REEL CHILDREN
O'Brien, Tom
Screen REEL CHILDREN STREETWISE & SCREENWISE THE DOCUMENTARY, George Stevens: A Filmmaker's Biography, concerns not just film, but American history; it examines not just one American...
...Directed by Mary Ellen Mark, Sharon McCall, and Martin Bell, Streetwise is a montage of vignettes of "street kids" 31 May 1985: 343 from broken homes surviving by the skin of their teeth...
...The documentary, assembled with both craft and affection by George Stevens, Jr., examines the accomplishments of one of Hollywood's most innovative artists who worked within the studio system of the 1930s to 1950s...
...The black eyes here are real...
...the boy-men pimp...
...The most affecting scenes in the documentary involve family — not the oft-mentioned, uncaring, alcoholic (or childabusing) parents and step-parents, but caring mothers and fathers whose own liabilities prevent them from saving the next generation...
...You may think that you have seen all this before, but the film contains some novel material: the jewel is about thirty minutes of rediscovered color footage that Stevens shot after D-day which his son found in a dusty family collection...
...the girls hustle...
...As retold in the documentary by De Mille's victims, the elder Stevens gave a key, passionate speech to stop the McCarthyite tide in Hollywood...
...it examines not just one American director, but a representative American life...
...For Stevens, the experience led eventually toThe Diary of Anne Frank (1958), the closest thing to a fictionalized war film that he had the stomach to make, and the closest study of the Holocaust that late fifties' audiences were judged to have the stomach to watch...
...People don't come to the movies to escape or be entertained, " he is heard saying on tape.' 'They come to learn about themselves...
...In Anne Frank's last words over the sound of blaring sirens — her dream that all Europe's sufferings would eventually lead to a better world — one senses Stevens's own idealism and the hopes of the initial post-V-E Day period...
...Shadow, sixteen, fakes an i.d...
...the horror...
...I knew who George Stevens was before I went, but I left liking him...
...In the D-day material, Steven's lifelike color reminds us, as only fresh art can, that these things really happened...
...To Stevens, De Mille's tactics were the essence of the world that he wished D-day had destroyed...
...Streetwise may be a very selective slice of contemporary adolescent life, but at least it's real...
...no synthesis of sex-and-spies (Gotcha), no therapy session during detention (The Breakfast Club), and no sci-fi wonderworld or computer adventurism...
...It covers the kinds of hopes, compromises, and survival anyone from outside the film industry and film criticism can respond to deeply...
...from late Laurel and Hardy to his American trilogy, A Place in the Sun (1951), Giant (1956) and Shane (1958...
...One part-time prostitute named Kimberley hems and haws about her profession, all the while dressed in a perfectly preppy-looking ski sweater...
...In other scenes, especially one involving a hair permanent, wild profanity and curses mix with innocent fantasies, as if to these teens there were no incongruity between their bourgeois aspirations and their current situation...
...In,4 Place in the Sun, he adapted Dreiser...
...Stevens made a grab bag of films — from the early Katherine Hepburn vehicles like Alice Adams (1935) and Woman of the Year (1942) to nonsense classics like Gunga Din (1939...
...Somehow I associated shots of bloodied G.I.s only with Vietnam, but Stevens's images of Normandy collapse past and present into one terrible process, and suggest how sad it is that some things just don't change...
...Like Blake and Hogarth, Streetwise opens our eyes...
...Rat, the youngest of the set, explains how to raid dumpsters and dupe Pizza Huts into providing food for free...
...The difference between this and the usual newsreel is color...
...But it's clear that she knows this is rationalization...
...The boys panhandle...
...Tiny's mother calls her "fourteen, going on twenty-one," and claims that prostitution is just "a phase Tiny's going through...
...However, her own alcoholism limits her action...
...In his adaptations, moreover, he expressed one consistent theme: the desperate struggle of the outsider to fit in and become part of some collective dream...
...Stevens never changed Hollywood...
