{"id":32226,"date":"2015-09-01T07:03:36","date_gmt":"2015-09-01T12:03:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/?p=32226"},"modified":"2020-05-16T15:16:46","modified_gmt":"2020-05-16T20:16:46","slug":"sometimes-a-reframing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/2015\/09\/01\/sometimes-a-reframing\/","title":{"rendered":"Sometimes a reframing…"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Axe<\/a><\/p>\n

Side Street<\/strong> (1949)<\/em>.<\/p>\n

DB here:<\/p>\n

…just knocks you out.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt can only be fully recommended to those who have a deep and morbid interest in crime.\u201d Snooty judgments like this made Bosley Crowther the critical joke of generations. Today film lovers wear their deep and morbid interest in crime as a badge of honor. Especially when the crime is covered\u00a0by Anthony Mann.<\/p>\n

In Side Street<\/em> (1949), Joe Norson has lost his business and works part-time as a postman while he and his wife await their first child. Having come back from war and wanting to give Ellen a good life, Joe is tempted to steal money he\u2019s seen lying around the office of a crooked attorney. He grabs a folder containing what he thinks is a couple of hundred dollars; instead, it holds $30,000 of blackmail money. The woman who chiseled the money out of a businessman turns up dead, and the police are investigating. When Joe naively loses the money and sets out to recover it, he\u2019s drawn into the murder, tracked by the gang, and targeted as a prime suspect by the police.<\/p>\n

Variety<\/em>\u00a0and Crowther chided the screenwriters for a sketchy\u00a0plot, and the complaint is somewhat fair. Joe is an unusually weak protagonist. He botches both his theft and his cover-up, leaving a trail that\u2019s easy for the killer and the cops to trace. Because Joe is fairly passive and on the run, and he has to follow his clues in a fairly linear manner, and his schemes to fight back come to almost nothing, the action is filled out by scenes of the gang and the police tracking him.<\/p>\n

What partly compensates for the plot\u2019s problems is the bold location shooting. As part of the semi-documentary trend of the period (the film opens and closes with worldly-wise voice-over narration from the Homicide Captain), Side Street<\/em>\u00a0presents itself as a story rooted in urban reality. And indeed it\u00a0is a triumph of location shooting. The characters visit\u00a0a bank, Greenwich Village, Bellevue Hospital, and many neighborhoods. The final chase, with Joe trapped in a taxi with the killer and pursued by three cop cars, is a tour de force of geometrical shot designs that make city canyons part of the drama.<\/p>\n

\"Buildings<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Buildings<\/a><\/p>\n

Mann has long been praised for integrating the forces of nature\u00a0into the action of his Westerns, but this film shows his flair for cityscapes too.<\/p>\n

Given the constraints of location filming, the freedom\u00a0of Mann’s camera\u00a0is all the more arresting. This time he\u2019s not working with\u00a0John Alton, the cinematographer most in tune with his baroque sense of light and framing. But Mann still gets punchy results from ace DP Joseph Ruttenberg. There is nothing quite so staggering as Alton\u2019s framing of Claire Trevor and the cabin clock in Raw Deal<\/em>, let alone the Grand Guignol imagery of Reign of Terror<\/em><\/a>, but Ruttenberg does give us plenty of nicely dense compositions, exploiting the verticals and apertures available on location. There’s also a neatly discreet shot of a revolver peeking out from behind a door in distant long-shot; the shadow supplies the telltale shape.<\/p>\n

\"Shop<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Revolver<\/a><\/p>\n

Mann is a post-Kane<\/em> filmmaker. Like nearly every Forties director of dramas, he learned from Toland and Welles that it\u2019s fun to shove the action into the viewer\u2019s face<\/a>. The high angles of the city are counterbalanced by steep, low setups both inside and outside. Mann never met a “Russian angle,”\u00a0or a ceiling, he didn\u2019t like.<\/p>\n

\"Digging<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Ceiling<\/a><\/p>\n

When the lens is more or less straight on, the frame can be tight and actors\u2019 heads are packed into the frame like cantaloupes in a supermarket display.<\/p>\n

\"Cops<\/a><\/p>\n

In motion, the camera isn\u2019t safe. Actors rush past the lens or thrust themselves straight at it.<\/p>\n

\"Phone<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Phone<\/a><\/p>\n

When Joe flings himself\u00a0out of a car, prepare to find yourself in the middle of traffic, with a truck rushing at you (a stunt done in real space, not against a back-projection).<\/p>\n

