“When you’re in New York, you’re in the whole world. There’s nothing you can’t find in New York,” Allan Dwan told interviewer Joe Adamson in 1979. “I always had a great respect for it. It’s a dirty place, it’s this and that, but it’s the place.”
East Side, West Side was Dwan’s valedictory ode to the city where for five years he had made most of his films, reveling in a degree of unsupervised independence that came with being three thousand miles from Hollywood. He captured New York in a moment of vaulting optimism and feverish growth two years before the Wall Street crash, when it had “all the iridescence of the beginning of the world,” as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his achingly elegiac 1932 essay “My Lost City.” The film’s introductory shot panning across the Brooklyn Bridge is familiar from the stock openings of countless movies set in the Big Apple, but Dwan swiftly embeds us in a real place, with a fresh wind blowing, rail floats churning up the river, and pennants of steam fluttering from the tops of skyscrapers.
In 1922, using his clout as one of the industry’s top directors, Dwan had persuaded Famous Players-
Lasky to let him work at their East Coast studio in Astoria, New York. Having cut his teeth as a director turning out hundreds of one- and two-reel westerns starting in 1911, he always remained nostalgic for the freedom of those pioneer days, when as he later told Kevin Brownlow there was no interference from above and directors were in full control of their companies. Gloria Swanson, with whom Dwan made a string of zesty comedies like Manhandled (1924) and Stage Struck (1925), described the Astoria studio in its heyday as “full of free spirits, defectors, refugees” fleeing Hollywood’s studio-bound regimentation. Dwan gleefully used the city as his backlot, later boasting of recruiting real gangsters as extras for an underworld ball in Big Brother (1923) and shooting at nightclubs and theaters using only available light for scenes in Night Life of New York (1925). Sadly, both are considered lost films.
In 1926, Dwan signed with Fox Film Productions, and shortly afterward it was announced that Fox would reopen its New York studio at Tenth Avenue and 55th Street, allowing him to continue working on the East Coast. East Side, West Side was the director’s fourth and last film for Fox under this contract, and the studio subsequently shuttered their New York operations. Dwan himself adapted a best-selling novel by Felix Riesenberg, a seafaring man whose background in the Merchant Marine, nautical education, and engineering color the story. Fox’s studio was taken over by an enormous, detailed set representing a Lower East Side “ghetto” street, but other scenes were filmed on locations ranging from South Street Seaport to a construction site for the IND subway being built under 8th Avenue, to the swanky Warwick Hotel on 54th Street, built by William Randolph Hearst in 1926 with a specially-designed suite for Marion Davies. A studio publicity sheet trumpeted the fact that the humble South Street birthplace of New York Governor Al Smith could be seen in the film. Smith’s campaign song for his three failed presidential bids was the lilting waltz, “The Sidewalks of New York” (“East side, west side, all around the town ….”)
Manhattan with its shimmering spires and roiling slums is not merely a setting in the film, nor is it simply, as the cliché goes, a character. Dwan had a way of mapping his stories onto physical spaces, merging two meanings of “plot”: a narrative and a diagram of an area. With its title, East Side, West Side introduces a geographic split between the two cities of the rich and the poor, and throughout the film symmetries and binaries abound: two shipwrecks, two families, two fiancées. The film opens and closes with John Breen (George O’Brien) facing the bristling skyline, but he starts as an outsider gazing from a river barge at the fortress-like city from which he is shut out, and he ends up surveying his domain from a penthouse terrace in the heart of the metropolis. In between, he pinballs through the city: a wild child washed up on the shores of Manhattan, he hides in a Lower East Side basement and perches on the floating walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge; descends to the netherworld of a subway tunnel, and leans from a high window to watch a tickertape parade for Charles Lindbergh. (Dwan incorporated newsreel footage of the parade celebrating the pilot’s transatlantic “hop,” which took place in June 1927, the same month that East Side, West Side was filmed.)
The giddy excitement of the new jazzes up an essentially Victorian story. Dwan handles all the melodramatic twists and tonal jumps of this pocket epic—mysterious parentage! noble sacrifice! romantic betrayal! sexual assault! drug raids! brawls! tunnel cave-ins! icebergs!—with the swift pace and focused energy of a jockey leaping hurdles. Skirting sentimentality, he is always warm-hearted. The early scenes in which John, after literally falling off the back of a truck and being promptly set upon by a gang of local toughs, is taken in by the kindly Lipvitch family, are buoyed by some charming rag-trade comedy and a soupçon of sex, as the shy young man is bewitched by the attractive daughter of the house, Becka (Virginia Valli). George O’Brien, fresh from his role in F.W. Murnau’s masterpiece Sunrise, said that making East Side, West Side was “one of the greatest experiences I ever had.” A one-time boxing champion in the Navy, O’Brien is persuasive as a boy in a man’s body, a musclebound innocent whose wits move more slowly than his fists or his feet. Valli, who made a staggering seven films released in 1927, is appealingly natural and sharply intelligent as the working-class girl persuaded to step aside so as not to hinder her beloved’s social ascent.
If the narrative sometimes creaks, it never bogs down. Each scene is enlivened by the pungent realism of the settings: you can smell the stale beer in a Bowery dive, the thick smoke in the sinister Poppy Club with its Art Deco murals, the mud and sweat of the sandhogs toiling below the streets. Dwan believed in “artistic efficiency.” Along with the simplicity and directness of his compositions and camera movements, this approach extended to the ideal casting of stock types, like the patrician Holmes Herbert as the wealthy Gilbert Van Horn, the beloved Irish mug J. Farrell MacDonald as boxing promoter Pug Malone, and Yiddish theater actor Dore Davidson as head of the Lipvitch family. Using images to telegraph thoughts, he establishes John’s dreamy, aspiring nature with visual touches like when he looks at a brick in his hand and sees a skyscraper, or gazes into the window of a bridal store and sees the mannequin transform into Becka.
John’s lofty speech about building the perfect city may sound naïve almost a century later. He makes it while looking north to the tower of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel, still under construction, and the showpieces of Central Park South from a terrace at the Warwick Hotel. Today, this view is blocked by bigger, newer buildings, verifying Becka’s words: “we tear down and build up. Where is it going to end?” Though he was happy to make use of a thrilling backdrop, Dwan himself was never enthralled by sheer scale, telling Kevin Brownlow many years later, “You go to New York to see the tall buildings—and once you’ve seen them, you’re satisfied.” He insisted that “size will never move people. They may gasp—and that’s it. It’s over.” What’s needed is “an intimate story.” Dwan had more than fifty years of film directing ahead of him when he completed East Side, West Side. He would never change his mind about what mattered most.
Presented at SFSFF 2024 with live musical accompaniment by Wayne Barker