Street of Chance

When, many moons ago, I interviewed director John Cromwell for an article I was preparing on the first big gangster-film star of the late Twenties/early Thirties, George Bancroft, I mentioned STREET OF CHANCE (Paramount; 1930) to him as an aside, it not containing Bancroft. His initial response was to confuse its genesis with gambler Nicky Arnstein, who, if I recall correctly, was married to Fannie Brice; but upon my putting forth Arnold Rothstein as the more likely source, he agreed. Arnstein was a gambler and apparent scoundrel; Rothstein also a gambler albeit far more notorious, infamously credited with having fixed a baseball World Series; his shooting death in 1928 was never solved. In STREET OF CHANCE, the shooting of the William Powell gambler is implied without being shown; his dying words, given in an ambulance rushing him to a hospital in response to an attendant's bet that he'll live, signals the film's final fadeout, these being, "You lose." When I complimented the director on this powerful, yet understated finale, he modestly responded something like, "Well, that's the kind of thing we were trying to do then." If, as John implied, such creativity was the order of the day, I've seen scant examples worthy of this one! Paramount remade the film in 1937 as HER HUSBAND LIES, starring Ricardo Cortez as the ill-fated gambler. A good little film, but lacking the tour-de-force quality engendered by the original which, sad to say, is a virtually forgotten motion picture.

Regards, Ray Cabana, Jr.