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.”
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