Here’s mud in your eye!

On the Bowery 1956 (65 minutes) co-written, directed and produced by Lionel Rogosin and edited by Carl Lerner, with the collaboration of Richard Bagley and Mark Sufrin; restored from original negatives at the Anthology Film Archives in New York by Cineteca del Comune di Bologna.

This classic documentary about alcoholics on Lower Manhattan’s once notorious Bowery stands out because filmmaker Lionel Rogosin reached deep into his subject and touched its heart, mind, soul—and liver.

He did so quietly, with subtlety. Rogosin said that first he spent six months ‘observing’: walking the neighborhood in the shadow of the former Third Avenue elevated subway, drinking in the bars, and meeting his prospective subjects.

‘I go without a camera until I know,’ Rogosin later said in an interview included in The Perfect Team (2009), a ‘making of’ documentary produced and directed by Michael Rogosin, the director’s son, and included in the Milestone DVD set.

Rogosin had been living in the West Village at the time, and found his team at the White Horse Tavern, a gathering place for movie and literary people, many alcoholic. He said that he originally had asked James Agee to write the screenplay, but Agee collapsed and died in a taxi cab (at age 42) before the project got going. Rogosin said that he himself had been drinking heavily at the time. He made several false starts.

The result of this experience is that On the Bowery is more than just the usual images of ‘shuffling figures that once were men’ who cannot handle their drink. Rogosin’s easy naturalism captures what passes for ‘normal’ in this subculture and makes for a harrowing tale told in its own terms.

Rogosin and his collaborators picked three genuine ‘Men of the Bowery’ around whom to structure their narrative of this life: Gorman ‘Doc’ Hendricks, Ray Salyer and Frank Matthews go by their first names.

First we see Ray, purportedly a furloughed railroad worker (and former Army sergeant). A clean-shaven, good-looking and neatly dressed man in his early forties, Ray arrives on the Bowery on a bright morning carrying a small suitcase, going into a bar for a beer and conversation.

A table of four ‘fellow railroad men’ invites Ray to join them—and to stand them a bottle of ‘muscatel’ (fortified) wine while he is at it.

Gorman, to whom Rogosin dedicated the film, an articulate man of late middle age, joins the party. The original four men melt away when the bottle is empty.

‘Those guys sure took off,’ Ray says to Gorman.

‘They didn’t see any more in evidence, so naturally they’re going to go,’ Gorman replies.

Ray tells Gorman that he is low on money and wants ‘a drink and a flop’. Gorman suggests that Ray sell the contents of his suitcase; he can help steer him right. It turns out that Gorman has more in mind than cadging a drink or two from Ray. And, appearances and an expressed desire to make a clean start aside, Ray is interested mainly in drinking.

The film follows these men, as well as Frank, who collects scrap cardboard with a cart that has ‘Joey’s’ painted on the side, as they go about their lives in this subculture. They drink and spin gauzy yarns, fight like demented puppies and roll each other; they drink more, pass out and sleep where they land. And then they help each other up ahead of police morning sweeps to start anew with a sip of coffee and ‘squeeze’ (Sterno strained through cloth).

Every day.

At the same time, most of them work, according to Ray in an interview included in the ‘making of’ documentary The Perfect Team.

‘Ninety-five percent of the men down there work every day. That is true,’ Ray told an interviewer on the NBC Tonight Show in March 1956 after the film came out. ‘But in that case there you see men that are like a Saturday night in any other saloon, except moreso.’

‘“Except moreso,” as you put it,’ the interviewer says.

One such ‘Saturday night’ is the centerpiece of the movie. A large group of men and several women sit around tables in a Bowery saloon drinking fortified wine by the glass and getting louder, more physically and verbally herky-jerky, and aggressive.

The most striking detail is the montage of faces, like a quick succession of sketches by a master such as Honoré Daumier. Vertiginous cutting makes the room start to spin. Ray and some of the others start to spin out of control. And before long it is morning again on the Bowery.

Sometimes the men go to one of the Christian missions. They get cleaned up and dry out for a spell, but generally they fall back into the old pattern.

The Reverend George L. Bolton, ‘supervisor’ of the Christian Herald’s Bowery Mission, who said that he had served this community for 28 years, addressed an evening religious service that Ray (and Rogosin and his cameraman) attended.

‘I don’t believe that ever a man, whether he be on skid row or otherwise, started out with a life ambition to end up in a drunkard’s grave. And yet that might happen to some person here this very day,’ Bolton said.

This may come across as self-righteous, pompous and smug but combined with a montage of the faces of individual men in the pews, it would come closest to the tragedy and waste Rogosin is trying to put his finger on.

The viewer finds out in the ‘making of’ film that Doc Gorman, warned to stop drinking because of his severely advanced liver disease, did not drink for the duration of the shoot. He died shortly afterward when he started to drink again. Kerouacian Ray, pursued with offers to take up an acting career, disappeared into the dark beyond of the Great American Night.

In addition to Rogosin’s documentary and his son’s 45-minute ‘making of’ film, the Milestone DVD set includes William Futter’s two-minute Street of Forgotten Men (1933) and Bowery Men’s Shelter (1972), an eleven-minute documentary by Rhoden Streeter and Tony Ganz.