The Street of Forgotten Men (filmography page)

  The Street of Forgotten Men is an underworld romance set among fake beggars and their “cripple factory” in the slums of the Bowery in New York City. The film is based on an O. Henryesque short story by George Kibbe Turner which appeared in Liberty magazine on February 14, 1925, just two months before the film went into production. The film is notable as the first in which Louise Brooks had a role, that of a moll (companion to a criminal).

The Street of Forgotten Men was well regarded upon release, with star Percy Marmount singled out time and again for a fine dramatic performance more often than not compared to the efforts of Lon Chaney. Director Herbert Brenon was also praised for his realistic depiction of Bowery life. Brenon, who the year before had directed Peter Pan (1924), went on to helm such classics as Beau Geste (1926), which won the Photoplay Medal of Honor, one of the industry’s first awards recognizing the best picture of the year, as well as The Great Gatsby (1926), and Laugh, Clown, Laugh (1928). Brenon’s Sorrell and Son (1927) was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director at the 1st Academy Awards.

Exhibitor’s Trade Review stated the film was tied for fifth among the year’s biggest “profit takers,” as reported by exhibitors. In fact, commercial success was matched by critical acclaim. The National Board of Review named The Street of Forgotten Men one of the 40 best pictures of 1925; it was named one of the year’s ten best films by a handful of newspapers including the Houston Chronicle, San Francisco Call & Post, Tacoma Daily Ledger, Tacoma Times, and Topeka Daily Capital. As well, the Pittsburgh Gazette Times named it the very best film of the year, while the Rochester Herald, in upstate New York, gave it an honorable mention.

The New York Daily News praised the film, noting “The Street of Forgotten Men dips into the dark pools of life. It shows you the beggars of life — apologies to Jim Tully — and in showing them it shows them up.” Dorothy Evans of the Sacramento Union summed-up the feelings of many critics when she noted that the film’s “theme goes deeper than the average motion picture”. Roberta Nangle of the Chicago Tribune echoed her, “It is a startling tale of Bowery life, of the soiled, tawdry ladies and broken men of the underworld”. An exclamation point was added by A. F. Gillaspey of the San Francisco Bulletin, “For fine dramatic detail, for unusualness, for giving us a glimpse into a world we never see and into the other sides of characters we simply pass in pity on the streets, The Street of Forgotten Men is a photoplay revelation.”

One of the film’s most favorable reviews was published in the New York Morning Telegraph. Its article, titled “Herbert Brenon Contributes Absorbing Film at Rivoli,” was penned by Dorothy Day, a one-time bohemian journalist and later social activist who, in more recent years, has become a candidate for sainthood in the Catholic Church.Day described the film as “an absorbing story, done by cast the people who really know how to act and directed in a skillful manner by Herbert Brenon…. All in all The Street of Forgotten Men makes for an absorbing and entertaining session.”

Carl Sandburg, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winning poet and biographer, also reviewed the film. He alludes to the scene Brooks is in noting “The blind men with their cups and the cripples with their stumps at the street corners will not like to hear about The Street of Forgotten Men. Beggars stand to lose millions of dollars. For the picture seems to take us behind the scenes and show us how street beggars live and work and fake…. A fight between a beggar who can see though wearing the sign ‘I am blind,’ and a supposedly crippled beggar is the high spot of the picture.”

Brooks debut was fleeting, as the entirety of the scene in which she appears lasts less than a few minutes. Nevertheless, she makes an impression, and she even had a line — a bit of dialogue in the form of an intertitle, “You’re just wonderful, Whitey!” Though her role was small and she was not listed in the credits, Brooks received her very first notice. In August, an anonymous critic for the Los Angeles Times wrote, “And there was a little rowdy, obviously attached to the ‘blind’ man, who did some vital work during her few short scenes. She was not listed.” At the time, this reference to the actress was only attention Brooks would receive for being in the film. In 1928, after she became an established star, film magazines carried a piece — which was likely ballywho — about her debut and her reaction to praise sent by a fan. “Louise Brooks must have been very satisfied when she received her first fan letter from a girl in Brooklyn who said she saw her in The Street of Forgotten Men, because after reading it, she immediately took a photograph of herself that she had hanging in her dressing room and sent it to the girl in thanks.”

STORY SYNOPSIS:
“Easy Money Charlie is a whole man who disguises himself as a cripple and makes his living as a professional beggar. When Portland Fancy dies, Charlie takes her child and sends the little girl to the country, providing her with a proper education and upbringing. Years later, the girl, known as Fancy Vanhern, meets and captures the heart of Philip Peyton, a young lawyer whose name is prominent in the social register. In order to secure Fancy’s future happiness, Charlie feigns death in an ocean accident; Fancy then prepares to marry Philip. Bridgeport White-Eye, a beggar who affects blindness, discovers Charlie’s secret and tries to blackmail Philip. White-Eye and Charlie fight, and White-Eye is indeed blinded. Philip marries Fancy, and Charlie takes over the care of White-Eye.”

