High Side-Low Side- Barbara Stanwyck’s East Side, West Side-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

East Side, West Side, starring Barbara Stanwyck, James Mason, Van Heflin, Ava Gardner, 1949

 

You can never predict what will sent a formerly flowering love relationship into a tail spin; indifference, longevity, boredom, philandering, and sometimes just plain murder. That is the premise, the ultimate premise of the film under review, Barbara Stanwyck’s East Side, West Side, a 1949 melodramatic murder mystery which takes place in high side West Side New York City and has its roots in low side East Side New Jack City as well. Purely by accident this will be the third film in a row that I have reviewed which has some relationship to that big, bad ass city and its eight million denizens. This one is as much about class structure, you know high and low class, in an urban environment as the others but has the added tingle of murder and mayhem among the upper crust to keep things moving at their normal slow pace among that set. (The other two films, both starring Gary Cooper, involved Great Depression light-hearted class struggle stuff and the usual romantic filler to expand the film time and bad ass upper crust characters by but 1949 the country was on the road to the golden age and the class struggle parts are muted to “back in the day” time).

Here is the way it played out, played out down and dirty, in this one. Former, or maybe not so former, playboy investment banker Brandon (played by a debonair James Mason) had been two-timing his West Side high society wife Jessie (played by Barbara Stanwyck) for years with a low-rent tramp Isabel, played by Ava Garner, a gold-digger from day one of her life probably, strictly from the East Side okay. He finally, or seemingly finally, decided that the staid and demur Jessie was for him and brushed Isabel off. Isabel healed her wounds in Paris for a while and then returned, returned to put her claws right back into Brandon. No prisoners taken this time. The replay of the past is what drives the first part of the story line. That and the introduction of Mark Dwyer, played by Van Heflin, an New York ex-cop now a very hush, hush governmental European agent (meaning CIA probably), who takes dead aim at the staid and demur Jessie.        

Of course while Mark and Jessie are “playing house,” the no sex 1940s version of playing house Brandon had been entrapped (yeah, right) by the scheming Isabel. The battle was joined as Jessie was ready to fight tooth and nail for her man. Except a little problem came up-Isabel wound up dead, very dead in her upscale high rent apartment (paid for by some sweet man sugar daddy she had been hanging around with). And who is the number one suspect. No, not Jessie because she had an alibi in Mark. Yeah, Brandon was all set to take the fall, take the big step off up in Ossining. Is rich lover- boy Brandon though going take the fall for something he didn’t do? No way because Mark, for a little breather from heavy duty CIA work, has this one solved before dinner with time for a nap. The sometimes gold-digger girlfriend of the sugar daddy who was paying Isabel’s bills got sore and put the bang-bang dead on old Isabel.

Here’s the funny thing, the funny cultural thing you pick up from old films, the dame was continually called an Amazon, like very tall and statuesque, which was a “crime,” a social crime in those days when women were shorter than today. She would barely make a high school girls’ basketball team today. Here’s the even funnier part after all the flap over Isabel and her fate it turned out Jessie left Brandon high and dry. Didn’t really love the shell of a man he she had married. Maybe she will become Mrs. CIA over in Europe. Hey, not Barbara Stanwyck’s greatest flix (probably Double Indemnity is) but what can you expect from a melodrama, even one set in New York City.