As something of a follow-up to Nicholas Ray's They Live By Night, Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell were again brought together in Side Street; under Anthony Mann's direction however, the socio-romantic slant of Ray's depiction of outlaw lovers on the run gives way to a semi-documentary scurry through the “naked city.” Granger plays a postman who wants to provide his pregnant wife with a few of life's finer things. He steals a wad of bills from an office along his route, and then finds himself the unlucky middleman in a blackmail-murder scheme for which the money was the payoff. In a recent reassessment of Side Street in the Village Voice, Andrew Sarris and Tom Allen write, “Joseph Ruttenberg's hard-edged photography vividly captures the granite canyons of Manhattan and the vistas of Wall Street at morning. Mann angles the dark shadows between the sunny skyscrapers into a fatalistic grid on which to impale Granger's common man.... The movie...explodes around James Craig's stylishly homicidal gangster.... Jean Hagen plays a wretchedly masochistic moll with as much mastery as she did in The Asphalt Jungle.”