almost entirely on the front steps of a typical tenement building. The ladies, mostly immigrants, gossip about a neighbor who is having an affair with the milk man. The woman's daughter, Sylvia Sidney, wonders if she is in love with the studious Jewish boy downstairs. Her father comes home drunk one night and catches his wife with the man, leading to tragedy. It can be a bit static at times, it is based on a play, and the material tends towards the melodramatic, but Sidney's sympathetic portrayal of the girl Rose is hard to dislike.

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