City Streets is a 1931 American Pre-Code romantic melodrama directed by Rouben Mamoulian from a story by Dashiell Hammett and stars Gary Cooper, Sylvia Sidney and Paul Lukas.

She finds that her father is unrepentant and involved with a loose, gold-digging woman named Pansy (Betty Sinclair).

Maskal soon takes a strong liking to Nan, throws her a homecoming party, and forces her to dance with him all evening.

[9] Mamoulian, to evade studio artistic control, refrained from making any explicit alterations to the Garrett/Marin scenario in advance of filming.

[10] Late in pre-production, Clara Bow experienced “a much publicized nervous breakdown” and was replaced by Sylvia Sydney.

The voice The Kid (Gary Cooper) is heard speaking when the screen shows only Nan's (Sylvia Sydney) face, in a sense superimposing Cooper's spoken thoughts on that of Sydney's as a dramatic device, a form of “subjective sound.”[14][15] Paramount publicity personnel warned that audiences would be disconcerted by hearing a character speak without seeing the actor's lips moving.

Rejecting any ersatz facsimiles of grand symphonic recordings, Mamoulian insisted on having genuine masterpieces as musical embellishments.

Spergel points out that Hollywood executives were pleased to see “high art” appropriated so as to add luster to their productions.

[17] The New York Times observes that director Rouben Mamoulian “photographic artistry’ trades character and narrative development for “clever cinematic ideas” manifested in “unusual camera stunts and angles” and not without “photographic artistry.” The reviewer finds the actors generally appealing, but regrets the “hapless casting” of Paul Lukas as Big Boy Maskal.

[19] Though the story involves bootlegging and power struggles among mobsters, the stylized treatment of the topic resembles Paramount's 1927 silent classic “fantasy” Underworld by director Josef von Sternberg.