NO TREES IN THE STREET (1959)

Imagine making a film now about the existential threat of Y2K, and you have a sense of the strange pointlessness that can seem to pervade J. Lee Thompson’s No Trees in the Street. Here is a film about a 20-year-old social problem (slum housing in Britain’s cities, specifically London’s East End) that even starts with confirmation that the problem is one of the past: some of the very first shots show homes that an audience of 1959 would have immediately recognised as post-war flats replacing older housing.

So, while both the 1930s milieu of the main story and the late-1950s period of production are long ago for us, it must have been difficult even in 1959 to get very indignant about past conditions in the slums. It was only two years earlier, after all, that Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had told Britons they had “never had it so good”.

Not everyone agreed, though, and for Thompson, this was the real point of the film: not to highlight crushing poverty in the 1930s for its own sake but as a kind of proof that Macmillan was right (or rightish). In an interview with The Daily Herald, Thompson described No Trees in the Street as “an answer to the angry young men set” (writers like John Osborne and Alan Sillitoe who made a speciality of portraying the hardships of post-war life), and said, “the story [of the film] maintains that, though perhaps small, social progress has been made in the last 20 years”. To Kinematograph Weekly he phrased it more vividly, suggesting that No Trees in the Street was a way of saying to disaffected young people “Stop your silly whining, look at what it used to be like”.

Unlike nearly every other controversial film about the poor at the time, No Trees in the Street is not primarily seeking to raise sympathy for them; its goal is just to reassure us that the bad old days really were that bad. As a result, the badness is laid on rather thick, and further underlined by a didactic postscript after the main action to make the comparison with 1959 clear; but all this also makes the characters and their personal stories difficult to care about very much. They exist largely to make a point, and for their lives to be directly discussed by other characters on occasion, in what amounts to commentary by the filmmakers.

If this often robs the movie of real, heartfelt drama, so does the fact that the point being made is itself muddy. As many commentators on the film have observed, No Trees in the Street is fatally undecided on the key question of whether conditions in the slums created criminality, or whether slum-dwellers were law-breakers by nature who would have been just the same elsewhere. For a long time, it seems to be heading in the former direction, but then towards the end, it seems to veer to the opposing position, suggesting that a lack of personal morality is at the root of criminality. As John Hill put it in his book Sex, Class and Realism: British Cinema 1956-1963, the “logic of environmentalism is radically undercut by an emphasis on individual responsibility”, while Steve Chibnall, in his excellent book on Thompson, observes that the film’s attempt to explore a “dialectic between free will and determinism” is unsuccessful.

Ultimately, what we are left with is a movie that does not stray far from the familiar earlier Hollywood trope of the gangster and the cop growing up on the same street, one ending up “bad” and one “good”: so much for the idea that building shiny new homes would solve all Britain’s ills, if inner character rather than housing was the problem all along!

No Trees in the Street begins with the cop who grew up on the same street as the gangster, though we do not learn that until later: he’s Frank (Ronald Howard), and we see him first in what is implicitly the 1950s after a scene-setting aerial shot of London gives way to an overhead view of a boy running across a bomb site, with obviously postwar housing also in the background, an image that links past and present as well as introducing a major theme of the film.

The boy (played by David Hemmings, not yet 18 but already with several screen roles under his belt) collides with Frank, who reveals that he is a police officer and comments on how much the area has changed in 20 years. Where they are standing used to be called Kennedy Street, he says, and now No Trees in the Street takes us back to the past, a rather over-imagined past that crams in seemingly every East End and 1930s cliché: unemployed locals grumbling, Welsh miners on a protest march, the graffitied name of British fascist Oswald Mosley, newspaper headlines about Hitler, grubby urchins, shrimp sold from a barrow, and a salt beef and herring shop.

To its credit, No Trees in the Street doesn’t over-romanticise working-class poverty in the way of Angela’s Ashes (the 1999 film and the book by Frank McCourt too). But this rather heavy-handed and repeated assertion of place and period can tend to give the whole thing a self-parodic cor-blimey-guvnor-strike-a-light feel. Nobody in the general Kennedy Street scenes seems to do anything that isn’t stereotypical of the 1930s East End, and at times it would not be very surprising if the entire cast erupted in a chorus of “Knees Up Mother Brown”.

