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The Crowd from a different angle, a cross-section terrarium: "Nothing but divorce, scandal and murder," grouses one tenement dweller like a crabby reviewer. Lee's Do the Right Thing is born in the kaleidoscopic preamble, a Gershwinesque note sends the camera gliding from rooftop to oscillating fan to Beulah Bondi on the sidewalk "like a wet dishrag." Hell's Kitchen during the heat wave really is an inferno, "two, three thousand people, everybody sweating," the front of a brownstone accommodates Elmer Rice's proscenium. Characters lean out of windows, sit on porches and pace back and forth for a layered tessitura of gossiping, warbling, kvetching, yearning. The truculent cuckold (David Landau) argues morality with the Jewish Trotskyite (Max Montor), the wannabe Italian tenor (George Humbert) and the Scandinavian philosopher (John Qualen) squabble over American history, the forlorn housewife (Estelle Taylor) and the milkman (Russell Hopton) trigger the paroxysm that gets everybody's attention. The old order of reactionary bluster and ineffectual intellectualism holds sway, meanwhile youthful escape is embodied by the sensitive ingénue (Sylvia Sidney) and the college dreamer with a taste for Whitman (William Collier Jr.). "Some baby of a day!" The enduring bedrock (cf. Wyler's Dead End, Preminger's The Man with the Golden Arm) is a tangible melting-pot not quite cooled by ice-cream, it demands architectural fervor and receives it in King Vidor's keen montage: Close-ups in swift succession following the climactic gunshot, ascending crane shots as the heroine pushes her way through the vast swarm of onlookers, a George Bellows image half-obscured by an elevated train rattling by. A theatrical snapshot that's also a heaving Vidor vision, chafing forces at play until they spill out of the screen within the screen, and from there to Rear Window is Hitchcock's secret. With Walter Miller, Matt McHugh, Greta Granstedt, Allen Fox, and Eleanor Wesselhoeft. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |