City Streets

Gary Cooper was a long way from his craggy, motionless Mount Rushmore phase when he made City Streets in 1931. In fact he still looked boyish enough to play a character called Kid, a fairground worker who gets caught up with some gangsters, finds he has a taste for it and then lives to regret it. It’s a Dashiell Hammett story and it is typically Hammett – complex – with two interwoven fields of play, the romantic and the criminal, each providing the obstacle to the smooth progress of the other, before the two eventually switch about. So Cooper and co-star Sylvia Sidney are required to cover a lot of emotional ground. He’s the … Read more