Tenement Life Inspires Film Bonanza Ranging From Musicals to Melodramas

Ted Tetzlaff’s “The Window” (1949) will be shown on the opening night of “Tenement Stories: From Immigrants to Bohemians,” a series organized under the auspices of Film Forum and the Lower East Side’s Tenement Museum. The curator of the program, Bruce Goldstein, will appear after the screening with the museum’s president, Annie Pollard, to discuss Tetzlaff’s adaptation of a short story by Cornel Woolrich, “The Boy Cried Murder.”The author’s name should ring a bell for movie buffs: Woolrich’s “It Had To Be Murder,” a story published in the February 1942 edition of Dime Detective Magazine, served as the inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” (1954). The Hitchcock connection is more than tangential: Tetzlaff worked alongside Hitchcock as cinematographer on “Notorious” (1946). He must have been taking notes on the set: “The Window” is cleverly choreographed and suitably suspenseful. It’s a find.The story is based on Aesop’s fable about a boy with a propensity for false alarms that ultimately proves dire when real danger is present. In “The Window,” it’s a precocious Tommy Woodry (Bobby Driscoll) whose imaginative flights of fancy are the puzzlement of his knockabout buddies and the worry of his parents, Ed and Mary (respectively Arthur Kennedy and Barbara Hale). Dad works the graveyard shift and mom takes care of business at home. Tommy is a good kid, but enough already with those stories …When a hot summer night proves particularly sticky, Bobby takes his pillow up a rung or two on the fire escape in the hopes of catching a cool breeze. What he gets instead is a ringside seat to robbery and murder. When Bobby tells of the nefarious doings done by the upstairs neighbors, the Kellermans (Paul Stewart and Ruth Roman), he’s punished by dad, patronized by the cops, and threatened with a visit to a shrink. The only people who believe him are the Kellermans — which is, of course, the rub of this nimble noir.“Under your tenement roofs is real life — the very stuff of which the greatest books are written.” That sentiment, coined by a founding editor of The Jewish Daily Forward, Abraham Cahan, serves as a guiding principle for a raft of comedies, tragedies, thrillers, musicals, melodramas and the stray documentary. A significant number of the films date from the first half of the 20th century — in 1900, we are told, 75 percent of Manhattan lived in tenements — with the most recent feature being Ronald Brownstein’s “Frownland” (2007).An abundant selection of Hollywood mainstays detail the bad decisions that can arise from impoverished circumstances, what with the likes of William Wyler’s “Dead End” (1937), John Huston’s “The Asphalt Jungle” (1950), and Jules Dassin’s “The Naked City” (1948). The latter will be accompanied by a short documentary by Mr. Goldstein, “Uncovering the Naked City” (2020), in which he tracks down the hundred-plus New York City locations used in the Dassin film.Harold Lloyd in ‘Speedy’ 1928. Via Film ForumWould that a similar venture by Mr. Goldstein, “In The Footsteps of Speedy” (2015), were being shown alongside Ted Wilde’s “Speedy” (1928), Harold Lloyd’s last silent film and one of the bespectacled comedian’s best efforts. The plot has something or other to do with the last horse-drawn carriage in Manhattan, but the reasons to tune in are beautifully executed gags, a guest appearance by Babe Ruth, and exemplary use of New York City locations, including a wild and woolly trip to Coney Island.Otherwise, Jimmy Cagney woos Loretta Young in Roy Del Ruth’s “Taxi!” (1932), Martin Scorsese interviews his parents in “Italianamerican” (1974), and Buster Keaton lets himself get upstaged by a monkey in “The Cameraman” (1928). A cadre of Yiddish-speaking performers will be on hand to do some shtick after the showing of Edward Sloman’s “His People” (1925), as will other guests who will bring context and color to an engaging and wide-ranging program.

Tenement Life Inspires Film Bonanza Ranging From Musicals to Melodramas

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