A Film Canon

A foundational neighbourhood drama, Street Scene details a short, sweltering period in the life of a single Manhattan block. Not only does the weather force the tenants to either open their windows or go outside, ensuring that everybody is within shouting distance of one another, but it reifies the neighbourhood, distilling it into a humid, circumambient medium that literalises the conception of the ethnic 'melting pot'. This all creates a sense of some imminent, dislocating, pervasive crisis, variously figured as movement to the suburbs, deportation, or a Communist revolution, but ultimately expressed as the central father-figure's violent rampage; a necessary, melodramatic compensation for the collapse of inside and outside - and violation of domestic sanctity - engendered by the heat. In this light, the narrative would probably have worked best in its original medium, just because the fourth wall of the theatre offers precisely the illusory assurance that this protagonist seeks. In any case, Vidor does very little to distinguish his cinematic version, with the exception of a few point of view shots, pans and the establishing depictions of Manhattan.