Side Street (1950)

(On Cable TV, February 2022) If there’s a single lesson to be learned from film noir, it’s that the path to damnation begins with a single slip, a mild impulse, a passing desire for something you don’t have. Side Street exemplifies this slippery slope better than most noirs in how it presents our everyman protagonist (Farley Granger) as an out-of-luck man with a past-time job and an expectant wife. When he’s got the opportunity to take a wad of cash, well, the soon-to-be-born baby will need clothes and food, right? From that single deviation comes escalating trouble, as the money belonged to people who don’t take a significant loss lightly and become hell-bent on recovering it. But even making things right isn’t simple, not when everyone has plans for the money and the intended recipients don’t have much trust in law and order. Before long, our protagonist is on the run in New York City, suspected of murder by the police and targeted by the mob. It climaxes in a car chase than ends on a surprisingly modern touch: a car flipping over a curb. The ending is far more satisfying than you’d think from the grim nature of the rest of the film. Slickly directed by Anthony Mann (who’d then go to make a well-known run of westerns with James Stewart) and imbued with the atmosphere of NYC, Side Street is a solid film noir that does a great job illustrating the moral framework of the genre. Kids: don’t do crime.