Mamoulian and Montage: City Streets

As a fan of Rouben Mamoulian's films (someone once referred to me as an apologist), I was obviously thrilled to finally get my hands on a DVD of his second film, City Streets. Released in 1931, this pre-code gangster/romance flick was penned by Dashiell Hammett (his debut as a screenwriter), and shot by cinematographer Lee Garmes, best known at for his work with von Sternberg. Fairly gritty for its time (there are nearly a dozen murders in the film), and apparently a favorite of Al Capone's, its lack of dramatic depth is more than compensated in its creative, groundbreaking confluence of sound and image.

With a wafer-thin plot centered around the beer rackets, the film tells of Nan (Sylvia Sydney at her loveliest), daughter of racketeer Pop Cooley (Guy Kibbee), and her relationship with carnival sharp-shooter The Kid (Gary Cooper), who unfortunately gets caught up in the underworld owing to pressure from Nan. Double crosses galore, tough guys constantly reaching into the jackets for the guns, and a climax that includes a car chasing a speeding train (it will be horse the following year in Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight), the film will never be remembered as a genre masterpiece. However, it seems this is by design, with Mamoulian far more interested in exploring the medium (with its then-new sound capabilities) than he is the narrative arc.

Though a former stage director, Mamoulian shows little of his theatrical roots in his early films, all of which contain nods to films and filmmakers that preceded him. A shot of a prison with birds flying overhead recalls a similar shot during the execution scene in Dreyer's La Passion de Jeanne d'Arc, and his use of pictorially expressive devices (porcelain cats, a match being snuffed out) is reminiscent of early Hitchcock. Mamoulian's continual shifts from realism to symbolic imagery have led some to all but dismiss him as a filmmaker. (Dwight Macdonald argued that his films are "marked with a vulgarity which is continually straining for effect, which cannot express a simple thing simply.") I've read that there are a few firsts in the film, including the use of subjective voiceover and an all-diegetic music soundtrack. (In one scene, music heard as a car is driving down the street suddenly stops as soon as the car parks. Did they even have car radios back in '31?)

Yet most impressive about City Streets is its use of montage, in the classic Eisenstein/Pudovkin mode. (Macdonald claims the film was used as a model in Russia, though I've not read that anywhere else.) Even more striking than the city-awakening montage that opens Love me Tonight is the first four minutes of City Streets, which, save for the gangster figures, could have come from a Soviet production. Though I'm far from being fully versed on 30s Hollywood cinema, I can't think of another American film that so calls to mind the masterpieces of the early Russian cinema.

Follow the jump to see images from the film.

The film opens on a close-up of wheels barreling down a street, followed by a medium shot of a line of trucks. A quick dissolve to a glass of beer reveals the trucks' contents, which is followed by a dissolve to a beer manufacturing plant. A group of racketeers are standing over a giant vat; cash taken from a hat with monogrammed initials changes hands. A slow zoom on the foamy beer in the vat dissolves to a rapidly flowing river, where we see the same hat go floating by -- the first of the film's many murders.

Equally impressive is the sequence that introduces us to The Kid (one of the best I've seen in ages.) Two scenes bridged by an interesting transitional device -- Pop sees Nan sitting in a coffee shop after a crime has been committed. He signals her with a wink, she responds in kind. Nan jumps into a cab; fade to black. Fade in on an extreme close-up of Nan, this time with her left eye closed. The camera pulls back to reveal she's aiming a gun -- it's a carnival shooting gallery. A reverse wide shot shows The Kid in the distance. Cut to a close-up of a white hat, the wearer of which turns to reveal himself with a look of surprise that quickly turns into a smile that is 200% charm.

As far as I know, there's no legitimate DVD release of City Streets, which is a shame, as it's a wonderful bridge between his first, Applause, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.