Side Street (RKO, 1929)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, January 7) Turner Classic Movies started their “Star of the Month” tribute to George Raft via a night of films including the 1932 Scarface (his star-making role as the second male lead to Paul Muni); Night After Night, also from 1932 and best known today as Mae West’s screen debut (“She stole everything but the cameras,” Raft reportedly said of her, though TCM host Alicia Malone disputed the authenticity of that quote); Fritz Lang’s 1938 quirky combination of gangster film and musical, You and Me (which I watched and didn’t like as well as I had previously on https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2014/12/you-and-me-paramount-1938.html); and the main one I was interested in since I’d never seen it before. It was called Side Street, it was made at RKO in 1929 (and looked it, with all the flaws of an early talkie not directed by a visionary like Milestone, Wyler, Vidor, DeMille, Capra or Hitchcock: long dialogue exchanges in interior sets and slow-paced line deliveries), and it was a novelty vehicle for all three Moore brothers: Tom, Owen and Matt. (Owen Moore had briefly been Mary Pickford’s first husband until she broke up with him to marry Douglas Fairbanks.) It’s the first film Raft made that actually survives complete (his two previous films, both for Warner Brothers: Texas Guinan’s vehicle Queen of the Night Clubs and the mega-musical Gold Diggers on Broadway, exist only in fragmentary form) even though he isn’t listed in the credits. He plays dancer Georgie Ames, who appears in one sequence: a scene in the private home of gangster Barney Muller (Owen Moore) during which he does a hot dance number to a song called “Take a Look at Her Now,” sung by June Clyde and danced by Raft and a small six-girl chorus line. Raft shows enough agility on the dance floor one can see why five years later Paramount decided that he and Carole Lombard could be their answer to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. My husband Charles and I both proclaimed that scene the most exciting and entertaining part of the whole movie!

Side Street was directed by Malcolm St. Clair, a filmmaker that for some reason has a good “rep” as a director – writing about his film The “Canary” Murder Case (1929), which exists only in a revamped sound version with talking scenes directed by Frank Tuttle, William K. Everson said that, “though [St. Clair was] a director specializing in sophisticated comedy, [he] was a master at making silent films with a minimum of subtitles that told essentially ‘dialogue’ scenes in totally visual terms” – which is thoroughly belied by the films of his I’ve seen. St. Clair is best known today for the four Laurel and Hardy movies he directed at 20th Century-Fox in the 1940’s that range from the moderately amusing (Jitterbugs, 1943) to the frankly terrible (The Big Noise, 1944). Side Street has a typically convoluted set of writing credits for an early talkie: St. Clair for the original story; John Russell for its adaptation; George O’Hara and Jane Murfin, screenplay; Eugene Walter for “dialogue”; and O’Hara alone for intertitles, presumably for an alternate silent version for the handful of theatres that still hadn’t wired for sound. The gimmick that sold this movie was that the three male leads were not only real-life brothers and the sons of Irish immigrants, they played brothers on screen, and the original posters read “MOORE” in big letters with their first names in much smaller print above. Their parents are retired police officer Tom O’Farrell (Frank Sheridan) and his wife Nora (Emma Dunn). The O’Farrell sons are Jimmy (Tom Moore), who’s followed in his dad’s footsteps and become a cop – he tells us all how proud he is of his police uniform, but he doesn’t stay in it long because he’s soon promoted to plainclothes detective – John (Matt Moore), who’s become an emergency-room doctor; and Dennis (Owen Moore), who’s become sensationally successful at some business which he doesn’t tell the family about. Jimmy, John and their parents are suspicious enough of Dennis’s activities they either reluctantly accept or actually refuse the gifts he proffers them, though a reference in the dialogue informs us that Dennis paid John’s way through medical school.

The O’Farrells are having a family dinner and are gratified that Dennis has deigned to show up for the first time in two years, but the dinner is interrupted by the sounds of gunfire outside the O’Farrells’ apartment building. It turns out the shots were from a professional hit carried out at the behest of local gangster Barney Muller, and at first we think that Dennis is a well-paid lieutenant in Muller’s gang. Eventually we learn that Dennis [spoiler alert!] is Barney Muller, a bootleg liquor kingpin who, with his assistants Silk Ruffo (Arthur Housman) and Maxse Kimball (Charles Byer), is plotting a takeover of the local booze business. Jimmy has just proposed marriage to Kathleen Doyle (Kathryn Perry), who’s hoping that his expected promotion on the police force will allow them to marry at long last and give up her career as a manicurist. Unfortunately, Kathleen is inveigled to go to one of Barney Muller’s wild parties by her friend Bunny (Mildred Harris, first ex-wife of Charlie Chaplin), and though she’s never seen Muller before and therefore doesn’t recognize him as her soon-to-be brother-in-law, there’s a scrape at the party. Two men badly wound each other in a fight and one is sufficiently hurt he has to stay the night at Muller’s stunning Art Deco apartment – and of course the doctor who’s called in on the case is John O’Farrell. John insists that he will have to report the incident to the police, and refuses Silk’s and Maxse’s offer of a bribe to ignore it instead. Meanwhile, the police department has at last made Jimmy a detective, and for his first case they’ve assigned him the task of capturing Barney Muller and bringing him to justice at long last. Jimmy receives a tip that an informant in Muller’s gang is willing to meet with him privately to give him the evidence he needs to bust Muller – only it’s a trap (big surprise – not!).

At the next big dinner party for the new year’s holiday (the film starts in late October and moves steadily towards the end of the year), Dennis finally realizes, based on info he got from a gang member who eavesdropped on Jimmy and Kathleen at a Chinese restaurant, that the man he’s ordered a hit on is his own brother. Dennis frantically calls Silk to tell him to cancel the hit, but he’s unable to reach him in time – and St. Clair’s direction, hitherto workmanlike, suddenly develops a spine as he builds the suspense over whether Dennis a.k.a. Barney Muller can call off the hit in time to save his brother. Ultimately, after a few futile phone calls, Dennis shows up at the scene of the hit and sacrifices his own life to save Jimmy’s – his gang members shoot him by mistake – and Dennis is mortally wounded, but takes long enough to die to give Jimmy a long, apologetic confession and tell their parents he’s just away on yet another extended long-term “business trip) and they should tell their folks that Dennis might not come back … ever. Side Street is an incredibly frustrating film because the parts of it that do work – particularly the antagonism between the brothers that already seems to be present even when we don’t know enough of the story to read and follow the plot – make you root for the parts that don’t. There are some technical glitches, including sound that at the start of the musical number becomes more strident, annoying and shrill – but that’s not the real problem with Side Street. The real problem with Side Street is that there’s a lot more potential drama in the story than St. Clair, his writing committee and the actors achieved in the film we have. It could have been a film for the ages – especially if RKO could have somehow wangled James Cagney from Warners to play Dennis (the part is clearly similar to the one Cagney would play in his star-making film, Public Enemy, two years later) – with more sensitive writing and a more powerful delineation of the character struggles between the three brothers and their realization that one of them is a dastardly crook. As it stands, though, Side Street is little more than a curiosity, brilliant when George Raft and company are on the screen dancing but all too stuck in studio interiors, so much so that when Jimmy and John go outside to check out the first murder about 20 minutes into the movie’s 74-minute running time, I said, “We finally got out of that damned overstuffed dining room!” And just why this movie is called Side Street when there don’t seem to be any side streets in it is yet another of its mysteries.