Side Street

Anthony Mann's 1950 film was made in noir's most productive period and uses the streets of New York almost as documentary. A young postal messenger about to become a father impulsively steals an envelope from the office of a corrupt attorney; what he assumed held a few hundred dollars contains thirty thousand. When he decides to give the money back, things go wrong, and that is only the start. Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell had played together two years earlier in They Live by Night; Mann takes that relationship of innocence somewhere darker here. The final chase was shot in the early morning on empty Manhattan streets and counts among the genre's best-known sequences. The idea at the centre is that one small mistake can turn a life completely. Who it's for: viewers interested in classic noir, Anthony Mann's work and street images of New York in 1950. Who it's not for: anyone who will find the tension of a protagonist's self-inflicted trouble wearing, or who counts a moralising narrator as dated.