1932 Directed by John M. Stahl
A woman's love for and devotion to a married man results in her being relegated to the "back streets" of his life.
In der Seitengasse, Histoire d'un amour, Seitenwege des Lebens, La usurpadora, La donna proibita
USANR
USA
USA
Fascinating how this is organized on the same principle of Pialat's We Won't Grow Old Together, a very diferent kind of masochistic romance, whatever joy and fullfilliment the main couple get out of its 20 year long affair remains in the cutting room floor, while the film put in first place the near misses, small ironies and arguments. We are left with the idea they were very happy together in between scenes, but we mostly watches the heartaches. There is something very intriguing about Boles performance here, he plays the part as a very straightforward romantic lead and that just makes he come off more slimy, that he is so passionate just makes his selfshiness sting more. Stahl as usual…
Back Street. From the beginning, total formal control, with icy tracking shots and closeups, scene transitions suspended in the emptiness of the last completed gesture, crowds, weather, everything one associates with mature Stahl. The story is classic Fannie Hurst, with a huge painful contrived coincidence ruining Dunne's life, and love as an immutable sentence condemning the heroine. Stahl and the writers push all of it to extremes: Boles in the middle section is hatefully selfish, and Stahl gazes at his hatefulness as Dreyer would, cutting away when the outcome is inevitable; in the last movement, he changes Boles to a gentle ally, as the trap is now closed. Really a stunning film, and the only difficulty is deciding what to do with the painful plot, and whether Stahl's perfect control is enough to take the curse off.
“This younger generation is going to the dogs.”
A Fannie Hurst-based pre-code weepy starring Irene Dunn. I dunno, this was okay if you’re really into these epic, decades spanning lost love and longing dying next to a picture of your man kinda melodramas, but I think I liked this better when Walerian Borowczyk directed it and it was called The Story of Sin.
That Stahl is one of the most talented filmmakers from the early thirties for me goes without question - it is hard to argue five consecutive masterpieces. Still, it's hard to say exactly why. Though he moves similarly with his camera to Ophuls, the latter is the more technically excellent of the two and has more to say with it. Though certain frames of this are equally pictorial as Sternberg, soft where it needs to be and angular otherwise, they never settle in as they do in Sternberg like masks over the characters, and there is nothing in his material as clearly despotic as can be found there. That Stahl never had the later career of a Sirk should not…
Ellipses abound in Back Street: after many a chance encounter (or missed connection) with John Boles's Walter, Irene Dunne's Ray jumps days or years forward in time to a future in which their relationship has matured. Dunne's masterful performance indicates everything we need to know about these gaps through the direction she casts her eyes and the tire with which she casts them, the tone in her voice and her posture gradually appearing more set in their ways as her life takes its shape. Structured through a series of encounters between Ray and the various people in her life, the narrative development is in line with the exploration of her character, and every conversation slightly alters our image of Ray's…
Between 1932 and 1935, director John M. Stahl filmed three enormously prestigious melodramas that would later be eclipsed in film history by their remakes: Back Street, Imitation of Life, and Magnificent Obsession. Stahl’s current reputation as a Douglas Sirk prototype is primarily the result of their each filming versions of the latter two films, although as storytellers the two had quite different preoccupations. Sirk’s narratives were driven by the heft of accumulated words and gestures, whereas Stahl’s characters often pass through their narratives episodically, obsessed with rebuilding instead of preserving an emotional momentum. Back Street involves a three decades long love affair in which the romance is rarely seen as pleasurable, but instead as a series of false starts and…
80/100
A beautifully tragic romantic drama. Quite ahead of its time with how naturally everything flows here. Irene Dunne is absolutely magnificent.
While watching, I was reminded of this painting. In a course I took a little over a year ago, we talked extensively about the lives of women who were mistresses around this time. Once you were a "fallen woman" there was practically no way to get out of that label. And often these women didn't know exactly what to do in this scenario, but felt ultimately helpless. Back Street is set a little after this particular era, but I think these ideas and feelings still stand.
This film does an excellent job of showing why Irene Dunne's Ray would love John Boles's Walter, and why Walter is a selfish man who should have had more awareness about how he treats those around him. Showing the film through the emotions of Ray shows the reality these women faced. Dunne plays Ray with such softness and love; I really want to watch a lot of her filmography now.
I'm legitimately unsure if Back Street purposefully made Walter (John Boles) incredibly unlikable. I think on one hand he definitely is supposed to be selfish and causing difficulties for his mistress, the protagonist Ray (a wonderful Irene Dunne), but judging by the ending, which portrays a sweet 'what could have been' fantasy of what Ray and Walter could have had if fate hadn't intercepted and kept them from marrying, I think that even with his flaws we are supposed to see Walter as Ray's true love and a good man, but based on his actions and how he treats Ray, I thought he was a terrible partner to her and he should have let her go. The film does definitely…
Pre-code melodrama about a good girl who becomes a married man’s mistress—for love, not money. It’s a nice production, and the whole thing is done with a surprisingly light touch. The guy is being unfair, of course, but he’s not a villain, and there’s no histrionics or moralizing. It’s also kind of interesting in how it shows us that Ray knows it’s not a good life, but she still runs to her man—she just loves the guy, and love isn’t logical.
It’s possible that I’m rating this one a little higher than it deserves; the subject matter was probably a lot more edgy and interesting to a 1930s audience than it will be to a 2020s one, and the ending is perhaps a bit much. I’m a sucker for Irene Dunne, though, and I always enjoy a good golden-age Hollywood production.
There is a scene here where the couple sits in their illicit hotel room, over two decades since they met and began their affair. The couple talks his career, getting older, doing things together and Boles lays his head on Dunne's lap. The scene is striking because we've seen so little of their relationship up to this point beyond tired excuses and sleazy manipulation from Boles. His character had three choices in the film, two of them honorable (at least by modern standards) and courageous (by any standard) and he picked the third. He chose to ruin a woman's life while keeping the comforts of his own rather than stay with her or let her go.
But the scene is…
The first of three film adaptations of Fannie Hurst's romance novel, Back Street is a wonderfully acted and sensitively staged melodrama that John M. Stahl directs with simplicity and frankness to match the mature material, allowing extended scenes to play out naturally for much longer than you'd expect and often staying in wide without milking the actors for closeups.
This direct shooting style, coupled with the naturalistic performances and relative freedoms of the pre-code era makes this disarmingly modern to present day eyes. Irene Dunne's heartbreaking performance as a mistress relegated to the illicit sidelines of a man's life is rich and engaging whilst John Boles' charismatic leading man charm makes him likeable but also somewhat sleazy and selfish, his…
