In a London slum a young woman tries to look out for her brother, who
falls under the spell of a local mobster.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: J. Lee Thompson
Starring: Sylvia Syms, Herbert Lom, Melvyn Hayes, Liam Redmond, Ronald Howard,
Joanmiller, Stanley Holloway
A gritty British cousin of American urban dramas like King
Vidor's Street Scene and Elia Kazan's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, J. Lee Thompson's No Trees in the Street was released in 1959 but is set two decades earlier. The movie
supposes that life for working class Londoners improved when crowded
tenements were knocked down and replaced hy high rise council flats, an
idea that seems quaintly naive in hindsight.
I'm not convinced it was the film's intention to make this unconvincing
assumption - which comes courtesy of '50s set bookends that were hastily
added following test screenings - as while the teeming '30s streets
certainly have their social problems, there's an undeniable sense of
communty, of eveyone being in it together; what would soon become known
as the blitz spirit.
Those bookends feature a teenage David Hemmings as a
knife-wielding gurrier apprehended by an off-duty copper, Frank (Ronald Howard). The kid has a cut on his hand, but rather than taking him down the
Nick, Frank gives the lad a lecture about how he saw similar young men
go down the wrong path back when the area was known as Kennedy Street
and filled with squalid tenements.
Thus begins the main story, focussed on Hetty (Sylvia Sims), an
intelligent young woman who feels trapped by her environment. She wants
out of Kennedy Street, but not because she doesn't like its people. Not
like Wilkie (Herbert Lom), a ruthless mobster who has nothing but
contempt for the people he grew up with. Wilkie has his eyes set on
Hetty, boasting of how he made a list of items he wished to obtain when
he was 14, and Hetty is the only item he's hasn't yet managed to
possess. Hetty is wary of Wilkie, despite her mother's (Joan Miller) advice to use the gangster as a way out of Kennedy Street. Hetty has
also attracted the attention of Frank, who claims he wants the best for
her but is probably just a more subtle version of Wilkie [SPOILER: in the closing bookend we see that Frank has taken Hetty for his
wife. He claims she has everything she always wanted, but tellingly
Hetty isn't given the opportunity to confirm this, and to a modern
audience she seems as trapped as ever. SPOILER ENDS]. The only figure who seems to genuinely want the best for Hetty is
Bill (Liam Redmond), a blind Irish immigrant who hangs around the
house like an unofficial uncle. You know things are bad when the only
person looking out for you is a blind man.
Hetty tries to look out for her kid brother Tommy (Melvyn Hayes), but she can't stop him destroying his life by falling under the
spell of Wilkie, who gives the boy a job coshing truck drivers and
stealing their loads. When Tommy decides to go into business for
himself, he becomes a fugitive from Wilkie, who doesn't take kindly to
such betrayal.
There's an almost Dracula/Renfield relationship between Wilkie and
Tommy. Wilkie is a vampire who sucks the life out of his own community,
which he observes with contempt from the window of his third floor
bookies' office, literally looking down on those he grew up with. Like
Dracula, he's come to London from Eastern Europe and stills harbours
resentment over the xenophobia his family experienced on arrival. The
more desperate Tommy becomes, the more Hayes develops an uncanny
resemblance to Dwight Frye's signature role of Renfield in Tod
Browning's 1931 Dracula; he looks as though his very lifeforce is being drained.
The film paints a rather glum view of the options available to the
residents of Kennedy Street, who can either turn to crime like Wilkie
and Tommy or accept their lot like Bill and Kipper (Stanley Holloway), a jovial ex-con who's always singing an old music hall number and
has a bottle of beer in every pocket; but the latter seem to have
genuinely made peace with their lot. Thompson makes a point of showing
how music and verse plays a role in Bill and Kipper's contentment
through Bill's playing of Irish tunes on his harmonica and Kipper's
constant recitals of poems he likely memorised while serving time. This
is contrasted with the materialism of Wilkie, which also comes to infect
Tommy. In one scene Wilkie gives Kipper a contemptuous stare as he waits
for him to finish reciting a Lewis Carroll poem, and later we see an
angry Tommy smack the harmonica out of Bill's hands mid-Molly Malone.
Men like Wilkie have no time for songs and poems, because such things
can't be possessed, only shared. It's a wonderful commentary on how
capitalism views culture as a hindrance, something that has value but
doesn't have a price and so is considered worthless.
Critics at the time commented negatively on Thompson's use of sets
rather than the location filming that had become popular thanks to the
influence of Italian neorealism. Looking at the film from a 21st century
perspective however, it only adds to the sense that we're watching a
story play out in the 1930s. The setbound Kennedy Street takes on the
appearance of the backlot settings of the gritty pre-code Hollywood
dramas and gangster pics of the early '30s, which is how most of us now
visualise the urban world of this era.
The sets are the only artifical aspect of Thompson's film, which
portrays its world so vividly you can almost smell the uncollected
garbage. It's a stench Wilkie complains of several times, and he's often
seen scrubbing his hands as though trying to erase his upbringing. In
the closing bookend such squalor has gone, replaced by soulless high
rise blocks that would soon become new symbols of urban decay. The final
image shows that the former Kennedy Street finally got a tree after all.
The producers were likely hoping audiences would view the sapling as a
sign of hope, but it's a rather pitiful specimen, and tellingly it's
protected by wire. A tree might grow in Brooklyn, but can it thrive in
the remains of Kennedy Street?
No Trees in the Street is on UK
bluray, DVD and VOD from August 5th.