The Street (1923) - Karl Grune

Long on my list of films to see I picked this up at the local library in Springfield IL of all places (I'm here for two days). Being a VHS from Video Yesteryear you know you're going to get a well meaning awful transfer. The foreward promised us that this was going to be shown at its correct frame rate, but the deterioration of the negative, not to mention the VHS tape itself was made in 1985 can't provide for much optical entertainment. What is important is the film, and this is a landmark in German film. This gave birth effectively to the street film which reached something of a perfection in Pabst's Joyless Street made two years later. Going along with the general trend in German film at that time Grune uses a very sparse amount of intertitles and relies on visual cues for most of the picture. The only downside is that this film's narrative isn't quite as self explanatory as we would like and its somewhat hard to follow what's going on. Some spectacular lighting and shadows, it certainly fits well within the parameters of the expressionst film.

The plot centers around a middle aged man who goes into something of a mid-life crisis and decides to leave his wife and kids to head into a life in the city. Believing this will break his monotony and enjoying the glamor of the streets he finds himself falling for a prostitute, then losing all his money to her pimps, and finally getting arrested for a murder they committed. Now there is something of a happy ending to all of this but the theme would be replayed again. The most famous film to follow a similar premise is surely The Blue Angel so this film might seem a great juxtaposition to that. Of course this film has no Marlene Dietrich and no Sternberg, but it is effective in what it does. I do long for a respectable Kino restoration of it, or god willing a theatrical re-release. Certainly an important film but as many of this period in German film the style does weigh a little heavier than the substance.