| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3

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| Movie Review | The Journal of American History, 88.3 | The History Cooperative

Movie Review

Streetcar Stories. Prod. by Michael Mizell-Nelson. 1997. 57 mins. (University of California Extension, Center for Media and Independent Learning, 2000 Center St., Fourth Floor, Berkeley, CA 94707-1223)

"It used to be when you went anywhere," recalls the first narrator in Streetcar Stories, "you either walked or took the streetcar." Streetcars indeed were a ubiquitous part of American urban life for most of the first half of the twentieth century. In addition to linking residential neighborhoods, workplaces, shopping districts, and entertainment venues, the streetcars influenced property values, shaped urban development, often were the sites of dramatic labor disputes, and, in the segregated South, were the principal location where blacks and whites literally rubbed elbows on a daily basis. 1

Streetcar Stories, produced in association with the New Orleans Streetcar Museum, takes a look back at that city's long, storied streetcar history. To be sure, the documentary treats such tried and true subjects as the popular, still running St. Charles line and the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Yet by no means is it simply an exercise in nostalgia. The documentary also takes a look at the violent 1929 streetcar strike, racial segregation, and the ways in which federal and local policies led to the decline of streetcars by midcentury, among other topics. The impulse to extend and challenge public received historical wisdom about the streetcars through the treatment of such subjects is commendable; the documentary's unimaginative, limited production, however, leaves one wishing for more. . . .

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