August 29, 2022

---

East Side, West Side (1949) takes place as a fresh start’s rot has begun setting in. As the film opens, we’re introduced to an Upper East Side couple, Brandon and Jessie (James Mason and Barbara Stanwyck), still building back marital trust after Brandon’s recent affair with a younger woman named Isabel (Ava Gardner). (He broke it off, wanting things to work out with Jessie, about a year ago; Isabel moved away.) But Brandon, a businessman, hasn’t entirely shorn the rituals that might make Jessie fear the worst: excuses about coming home suspiciously late because of an after-work bar visit are still common, for instance. Jessie, though, is willing to trust that he’s changed for the better. He ended the affair to stay with her, after all, and since her love for him hasn’t worn she doesn’t see a reason not to give him a second chance. 

But that stance is challenged almost immediately in East Side, West Side when Isabel returns to New York, hungrier than ever to break up this marriage. (I’ve met few femmes fatales in the movies this hell-bent on reeling in a taken man, with few other interests of her own explored beyond that one.) The bulk of East Side, West Side becomes mostly just Jessie mulling over whether she should keep accepting apologies: Brandon, though putting up somewhat of a fight fending off Isabel’s advances, still doesn’t do a good enough job of it. It’s spiced up by Jessie’s maybe-she-will-maybe-she-won’t romantic interest coming in the form of an empathetic investigator she meets (Van Heflin) through a new friend (Cyd Charisse), and also a late-in-the-movie crime against Isabel whose prime suspects are immediately Jessie and Brandon. (The upkeep of their marriage is presumably the motive.)

That last development, and the writing around Isabel in general, is what’s worst about East Side, West Side. (Which is still a very good — and in a lot of ways forward-looking — movie.) It’s an obvious attempt to add something a little sensational to a movie that, while engaging, technically doesn’t have any of the juicy plot beats you’d expect from the other melodramas this film would have been grouped alongside in its era. It also encapsulates the kind of moralizing done around aggressive, sexually open women characters like Isabel. Deviate from the kind of “decency” expected of a woman and moralistic violence against you is practically a given. 

Gardner gives the movie’s showiest, most electric-to-the-touch performance as a viper-tongued, vehemently one-track-minded woman who will stop at seemingly nothing to reignite a relationship that clearly meant a lot to her. But she’s written in a proto-Alex Forrest kind of way that makes her difficult to believe as a human. She remains mostly a misogynistically conceived symbol. The movie doesn’t explore why she’s so unwilling to give up this affair beyond concluding that she’s mean and selfish; the film suggests her moral rot is inextricable from her lower-status background compared to the well-off people into whose lives she’s inserting herself. (She was raised by a single mother who made her money through striptease shows; Isabel eventually staked independence for herself saving money through food-service work.)

It’s frustrating, because this otherwise is a movie that can be unusually nuanced in how it represents women, from its attentiveness toward Jessie’s ever-shifting emotional state (and the thought processes guiding her decision to stay in this marriage) to the touching role female friendships play in the story. Charisse’s character and Jessie’s mother (Gale Sondergaard) are fiercely protective of Jessie, and make it a point to take Brandon to task for his continuously reckless treatment of her. The film’s best scene might be the one where Jessie and an inquisitive friend, played by Nancy Davis (soon-to-be Reagan), talk with moving frankness about the impact Brandon’s infidelities have had and how they continue to residually hurt. East Side, West Side, adapted from Marcia Davenport’s novel by Isobel Lennart (whose writing is as emotionally penetrating as it is witticism-prone), markedly keeps the Brandon and Isabel characters on the periphery. It plays like a tribute to the long-suffering wife stock type so often rendered a one-dimensional annoyance in other male-dominant movies — someone whose existence is mostly seen through our pity.

You wouldn’t necessarily be unhappy if East Side, West Side concluded the way it seems likely to for so long: with Jessie finally giving up on the man she ought to have a long time ago and deciding hastily to run away with the Heflin character, who is kind to her and professes pretty quickly to being in love. (He’s never pushy about it, though — just puts it on the table for her as something to consider as she ponders the state of her marriage. He’s for the most part a standup guy, though that comes particularly into question during a late scene where, in policeman mode, he dupes a suspect and roughs them up without ever being transparent about who he is.) But surprisingly the movie presents a precarious move toward independence as the best route forward. Reliance on one man and then another is hardly the best option — at least in the short-term — for a woman whose sense of self and self-worth have taken such a beating in the last few years. In East Side, West Side, marriage becomes less a haven — something one should always aspire to — but something to be wary of.