Sidewalks of New York (1931)

Directors:

Zion Myers
Jules White

Writers:

Eric Hatch (writer)
George Landy (writer)

Release Date:

26 September 1931 (USA)

Genre:

Comedy | Crime

Plot:

A dim-witted slumlord tries to reform a gang of urban boys (and impress an attractive young woman) by transforming their rough neighborhood into a more decent place. |

Cast

Buster Keaton	...	Homer Van Dine Harmon
Anita Page	...	Margie Kelly
Cliff Edwards	...	Poggle
Frank Rowan	...	Butch
Norman Phillips Jr.	...	Clipper Kelly (as Norman Phillips)
Frank LaRue	...	Police Sergeant
Oscar Apfel	...	The Judge
Syd Saylor	...	One Round Mulvaney
Clark Marshall	...	Lefty

Runtime:

74 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Sound System)

Company:

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM)

Trivia:

Buster Keaton's most commercially successful film to date -- to his chagrin, since he made it under protest at MGM's insistence and felt that the studio would feel justified in ignoring his artistic opinions in the future.

Movie Connections:

Featured in Tulips (1981)

Poor Buster! He looks deeply unhappy here, and no wonder . . .

Maybe this isn't the worst movie Buster Keaton ever appeared in, but it sure felt like a long, long way to spend 74 minutes, and I regret to say that the 'The End' title came as something of a relief. Buster was a truly great comedian, but watching this film is no way to appreciate his talent, especially if you've never seen his best work from the silent days. I was sorry to find a VHS copy of SIDEWALKS OF NEW YORK on the shelf with the other videos at a local library; and to make matters worse, they didn't appear to have any of Keaton's other movies, just this one. Wherever he is, Buster is wincing.

What's wrong with it? Well, where to start? The dialog is labored and witless, but feels even worse because this is an early talkie with no musical score whatsoever, so the actors exchange their clunky jokes accompanied only by the low hiss of the soundtrack. Buster has been cast as a dim-witted millionaire, a role which suited him in silent movies but which feels all wrong in a talkie because, let's face it, the man didn't speak in the cultivated tones of a moneyed person (I'm trying to phrase this delicately). Buster Keaton was a brilliant comic artist but he was not well educated. His voice was harsh and his grammar was poor, and he tended to impose his own phrasing on the dialog he was given, so he'd wind up saying things like "That don't feel good." He doesn't sound like a millionaire, and when he's given such bogus things to say as "You strike me as a trifle unbalanced" he sounds even less so. Furthermore, this character's dimness lacks the distinctive eccentricity Buster displayed in his best silent comedies: he's just stupid. And, worse still, MGM has placed Buster's annoyingly dim-witted millionaire in the middle of a sentimentalized Lower East Side ghetto, full of picturesque Little Tough Guys with nicknames like Baloney. The real-world euphemism for "Baloney" sums up this script quite succinctly.

Even given Buster's miscasting and the phony setting, there was still the potential for decent comedy if the genuinely dim-witted millionaires who ran MGM had allowed their star to develop some of his characteristic set-pieces --but no, it looks like this thing was cranked out in a hurry, and the exquisitely funny moments we remember from the silent features have been reduced to painful and mercilessly repetitive bits in which Buster gets punched, trips, flails, drops things, clunks his head, breaks more stuff, and falls over again.

Even Keaton's weakest comedies usually have a scene or two worth seeing (except for the abysmal feature he made in Mexico in the '40s: all prints of that one should be seized with fireplace tongs and tossed into a raging furnace), but in SIDEWALKS OF NEW YORK the pickings are pretty slim. There's a modestly funny sequence in which Buster attempts to carve a roast duck, and another in which he and Cliff Edwards mess up an amateur stage performance, but any halfway decent comic could have performed these scenes. On balance, there's no compelling reason to see this movie, and I'd suggest that the 74 minutes it takes to view it could be more profitably and enjoyably spent watching any of Buster's silent features.