Essay: Crime in the Streets (1956)
Almost seven decades later, what was supposed to be filth looks like almost touching innocence
The cable channel Turner Classic Movies — where, among genres like post WWII marriage comedies, 1930s movies about dancers and rich people, and 1960s sex comedies — is a great place to catch films noir. They’ll show a movie like “The Big Combo” (d. Joseph H. Lewis, 1950) (with its absolutely fantastic title theme composed by David Raksin), or “Pickup on South Street” (d. Sam Fuller, 1955), and then it stays for a month under the Movies tab.
Courtesy of that channel — and I pray that whatever economic model it’s set up with, it succeeds for the rest of my life so I can access its films — I randomly decided to watch the Don Siegel juvenile delinquent B-movie “Crime in the Streets,” which has the distinction for being the first starring movie role for actor and soon-to-be director John Cassavetes.
The script seems standard for a movie about rebellious urban teenagers, known then by the scientific-sounding phrase “juvenile delinquents” — angry young youths, usually said to be the product of “broken” homes in invariably ethnic urban neighborhoods where they formed gangs that fought with each other to protect their self-proclaimed “turf.” Because their origin was said to be related to their victimization by “urban decay”1 and its negative societal effects, they were thought by middlebrow society to be more pathetic than threatening — in other words, a case for social workers and do-gooders. In the immortal words of Stephen Sondheim, who during the same mid-1950s period was working on the lyrics for Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” music, “Hey! I’m depraved on account I’m deprived!”2
This dynamic is on full view in Don Siegel’s 1956 film “Crime in the Streets.” After the obligatory (since “Romeo and Juliet,” stories about wayward youth have begun this way) rumble with another gang, the Hornets, led by Frank (Cassavetes), huddle to talk over the fight and assess their wins and losses. Enter Ben Wagner, a burly social worker played by James Whitmore — a powerfully built actor who had by the mid-50s graduated from rugged cowboy and soldier roles to second-fiddle comedy sidekicks and occasional starring roles in B-pictures like this one. In “Crime in the Streets” it was important that the social worker character — an inherently soft character whose main tools are friendliness and words — be as tough, or tougher, than the gang kids. He has to be believably manly enough to appear unafraid at all times and even occasionally grab them by the lapels of their satin gang jackets and say things like “You think I'm going to give you a pep talk? Well, it'll never happen, kid. I know you and I know why you're on fire inside. I'm going to lay you bare. So brace yourself!”
Of course, the center of the movie is Cassavetes. He would, as he developed as an actor, further refine the electric charge that ran under his skin, but here in his first starring role much of the time he seems ready to bite off someone’s ear. Another character expresses this using a cliche — “He’s like a coiled spring” — but as viewers we understand that a gang leader is most powerful not when he bursts into violence but when his whole demeanor threatens to do so. And simultaneously, we can tell that Cassavetes the actor is telling himself the same thing, to keep it under wraps. (I’ve seen performances in which actors playing angry young men flail about, expressing instead of conserving this vital quality of a character’s presence. They’d do well to study Cassavetes here.)
For his part, Whitmore clearly realizes what he’s up against as an actor, and suitably mutes his energy for much of the film, knowing Cassavetes will outshine him. Maybe that’s why he goes through the movie with a certain sense of resignation.
But there’s another young actor who stands out. Mark Rydell plays a gang member named Lou who is flamboyantly swishy at times — without, oddly, anyone commenting on it. Soon the viewer realizes that the character’s apparently deviant behavior is intended to signal viewers that the character is a psychopath.3 When gang leader Frank puts forth a plan to kill a witness to a crime committed by a gang member, most of the gang is appalled and refuses to participate in the plot, but Rydell’s character clearly relishes the idea. At one point, as they lie in wait for the intended victim, he literally licks his lips. When they ambush the intended victim, Rydell’s character grins gleefully as he holds the victim and anticipates the fatal blow:
(Eighteen years later, in “The Long Goodbye” (1973), Rydell vividly played another psychopath, the crime boss who smashes a Coke bottle across his girlfriend’s face merely as a threatening example of what he intends to do to Eliott Gould’s Marlowe, hissing “That’s what I do to someone I love! You I don’t even like!” You’d think that Rydell might have had a long career playing scary bad guys, but since the 1960s he’s had more directing than acting credits. These include “The Reivers,” “Cinderella Liberty,” the Bette Midler rock music film “The Rose,”4 and “On Golden Pond,” for which he won a Best Director nomination in 1982.)
The other well-known actor who appears as a gang member is Sal Mineo, who had appeared the year before in the role for which he is best known, Plato in “Rebel without a Cause.” Here his pretty face earns him the monicker “Baby.” He was better known at this point than John Cassavetes and may have been the primary audience draw for what was a B-picture.
But aside from the performances — and Don Siegel’s direction, about which much has been written by others — what I found most remarkable about "Crime in the Streets" is its optimism. Yes, a grim tone dominates the film, but by the end the social worker's approach has worked. Of course, this is primarily due to Hollywood's need for a happy ending and the Hays code's insistence that malefactors must be shown to pay for their crimes. (The last shot is of Cassavetes' character willingly accompanying the social worker to the police to turn himself in, similar to the ending of the 1961 movie of "West Side Story" in which Sal Mineo shows no resistance as he's collared for shooting Riff.) The optimism I'm referring to is the notion that audiences would accept this ending -- not just because they desired a positive tone at the end but because in 1956 they would find credible the notion that juvenile delinquents could be redeemed.
Twenty years later, to reach the same conclusion, "The Wire" admitted that by the age of these characters -- 18 -- teenaged criminals would be past saving. The series had to go back to the 6th grade to find dead-end kids to rescue from a life of crime. Today the whole idea that well-meaning people could divert anyone's path from crime to ordinary worker -- or even the idea that anyone should try -- seems like a stretch.
Of course, the phrase “urban decay” was code for a host of economic and social factors that affected cities in the 1950s and 60s, many of them related to segregation and racism. During these decades this convenient phrase went unquestioned and unpacked, and this reluctance to think critically about the real factors behind the economic and physical decline of cities contributed to misunderstandings and failed attempts to address the problem with social workers and the like.
I imagine this has been written up in some study of homosexual and, more prevalent, homosexual-appearring film characters. This use of gay mannerisms to signal deviancy, hidden mental “sickness,” and outright psychopathy was rampant in film and television — think of Jonathan Harris as Dr. Smith in the 60s TV series “Lost in Space” — throughout the 1950s through the 1980s, when things began to change, and remained a shameful part of movies and TV well into this century.