• What the Critics Said
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DATABASE LINKS:

• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
• AFI catalog
• All Movie Guide
• AlloCine (fr)
• BFI website (uk)
• Cinemacontext (nl)
• Filmvandaag (nl)
• Filmnavi (ru)
• Filmweb (pl)
• IMDb
• Kinopoisk (ru)
• Letterboxd
• MUBI
• notre Cinema (fr)
• San Francisco Film Preserve
• SilentEra.com
• Swedish Film Database (sv)
• TCM.com
• TMDB
• Wikipedia

NEXT Louise Brooks Film

PRODUCTION HISTORY:
Production began on April 6th and finished around June 6th. The film was shot at Paramount’s Astoria Studios on Long Island (located at 3412 36th Street in the Astoria neighborhood in Queens). Location shooting was done elsewhere on Long Island as well as on the streets of Manhattan, including on Fifth Avenue and at the landmark Little Church Around the Corner on East 29th. Brooks began work on the film on May 20, 1925. She appears in only one scene, in the bar room where a fight breaks out, near the end of the film.

ALTERNATE TITLES:
Under its American title, documented screenings of the film took place in Australia (including Tasmania), Bermuda, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Ireland, Jamaica, Korea, New Zealand, Panama, South Africa, and the United Kingdom (including England, Isle of Man, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales). In the United States, the film was presented under the title La Calle de los Olvidados (Spanish-language press), A Rua dos Homens Esquecidos (Portuguese-language press), and Az Elfelejtett Emberek Utcája (Hungarian-language press).

Elsewhere, The Street of Forgotten Men was shown under the title L’école des mendiants (Algeria); Die Straße des Grauens (Austria); De School der Bedelaars (Belgium); O mendigo elegante and Um mendigo elegante (Brazil); La calle del olvido (Chile); La calle del olvido (Cuba); Ulice zapomenutých mužu (Czechoslovakia); Tiggerkongen (Denmark); De Straat der Ellendigen (Dutch East Indies); De Straat der verlaten Wezens (Dutch Guiana); Varjojen lapsi (Finland); L’école des mendiants – primarily, but also on a few occasions as Le roi des mendiants and La rue des hommes perdus (France); Die Straße des Grauens (Germany); Konungur Betlaranna (Iceland); 或る乞食の話 or Aru kojiki no hanashi (Japan); L’école des mendiants (Luxembourg); La calle del olvido (Mexico); De School der Bedelaars and De Vakschool der bedelaars (Netherlands); Varjojen lapsia (Norway); Vidas Perdidas (Portugal); Улица забытых людей (Soviet Union); La calle del olvido (Spain); and Skuggornas barn (Sweden).

STATUS:
The film was once thought lost, as it had been out-of circulation and long forgotten for decades. [In his famous 1979 profile of Brooks in the New Yorker, Kenneth Tynan referenced the film stating “no print is known to exist.”] Nevertheless, six of its seven reels in the form of 35mm nitrate negative had been acquired by the Library of Congress sometime before or around 1969. This material was duplicated for preservation in 1969, but not before the second reel had deteriorated completely. Since that time, decomposition of the negative has continued, leaving the duplicate as the only source for the surviving portions of the film.

As of 2021, the LOC held a 16mm exhibition print, and a 35mm preservation master positive. Among the surviving footage is an approximately four minute scene which includes the entirety of Brooks’ role, which occurs near the end of the film. The LOC print has, over the years, been screened a few times at festivals including Pordenone in 1996 and Syracuse CineFest in 2012. In early 2022, the San Francisco Silent Film Festival announced it had completed a restoration of the surviving film. This restoration included a filmic bridge – a reconstruction of the missing second reel based on stills and the surviving script. The restoration debuted at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival on May 10, 2022. And in 2025….

RELATED ONLINE DOCUMENTS, MEDIA, LINKS, etc…:
Paramount Press Sheet (Library of Congress)
— Paramount, 1925
Thematic Cue Sheet (George Eastman House)
— Paramount, 1925
Kansas Board of Review Movie Index (censorship record)
— “Eliminations: REEL 6 – ELIM TITLE “WELL, I DON’T BLAME YOU NONE – I LIKE ‘EM YOUNG MYSELF”.
“Actors in Uncredited Bit Parts in The Street of Forgotten Men” (Louise Brooks Society blog).
— a four-part blog: Anita Louise | Lassie | Whitney Bolton | Louise Brooks
“The Street of Forgotten Men,” by Thomas Gladysz (San Francisco Silent Film Festival).
— festival program essay
The Street of Forgotten Men: From Story to Screen and Beyond, by Thomas Gladysz (amazon.com link)
—  a book about the film: “an illustrated, 380 page deep dive into the history of the film, its literary source, making, exhibition history, critical reception, and cultural impact.”

The Street of Forgotten Men: From Story to Screen and Beyond  (PandorasBox Press, 2023)