USA
, 90 min
Shown in 1981
CREDITS
- dir
-
Jenny Bowen
- prod
-
Richard Bowen, Laurence Berteau
- scr
-
Jenny Bowen
- cam
-
Richard Bowen
- cast
-
Elizabeth Daily, Larry Breeding, Ned Glass, Marjorie Eaton, W.F. Walker, Miriam Phillips, D’Alan Moss, Sam Morford
-
COMMENTS
Elizabeth Daily in person.
The life of San Franciscans has taken on all the aspects of social mythology; they are the most imagined people in America. The cinema has, for the most part, encouraged the idea of a swinging Land of Canaan where aristocracy holding its own standards of civilized behavior, tolerates the remnants of Beatnocracy, the go-go era and the gay-gay liberals. Ever since the MGM hymn to San Francisco, where nobility-of-purpose supposedly rose from the ashes of 1906, the city’s reality has gone unexplored in motion pictures, so that this independently made film, with modest intentions, succeeds in becoming a healthy slice of believable San Francisco lore. Street Music is the first feature made by Jenny Bowen and it tells the story of two individuals whose love for each other is complicated by their involvement with the destruction of a pensioners’ hotel in the Tenderloin district. This odd turn of circumstances is loosely based upon recent protests against the razing of the International Hotel but, in Street Music, the atmosphere is less angry somehow. At any rate, it is Sadie, a plucky street entertainer, and her boyfriend, Eddie, a city-tour guide, who are the center of attention. Sadie is ambitious and, although compassionate toward the plight of the elderly residents in the Victory Hotel, she dreams of her career as a successful chanteuse. Eddie is totally loyal to the old people, who are like a family to him. The strength of Street Music lies in the gallery of characters and views of the Tenderloin area. The inhabitants of the hotel are stoical and dignified and, even the expected dotty dowager has moments of seedy glory: it is a California refuge with a touch of Giraudoux. Miss Bowen has adroitly and sensitively presented each character, but it is Elizabeth Daily who emerges strongly as the defiant, emotionally-frustrated singer. Her portrait of a modern woman clinging to a girlhood dream, has all the hip toughness needed to thrive in her particular urban garden, where all the flowers have died.
—Albert Johnson
FACTOID #68
Stanley Mosk, who later became a California state Supreme Court Justice, served as the general chairman at the 1967 Festival.
