As its genre-painting title hints, Street Sceneis one of the rare Hollywood slices of lower class life, a Grand Hotel of the slums, centering on a pair ofeconomically and environmentally oppressed lovers (Sylvia Sidney and William Collier, Jr.). The script isfaithful to Elmer Rice's three-quarters naturalistic, one-quarter melodramatic stageplay-too faithful, Vidorfelt. But his flamboyant camerawork is resourceful at disguising the stage-bound limitations of theelaborate single set and of the cast, most of whom were brought over from the Broadway production(including Beulah Bondi and John Qualen, who both began their long Hollywood careers here). Immigrantscrowd the Manhatten street, and one tends to forgive the film its slanderous caricatures of frustrated andstagnant ethnic lives in light of Hollywood's progressive exclusion of any such American diversity. At itsbest, Street Scene dramatizes nature/nurture arguments, through two individuals' aspirations to escapethe oppressive matrix of family, society and urban life. Usually available only in poor prints, tonight's is arecent 35mm preservation from the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Scott Simmon