The more important action takes place inside: No Trees on the Street is based on a 1948 play by Ted Willis, also the screenwriter of the film, which had been both successful and controversial (and probably benefited from being staged when the period it depicts was closer). The most shocking element, a sexual assault committed with the collusion of the (adult) victim’s mother, was changed for the film to avoid an X-certificate, but if anything that probably works to the film’s advantage: instead of such brutality, we get a noirishly-lit scene of a man knowing he must restrain his worst impulses, making him a less completely villainous and more interesting character.

Once No Trees in the Street moves indoors, two main storylines emerge. One follows Hetty (Sylvia Syms), a young woman who longs to get away from Kennedy Street (“people don’t live here,” she says, “they exist, like animals”) and is for a while tempted to achieve that by accepting the advances of Wilkie (Herbert Lom), a small-time local crime boss who is infatuated with her and wealthier than anyone else on the street. Hetty hopes his money might provide an escape route, though, in fact, he shows no sign of wanting to leave permanently.

The other storyline again involves these characters, but also foregrounds Hetty’s younger brother Tommy (Melvyn Hayes), who starts as a very petty criminal, and begins working for Wilkie’s gang—like Hetty, seeing Wilkie as the way out of poverty, even if she is law-abiding and he’s not—and then embarks on his own ill-conceived, increasingly violent and eventually disastrous criminal career. In and out of these twin narrative strands weave a selection of other residents of the street including Hetty’s mother Jess (Joan Miller); blind, harmonica-playing Bill (Liam Redmond) and former music-hall performer Kipper (Stanley Holloway), overdone characters presumably intended to provide local colour who instead come across as painfully unreal; and Lova (Carole Lesley), a blonde bombshell who works for Wilkie and—as becomes evident in a surprisingly poignant scene later on—longs for his love. Frank the police officer, definitely not looking 20 years younger, also pops up although his main role in the movie is as a framing device; the storylines would essentially be much the same without him.

Several of the cast members had recently worked with Thompson on films such as Yield to the Night (1956), The Good Companions (1957), and Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957)—the latter also written by Willis and based on his play. Perhaps the biggest strength of No Trees in the Street (certainly stronger than the sometimes repetitive screenplay, say, or the uninteresting music) is the way Thompson gets the best out of his cast—far better than the script deserves.

Syms as Hetty has the central role that ties everything in the film together, and though she is far too angelic and impeccable (and well-spoken) to be very believable as a slum-dweller, she never fails to hold the attention. Hayes as her brother may be trying to do a bit too much of that: his Tommy is full of pent-up energy and feeling, ambition, and class resentment, but although the effect is undoubtedly mesmerising at moments, it starts to feel over-acted even by the standards of the period, the intensity overwhelming any sense of a real, rounded person.

Much more held back and as a result more intriguing—quite a fascinatingly difficult man to read, in fact—is Lom as Wilkie, self-assured and even politely aggressive on the surface, clearly intelligent and perceptive beneath (more than most movie gangsters of the time), and perhaps not truly as confident as he seems. Wilkie’s background as an immigrant (it’s not specified where from, but central Europe is implied and Lom was Czech-born) may both allow him to maintain an aloof distance from the rest of Kennedy Street’s people and prevent him from forming close relationships.

Miller is convincing as Hetty’s mother—a less monstrous character than in the play, you can imagine she has a full and not particularly easy past and sympathise with her for that, just as you can with Wilkie. Howard as the police officer Frank is believable enough, although the character is a bit of a dull Goody Two-Shoes. Lesley as Lova has only that one powerful moment of emotional frankness, where the depth of her feelings for Wilkie becomes apparent, but she also plays a part in the movie’s single best scene, one where Wilkie exercises power over Hetty with a psychological cruelty reminiscent of Pinkie in Brighton Rock (the 1947 film or the Graham Greene novel).

This scene appears to contradict much of what we have seen before in Wilkie’s behaviour. Why does he hurt Hetty if he wants her so much, perhaps even seeing something of his own outsider status in her? He does it because people do irrational, destructive things like that when they are angry, even to others they love—and this contradiction only makes Wilkie seem one of the most credible and human characters in No Trees in the Street.

