Paramount's Turn At The Gang Cycle

Rouben Mamoulian Directs Sylvia Sidney and Gary Cooper

City Streets (1931) Back From Hibernation

A sort of arty gangster film from Paramount and cheeky director Rouben Mamoulian, who'd try anything anyone said couldn't be done. He's more conventional here than with previous Applause, or later ones for that matter, so City Streets, which ventures little onto streets in fact, must go begging in comparison to high-powered Warner pics it competed with. Streets is really more like "crook" melodramas done from dawn of talkies before Robinson and Cagney began juicing them up, when Paid or Chaney's Unholy Three remake spoke for screen criminality. City Streets might have struck a more forceful chord had it come out a year before. Gang stuff was playing much rougher by 1931, the beer racket a mere launch to greater violence rather than City Streets' end in itself. Sylvia Sidney is goal-bound for stashing a mobster's gun, boyfriend Gary Cooper following her into the racket to effect a release. Sidney got the part here that Clara Bow had hoped for, but important properties were past the No-Longer-It Girl, and SS was besides a GF to Para production chief B.P. Schulberg, thus her push past Bow. Cooper is a languid lead until last reel's showdown. City Streets does, in fact, play at times like one of Jo Sternberg's gang pics that had been Para-popular since Underworld. Was Mamoulian guided toward inspect of these before starting City Streets? TCM licensed multiple runs of this otherwise scarce one and got a beautiful transfer.