#slyvia sidney

[whilecinemavisionsdancedinmyhead]

Sabotage (1936)

#sabotage #slyvia sidney #hitchcock #alfred hitchcock #british cinema #british hitchcock

[lascenizas]

The Last Movie I Watched...

Merrily We Go To Hell (1932, Dir.: Dorothy Arzner)

#i watched #merrily we go to hell #female director #slyvia sidney

[mrclinical]

Street Scene (1931)

Directed by King Vidor

Rating: 77/100

Adapted from Elmer Rice’s 1928 play of the same name, King Vidor’s Street Scene is a film which explored contemporary metropolitan society through a door-step microcosm. The film takes place almost wholly in front of an apartment block inhabited by a Caucasian menagerie - a hodgepodge of the white working classes, aspiring middle-classes and the proletariat  intelligentsia. These character’s flitter in and out of the simmering New York heat discussing their social issues through the gauze of gossip and idle chatter. In many senses it is a domestic tragedy predominantly about the role of women, or moreover, about how they each navigate the patriarchy as an honorary angel of the house. 

The narrative centre of the film is the archetypal middle-class nuclear family, the Maurrants. Estelle Taylor plays Anna Maurrant, the name on everyone’s lips, a mother, wife and presumed adulterous, who slips behind her authoritarian husband’s (David Landau) back, to meet up with her male “friend” Steve Sankey (Russell Hopton) - who in a comic twist also happens to be every man’s greatest fear: an extremely optimistic milkman. As whispering of infidelity transverse around the neighbourhood, her daughter Rose (Sylvia Sidney) is starting her own romantic voyage, dodging the clutches of rough proles and letchy liver-spotted gentleman, for the warm embrace and sensibility of aspiring writer and romantic Kaplan (William Collier. Jr). Rose represents the emergence of the new woman - the kind of woman whose romantic illusions are more measured, who have learnt from the suffrage of the generation of women before them - a generation who married hastily and often for the wrong reasons.  

Ultimately, Vidor’s films reminds the audience that living in close and diverse quarters can be a double-edged sword. For, although, community can be something akin to a modern utilitarianism, where everyone chips in and supports one another, it ultimately breaks down because of humanity's inherent frailties - the scourge of jealousy, disgust and prejudice which live all in our own dark corners. Unable to escape from the prying eyes and flapping gums of the community, who Vidor has leaning out of windows ajar and malingering on the front steps, the family fall victim to the devastating consequences of the mounting hearsay. The film’s theatrical inclinations do slightly neuter its emotional punch, but it's an impressive picture nonetheless, with some clever directorial touches from Vidor who handles the material with meditative deliberation.

#Street scene #king vidor #classic #movies #film #review #slyvia sidney

[don56]

Sylvia Sidney

#slyvia sidney

[womenofthe30s-70s]

#Slyvia Sidney