Many of the film’s other contradictions are far less successful, unfortunately. The street is patently a studio set, and the apartment where Hetty and her mother live looks palatially large; No Trees in the Street may have ambitions to achieve the kind of everyday-life realism celebrated in films like Room at the Top (also 1959), but what we see on the screen constantly detracts from that. Thompson and Willis also seem unsure whether or not they are making a crime film, focusing sometimes on Tommy but then ignoring him for long stretches; a climactic siege scene lacks tension, too.

Above all, though, there’s the film’s uncertainty about how to answer its central question: are people bad because of nature or nurture? A logical look at the characters of No Trees in the Street seems to suggest the former—after all, the policeman Frank grew up with the gang boss Wilkie, as purer-than-pure Hetty did with tearaway Tommy—but over and over again the movie seems to be saying the opposite.

Wilkie observes of Tommy “his life went wrong the day he was born”; Tommy himself asks “What chance is there for people like us?”; at one point Frank even has a conversation with a more senior police officer which sets the question out plainly. “Do you think this lot would be any better if they lived in decent houses? Do you think bricks and mortar would make a difference?” asks the inspector, to which Frank replies: “Yes, I do. Wouldn’t make ’em perfect, it might give them a chance to be people.” (“You sound like a Red,” the inspector then says, though Frank—speaking for Thompson and Willis—insists his point isn’t political.)

Again and again, we’re told that the problem is environment, not character. Although it’s conceivable that Thompson and Willis are setting up the point to knock it down, that seems unlikely. So it is something of a startling reversal when the film—via Hetty—finally decides to point the finger of blame at individual evil, rather than circumstances. She does this specifically concerning Wilkie, and it is also an uncomfortable possibility that the movie is saying that he—being an immigrant—is inherently bad, while the British-born are only made bad by factors beyond their control. Either way, it’s a deeply muddled message and one which also undermines the initial proposition that nice new housing would in itself solve social problems.

No Trees in the Street returns to the 1950s at the very end, with rhapsodic music and Frank affirming that life is better now, even if it is not paradise. There is at last a tree in the street, although there are few other signs of life in the postwar development. (Indeed, Phuong Le points out in one of the extras on this disc that bad old Kennedy Street is suffused with a lot more human energy than this brave new world.)

It’s a striking image, but like so much in No Trees in the Street, one which is not really as rhetorically effective as the filmmakers must have hoped. The tree is a young, slender thing alone in the centre of the frame amid all the concrete; barely qualifying as a tree yet, it is presumably intended to signify hope (and there are other elements of a pat “happy ending” too), but it would be equally easy to read it as an emblem of disappointment. We went through the war for this?

UK | 1959 | 96 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | BLACK & WHITE | ENGLISH

Blu-ray Special Features:

StudioCanal has done a nice job with this reissue—a handsome restoration and a couple of excellent bonus features—but, like the movie’s often classy acting, the care lavished on it is more than this misfire of a film warrants.

• NEW 4K restoration of the film. Just as it did for its recent reissue of J. Lee Thompson’s The Weak and the Wicked, StudioCanal delivers a lovely, fresh-looking 4K restoration taken from the original camera negative, with rich shades of grey bringing every detail home.
• NEW The Highs and Lows of Kennedy Street. As with The Weak and the Wicked (1954), critics Matthew Sweet and Phuong Le deliver a wide-ranging discussion which overrates the film but is fascinating nonetheless, taking in topics ranging from the role of music hall in English culture to the 1950s’ ambivalence toward the past. It’s especially interesting for the contradictions in the character of Wilkie.
• NEW Passion & Poverty. Again, as with StudioCanal’s other recent J. Lee Thompson release, this second short documentary features Melanie Williams from the University of East Anglia, offering a slightly different interpretation from Sweet and Le. She’s especially interesting when talking about the film’s differences from the play, and the influence of Walter Greenwood’s 1930s novel Love on the Dole.
• NEW Melvyn Hayes on No Trees in the Street. The actor reminisces.
• Behind-the-scenes stills gallery. A small collection of about a dozen images.
• Trailer.
• English subtitles.

Cast & Crew

director: J. Lee Thompson.
writer: Ted Willis (based on his play).
starring: Sylvia Syms, Herbert Lom, Ronald Howard, Stanley Holloway, Joan Miller & Melvyn Hayes.