Back Street (film)

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Movie
German title Side ways of life
Original title Back Street
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1932
length 86 minutes
Rod
Director John M. Stahl
script Gladys Lehmann
production John M. Stahl for
Universal Pictures
music David Broekman ,
James Dietrich
camera Karl friend
cut Milton Carruth
occupation

Back Street (alternative title: Sideways of Life ) is the film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Fannie Hurst from 1932 with Irene Dunne and John Boles in the leading roles. The film became Universal Pictures studio's biggest financial success to date and saved the financially troubled company from bankruptcy.

action

The young Ray Schmidt lives with her father and stepmother. She is about to get engaged to Kurt Schendler. Chance brings her together with the aspiring businessman Walter D. Saxel. Their romance ends in a misunderstanding and Walter, deeply disappointed, marries another woman. Five years later Walter is already deputy director of a bank and fate brings the two young people together again. Ray, who herself works successfully in the secretariat of a financial investor, immediately falls for the charm of Walter. On his advice, she resigns her position and her apartment in order to live only for Walter. As his mistress, Ray is forced to live a life in secret. Walter pays her a monthly pension of $ 200 and rents a tiny apartment on a side street for her. For the next 25 years, Ray's existence was limited to the monotonous wait for Walter and the few hours together. When Walter dies, Ray is left penniless and dies of desperation.

background

The career of Irene Dunne began spectacularly with her appearance in the Western Cimarron for which they at the Oscars in 1931 , a nomination for Best Actress was given. Her studio RKO was not able to provide the actress with similarly good engagements in the following period. In the internal studio hierarchy, Dunne was way behind Ann Harding and Constance Bennett, on par with Helen Twelvetrees and Mary Astor . As a rule, Dunne therefore had to be content with roles in less ambitious films.

In 1932 she had a second chance to establish herself as a star when the Universal Pictures studio gave her the female lead in the film adaptation of the popular novel Back Street by the successful author Fannie Hurst . Immediately before that, Irene Dunne had worked on the film adaptation of another book by the author, Symphony of Six Million . In the wake of the global economic crisis and the resulting drop in weekly audience numbers from 1929 to 1932 by more than 50%, Universal got into severe financial turmoil. In addition to the horror film genre, the studio also had high hopes for a series of films that were specifically tailored to the needs of female viewers. In order to better address this target group, the script changed the original character of the heroine in Back Street to a considerable extent to make him more personable. In the literary source, Ray is an extremely passive woman with no pronounced intellectual abilities. She spends years and years in a cheap apartment without any interest in the outside world and waits for the few visits from her lover. In the film adaptation, she becomes a well-bred young lady who freely chooses an existence in the shade, as she calls it herself. Renouncing a life of her own is a self-made decision that she makes with full awareness of the consequences. The film also emphasizes how deep and honest the feelings of Walter are, who keeps talking to Ray about his problems and worries and who finds a soul mate in her. Nevertheless, the film does not clarify the final reasons why Ray voluntarily chooses to live in the shadow of a married man and repeatedly lets the chance slip by to marry himself.

The studio made a virtue of this need and deliberately put the heroine's unclear motive at the center of its advertising campaign by issuing the slogan:

"Waiting - always waiting - in the shadow of a backyard ... longing for a man she loves ... asking for nothing, receiving nothing - and still content to sacrifice everything for him. WHY?"

Back Street proved to be popular at the box office and ended up becoming the most successful film for the studio in years. The material was filmed again in 1941 with Margaret Sullavan and Charles Boyer and even saw a third film adaptation in 1961 under the title Endstation Paris with Susan Hayward and John Gavin .

In the period that followed, the basic premise set the style for a whole series of similar films, in which the lover of a husband makes every imaginable sacrifice just to keep his luck. Other examples are Forbidden with Barbara Stanwyck, also from 1932, or The Life of Vergie Winters with Ann Harding from 1934. In contrast to these long-suffering lovers, Kay Francis preferred to play self-confident women who would not let their lovers constrict them and next to them Relationship pursued careers, so in Street of Women and I Loved a Woman , in which Francis puts the all too possessive Edward G. Robinson in his place.

For Irene Dunne, who in later years referred to the film as trash , the success brought a whole series of comparable roles, which she presented as the ideal image of the long-suffering woman who endured every misery and earned her the nickname Lady Gandhi of the Screen . In her own words, her career was built on tears.

Together with John Boles, Irene Dunne played again in 1934 in The Age of Innocence , the film adaptation of the novel by Edith Wharton .

Reviews

Most of the critics criticized the unoriginal initial situation and the staging of the material, which was perceived as bland and boring. Irene Dunne received praise for her restrained performance.

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ^ Charles Stumpf: ZaSu Pitts: The Life and Career . McFarland, Jefferson 2010, ISBN 978-0-7864-4620-9 , pp. 53 (English, limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed on November 19, 2019]): “Waiting - always waiting - in the shadows of the back streets… longing for the man she loves… asking nothing, receiving nothing - yet content to sacrifice all for him. WHY? "