Review of Side Streets

Aline MacMahon, a Warners contract player not attractive enough for conventional stardom, was perfection in everything she did. Here she elevates a somewhat moldy soap opera and makes you understand, care for, and weep for a powerful woman plunged into unfamiliar waters by love. By happenstance she meets a down-on-his-luck sailor (Paul Kelly) who's a big hunk of trouble, and soon they're married, to the consternation of furrier MacMahon's one employee. It's hard to root for such a jerk as the Kelly character, but the screenwriters do drop in sympathetic moments to present a conflicted, somewhat Billy Bigelow-ish lout, transformed by fatherhood into responsibility but still with a roving eye and a gift for deceit. It takes Kelly's out-of-wedlock child, fathered with pretty Ann Dvorak, to bring this to its unlikely happy ending. But MacMahon is so mesmerizing--I don't know of any other actress who uses her eyes the way she does--that you root for them both and hope they'll live happily ever after.