Although there have always been homeless people in society, it’s something of a paradox that the have-not demographic seems to increase as our country grows wealthier. This can be discomfiting to the prosperous segment of the population, and as such movies and television have often reflected a temptation either toward romanticizing the plight of the homeless or toward dismissing them as lunatics or addicts who have brought misery upon themselves.
The more noble (and more interesting) cinematic approaches to homelessness are also the more disturbing, for they don’t allow us to ignore the underlying fact that each person living on the streets is a member of the human race. What follows is a list of some of the finer domestic efforts at portraying the dispossessed and disenfranchised, as well as a few foreign gems to remind us that ours is but one perspective.
City Lights (dir: Charlie Chaplin, 1931) With the availability of modern technology and the grating nature of street mimes, we tend to forget that it’s possible to tell a great story without the aid of pyrotechnics or even so much as an uttered word. The story of a sweet-natured tramp who falls for a blind flower girl, Charlie Chaplin’s last silent movie is a veritable primer on how much humor and poignancy can be conveyed with nothing more than the human body and a decent piano. The girl mistakenly thinks he’s wealthy, and through a bit of luck the tramp helps raise money for a sight-restoring operation. In so doing, though, he realizes that the flower girl will see him for the poor man that he is. Choosing to sacrifice his own happiness, he lends credence to the common panhandlers’ refrain that the poor are more giving than the rich.
The Grapes of Wrath (dir: John Ford, 1940) Among the great American novels, Steinbeck’s narrative is freighted with long passages of sociological essayism. Remarkably, the inevitable compression that takes place in adapting a novel to the screen comes off here more as a brilliant distillation. Henry Fonda was never better than as everyman Tom Joad, moving his bedraggled family from the Dust Bowl to California, only to discover they’ve swapped one patch of misery for another. Splendidly acted and remarkably unsentimental, this represents Hollywood at its best.
Oliver Twist (dir: David Lean, 1948) Dickens’ consummate tale of an orphan who falls in with a pack of pickpockets on the streets of London has been committed to film about a thousand times, but no version is better than Lean’s. Unparalleled among directors at interpreting Dickens’ work, Lean was adept at using exquisite cinematography to present the author’s rich characters; here he gets an especially fine performance from Alec Guinness as the fiendish Fagin.
Midnight Cowboy (dir: John Schlesinger, 1969) Yet another classic, this one featuring two major talents in a wrenching tale of disconnection and loneliness. Jon Voight plays Joe Buck, a rangy Texas stud who rolls into New York figuring to make his living servicing horny rich women. Though he wears a black hat, he’s not evil—he’s just dumb. Eventually, he hooks up with the pathetic Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), a tubercular greaseball with a hitch in his giddy-up and a taste for petty scams. As a way of persevering in the face of a harsh reality, Ratso pipe-dreams about living the good life in Florida. The interplay between these two leads is outstanding, and if you’re at all confused about the difference between tenderness and mushiness, here’s your chance to get it straight.
Pixote (dir: Hector Babenco, 1981) Praised far and wide by critics, this Brazilian film is not for the faint of heart. Played by Fernando Ramos da Silva, Pixote is a 10-year-old urchin who has already seen a lifetime’s worth of misery—he wears the faraway stare of a sane person trying to endure a mean world. Pursuing any and all means of survival, our boy roams the streets of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, dealing drugs, committing murders, and eventually becoming the unlikely pimp to a weary prostitute (played spectacularly by Marilia Pera). Similar to Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados, this film never plays for the easy emotional score; rather, it’s concerned with portraying the corrosive effects of abandonment and of lives never infused with the notion of worth. Several years later, while still in his teens, da Silva was himself gunned down by police.
Streetwise (dir: Martin Bell, 1984) One of the best documentaries of the 1980s, this unblinking look at young people on the streets of Seattle is grim but thoroughly fascinating. It’s a nifty bit of filmmaking, and the camera follows the kids everywhere, be it to the gynecologist or to see their old man in prison. Most strikingly and hauntingly, the film conveys some of these kids’ capacity for insight, and, in the absence of any traditional family structure, the ways in which they gamely try to fashion a stable, loving environment of their own.
Salaam Bombay! (dir: Mira Nair, 1988) Like Pixote, this film was made on location using nonactors; it’s at once striking and profoundly distressing in its realism. Chaipau is a young boy living on the streets of Bombay as he tries futilely to raise enough money to return to his mountain village. His life is one of work and deprivation, and yet director Nair manages to frame the whole affair with a striking note of beauty. While less violent than Pixote, it is nonetheless every bit as jarring in its portrayal of childhood as a period devoid of freedom and innocence.
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