STREET CORNER. J. Arthur Rank, 1953. Released in the US as Both Sides of the Law, Universal Pictures, 1954. Peggy Cummins, Terence Morgan, Anne Crawford, Rosamund John, Barbara Murray, Sarah Lawson, Ronald Howard. Screenplay by Muriel Box & Sydney Box. Director: Muriel Box.

   I don’t know how common it was for a British film in the early 1950s to have a female director, but I have a feeling there weren’t many of them. Looking at Muriel Box’s list of directing credits, and there were 15 of them, the only one that catches my eye is Rattle of a Simple Man (1964), and that the last one she did.

   Street Corner was the second, and I don’t know what the title means, but I purchased this on DVD as being a noir film, and to tell you the truth, I’m not so sure about that either. What Street Corner is, when it really comes down to it, is a rather nitty-gritty portrayal of London’s women police as they go about their everyday duties, told in stark black-and-white documentary style.

   Let’s get back to the word “noir,” though. Life in Britain after the war was often a struggle, and this movie, shot every so often on outdoor locations, reflects that struggle a lot more than you’d able to learn about it from only reading books about it.

   Cramped quarters, when you could find quarters, vacant lots, life on the make (and on the take) and even life without much hope, that was England in 1953, even without a scriptwriter concocting up a story to go with it.

   The women who are policemen in Street Corner are largely anonymous. In these early days of the very concept of female officers, in this film they are treated as though they were the women’s auxiliary.

   I couldn’t match any of their names (fictitious) to the actresses (real) who played them, perhaps by design. The stories – three of them, otherwise unconnected – are what’s designed to catch the viewer’s interest:

   (1) A young married woman (Peggy Cummins) with a small child and her husband on the road is tempted into world of far more glamour by a young hoodlum looking for a score. (2) A young girl goes AWOL from the Army to come to the assistance of her ill new husband. (3) A three-year-old girl is left alone to fend for herself in a dingy apartment by her uncaring father and stepmother.

   Peggy Cummins, last seen and written about by me for her role in Escape (reviewed here ), continues to impress me as an actress. Her career didn’t go all that far, however. It was essentially over in 1961 when she was only 36.