By David in TN
Thursday, July 6, 2017 at 8:34:00 P.M. EDT
Immediately after starring in They Live by Night, Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell were teamed again in Side Street (1950), directed by Anthony Mann, which runs on TCM at 11:30 a.m. ET, Friday July 7. They play a financially strapped couple in which Granger's character is a part-time mail carrier.
While delivering the mail to a crooked lawyer's office, he steals a large sum of money he'd seen placed there.
Expecting to find a few hundred dollars, Granger finds it was 30 grand. The usual Noir predicament results. A hood employed by the lawyer is played by James Craig, who was thought to be a replacement for Clark Gable when Gable went off to WW II.
Funny thing, a 1950 New York street hood is played by an actor in his late 30's, born in Nashville, Tennessee, and a graduate of Rice University. Oh, wait. A street hood in a 21st Century Law and Order episode could be like this.
It was filmed on location and shows what 1950 Manhattan looked like. In my opinion, Side Street is better than They Live by Night.
3 comments:
It would be so nice if you could announce these films noir within more advance notice-- by the time I see your blog post, it's usually too late to catch the movie, and TCM does not keep many in rotation in their "On Demand" section.
I usually agree with your reviews.
I really appreciate the film noir diversion & the truth exposure of this site.Sadly,our world has become darker than any film noir.
TCM's Film Noir of the week for Sunday, July 9, is T-Men (1948), showing at 10 am ET. This is another Anthony Mann film noir.
It's a documentary style police thriller with undercover Treasury agents infiltrating a counterfeiting ring. Having undercover law enforcement officers was a common noir trope.
Dennis O'Keefe plays the main character, a "T-Man" pretending to be a former member of a Detroit gang called "The River Gang," probably based on the real life Purple Gang.
Charles McGraw plays a dangerous hood, a characterization McGraw did very well. Other times he played a cop.
Many years ago, when my brother started out as a lawyer, he was assigned to defend a counterfeiter in federal court. He negotiated a plea deal for a prison sentence. The counterfeiter was satisfied and thanked my brother. He didn't mind going to prison for a few years.
My brother said this counterfeiter was a scary individual.
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