On the Bowery (1957), Lionel Rogosin’s landmark film about skid row in Manhattan, was nominated for an Oscar in the category of best documentary. If the same thing happened today there would surely be an uproar, because the movie is partly scripted and staged. Rogosin, an affluent businessman making his first film, was inspired by Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948) to create something of real immediacy that would blur the line between drama and documentary. Hanging around the Bowery, he recruited three down-and-outers—Ray Salyer, Gorman Hendricks, and Frank Matthews—to improvise a simple story line in which Salyer attempts to sober up and get back on his feet. Much of the screen time, however, goes to real-life footage of the Bowery’s lost souls as they slug down the booze and stagger around the streets. With its harsh locations, ravaged faces, and plainspoken performances, On the Bowery galvanized a generation of New York independent filmmakers, most notably John Cassavetes.
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A restored print of the movie screened a year ago at Gene Siskel Film Center, along with an excellent making-of documentary by Rogosin’s son, Michael, called The Perfect Team. Now both titles have been anthologized in a two-DVD set from Milestone Film & Video, On the Bowery: The Films of Lionel Rogosin, Vol I. Though Rogosin died in 2000, The Perfect Team includes several interviews with him—one broadcast on NBC’s Today Show in March 1957, when he was 33, and a few more conducted in the late 90s by film professor Marina Goldovskya—and he proves to be smart, wise, and disarmingly candid. As the video reveals, some of the filmmakers were pretty heavy drinkers themselves; they bonded with their subjects by getting blasted with them, and eventually Rogosin had to fight the drunken chaos that was his subjects’ daily lot. Just as the movie dissolved the line between fact and fiction, the process of making it began to dissolve the line between the artist and his subject.
On the Bowery runs only 65 minutes, but by the end you can feel skid row in your bones. The credits are followed by a two-minute establishing sequence of men drunk on the street: one sleeps on the curb, his coat rolled up like a pillow; another lounges in a pushcart, leafing through a copy of Esquire; yet another tries valiantly to sit up, can’t quite get his balance, and lies back down. Rogosin urged Bagley to model his imagery on Rembrandt’s portraits, and in the movie the filmmakers manage to zero in on the humanity of every wrecked face. One of the more stunning sequences takes place in a mission church, where men listen impassively to a sermon in exchange for a free meal and a bed for the night; as the camera pans over them, their faces are a gallery of hardship and hopelessness. The portraiture grows frightening in the climactic bar scene, a late-night “orgy” (as Rogosin later characterized it) expertly edited by Carl Lerner (12 Angry Men): men knock back shots, drool on themselves, nod off over tables littered with empty glasses, and reel around picking fights with each other.
Directed by Lionel Rogosin
