The Street with No Name

Mark Stevens, Barbara Lawrence and Richard Widmark pose for a publicity shot

Full of guys with nicknames like Mutt, Shivvy and Whitey, 1948’s The Street with No Name is your tough, streetwise crime drama making many claims to authentiticity. It was one of a run of “semi-documentary” movies made around this time, often by Twentieth Century-Fox, and shot out on the streets, in the bars and at the racetracks where ordinary Americans lived their lives in the boom that followed the Second World War. Don’t get too cosy is the message, delivered via stern voiceover and onscreen teleprinter in the film’s opening moments – gang activity is starting to re-assert itself now the peace has been won, it declares in so many words. If the … Read more

The Man Who Came to Dinner

Monty Woolley, Bette Davis, Ann Sheridan

The Man Who Came to Dinner claims to star Bette Davis, but this is not true. The real star – the person around whom the story revolves, who drives the plot and takes up most of the screen time – is Monty Woolley, as the eponymous “man”. He’s the hoity-toity metropolitan-elite writer who arrives in a nowheresville town along with his personal assistant Maggie (Davis), complaining loudly of having to have dinner with “mid-western barbarians”. The Stanleys (Grant Mitchell, Billie Burke) are middle-class stalwarts – he’s in ball bearings, she’s a fluttery wife – and she’s delighted that Sheridan Whiteside (Woolley) has deigned to grace them with his presence. Until Whiteside slips on the … Read more