\"Taxi<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Taxi<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet even studio-shot back-projections\u00a0retain vigorous,\u00a0immersive depth.<\/p>\n

\"Taxi<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Taxi<\/a><\/p>\n

Mann\u2019s visual dynamism, complete with aggressive foreground and distant depth, hits a high point in the dialogue-free scene that\u2019s the topic of today\u2019s sermonette. Joe hasn\u2019t planned\u00a0to steal the money, but circumstances lure him on. The lawyer\u2019s out of his office, and the door has been left ajar. Joe earlier saw the money put into a file drawer, and as Joe prepares to slide the mail under the door, the cabinet stands temptingly in the foreground.<\/p>\n

\"Cabinet<\/a><\/p>\n

He impulsively heads for the cabinet, pauses before it, and then\u2014thanks to an abrasive cut\u2014grabs the handle violently. The drawer is locked. He recovers himself, almost grateful that he’s blocked, and he lurches out the door. No theft today, apparently.<\/p>\n

Outside, Joe seems to be going on his way, but the\u00a0long shot shows a barrier, like a railing in the foreground. It seems about as innocuous as the car hood we saw when Joe went in the building.<\/p>\n

\"Corridor<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"St<\/a><\/p>\n

As Joe approaches, the camera tilts up to follow him and he stops, staring. He\u2019s framed \u00a0before what\u2019s now revealed as a fire axe.<\/p>\n

\"Corridor<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\"Axe<\/a><\/p>\n

Another director\u2014Hitchcock, perhaps\u2014would have handled this with a medium-shot of Joe leaving and looking off, followed by an optical POV shot of the axe. Or you could show him leaving in the foreground, with the axe mounted in the distance; he glances back, sees it, and decides to go fetch\u00a0it.<\/p>\n

By contrast, Mann\u2019s approach yields a sharp one-two snap: Joe approaches\/ he stops. We see the axe, but almost by accident; the reframing is just following Joe\u2019s movement. And we don\u2019t need to see any more of the thing but its distinctive shape\u2014its pure axe-ness given in silhouette. Rudolf Arnheim, who always advocated pictorial simplicity<\/a>, would be pleased.<\/p>\n

After a beat, in\u00a0an abrupt cut, Joe grabs the thing.<\/p>\n

\"Joe<\/a><\/p>\n

He lunges down the corridor back to the office and starts to break into the cabinet. Now his violent adventure begins.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Crime I\u2019m not so sure of, but with bodacious filmmaking like this, who wouldn\u2019t acquire a deep and morbid interest in cinema?<\/p>\n

\n

It’s been too long since our last “Sometimes…” entry. For the others see:\u00a0\u00a0\u201cSometimes a shot . . .\u201d<\/a> and \u201cSometimes two shots . . .\u201d<\/a> and “Sometimes a jump cut…”<\/a><\/p>\n

Bosley Crowther’s review of Side Street<\/em> is “The Screen: New Crime Story,” New York Times<\/em> (24 March 1950), p. 29.The Variety<\/em> reviews, more or less identical, are in Daily Variety<\/em> (22 December 1949), p. 3, and Variety<\/em> (28 December 1949), p. 6. The Times<\/em> covers the shooting of the climactic chase in\u00a0“Taxi Acrobatics in Wall Street”\u00a0(8 May 1949), X5.<\/p>\n

For more on the postwar cinema’s love affair with vigorous depth staging and depth of field, see this entry on Bergman and Antonioni<\/a>, this entry on Toland and depth of field,<\/a> this entry on Manny Farber’s objections to Huston<\/a>, this entry on dense staging<\/a>, and this entry on Wyler’s staging in The Little Foxes<\/em><\/a>. For much more see Parts Three and Four of our Film History: An Introduction<\/em>, \u00a0Chapter 27\u00a0of The Classical Hollywood Cinema,\u00a0<\/em>and Chapter 6\u00a0of On the History of Film Style<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Lamp<\/a><\/p>\n

Side Street.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Side Street (1949). DB here: …just knocks you out. \u201cIt can only be fully recommended to those who have a deep and morbid interest in crime.\u201d Snooty judgments like this made Bosley Crowther the critical joke of generations. Today film lovers wear their deep and morbid interest in crime as a badge of honor. Especially […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[224,163,60,59,57,285],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1940s-hollywood","category-directors-mann","category-technique-cinematography","category-technique-staging","category-hollywood-aesthetic-traditions","category-sometimes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32226"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44823,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32226\/revisions\/44823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.davidbordwell.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}