...Although no Bergman, Eisenstein, or Renoir, Stevens qualifies as what the French cinema theorists christen an auteur, working within imposed guidelines to express his own vision as best he can...
...It was thought to have climaxed another war to end all wars...
...in Shane, Jack Schaefer...
...The shots of Dachau — again, in color — make even that familiar horror real...
...STREETWISE is no ordinary teenpix, no medieval fantasy (fxidyhawke), no sexual rite of passage (Mischief, The Sure Thing, et al...
...TOM O'BRIEN Commonweal: 344...
...The myth of progress may take advantage of us...
...Tiny, a fourteen-year-old prostitute, dreams of both a "farm and three yachts," but has been turning tricks since twelve...
...The ironies of damned innocence in Streetwise ate appalling...
...Stevens's success involves sneaking quality past the movie moguls' passion for a quick buck...
...Important as that is, the documentary also taps deeper veins of emotion, particularly in the way Stevens, Jr., crisscrosses his father's career and modern history...
...It makes us think, or pretend, that evils such as child abuse aren't happening...
...Although standard even then, Stevens individualized the theme by allowing his heroes — played by Montgomery Clift, James Dean, and Alan Ladd — to have internal struggles that went far beyond Hollywood's notions of character conflict...
...Streetwise is a searing document in this national self-discovery...
...If the directors had a design in their understatement, surely it was to make us sympathize with these barren resolves, and to hope that somehow such broken lives can be healed...
...In commemorating him, morever, his son has provided some heady nostalgia for everyone...
...What unifies his work, the documentary makes clear, are two elements: a passion for the right shot (Stevens started as cameraman for Hal Roach's silent comedy classics) and a commitment to the presentation of serious human drama...
...One father, in jail for burglary and arson, pleads to his son to shape up and avoid his example...
...The directors have wrenchingly caught these lives by following them around in cinema veritestyle, then effectively editing a composite of urban hell...
...The strength of the documentary involves the way Stevens, Jr., links his father's idealism — and sense of innocence betrayed — to his postwar "trilogy...
...Indeed, D-day led directly to Dachau, and some of the newsreels he made then became the kind of standard footage that we have seen so often on television during this spring's anniversaries...
...His good guys weren't perfect, or necessarily innocent, but bore psychic scars, as in Shane, when Alan Ladd can]t put aside his gunslinger past...
...By name and costume, she looks like an escapee from some Muffie movie...
...He did use it...
...Throughout the media, especially in TV movies on missing children, America seems to have acknowledged an enormous new social problem: child abuse on a scale only Blake, dismissed as a madman, had imagined before...
...The street kids in the documentary stand on street corners, shakedown customers, beware knaves...
...It fits...
...It was, as he says on tape, "the most important experience of my life...
...In line with his penchant for highly literate products before and after, we are charmed to believe that he actually read them...
...in Giant, Ferber...
...The core of the documentary, ironically, involves Stevens's one departure from Hollywood, his work as director of a camera crew covering the liberation of Europe...
...Nominated for an Oscar as best documentary of 1984, Streetwise provides a microscopic view of the Seattle teenage underworld...
...You're everything I've got and unfortunately I'm everything you've got," he says pathetically...
...to give blood for cash, since no one under eighteen is allowed...
...Stevens's moral intensity is also revealed in one telling section of the documentary, the account of his attack on Cecil B. De Mille's attempt to purge the Directors' Guild of "Communist sympathizers" in the early fifties...
...Certain of these scenes, with slight changes of costume, seem straight out of Hogarth, and indeed resemble a recent BBC adaptation of Moll Flanders...
...Stevens was one of Holywood's great color craftsmen (particularly in the classic Shane, with his sublime cinematography of the Tetons...
...Although it focuses on a career in movies, it has no in-house narcissism...
...I left without teenpix in mind, but rather Conrad's cry, "the horror...
...It was for Stevens, perhaps, an allegory on war and peace: what happens if a pacifist meets a Nazi...
Vol. 112 • May 1985 • No. 11
