In one regard John Sayles resembles Woody Allen: he has had on-the-job training as director and has benefited from it. Of course almost all directors learn as they go along, but not many have started at the low level of these two. Like Allen, Sayles began as a writer; filming, to him, apparently meant merely adding pictures to his scripts. Now he understands cinematic resources and how to rely on them. With City of Hope (Samuel Goldwyn), which he edited as well as wrote and directed, the making of the film is so good that it nearly masks the screenplay's shortcomings.

The subject is the American city, its geist in our zeit. (The title is the name of an apartment project.) This city is in New Jersey and is never called Jersey City or Newark. The story is multi-stranded, with elements that are Italian, Irish, Hispanic, Jewish, black, and ethnically nondescript. The point of each story is to examine morality and to show that, like stretch socks, one sleazy morality fits all these days. This is hardly the whole truth about our cities and their people, but neither is it only sour fantasy; and it's the Swiftian charge that Sayles wants to level.

The hazards in urban life for physical survival portrayed in Boyz ’n the Hood are here transmuted into those for moral survival. Not much hope in the city of hope, says Sayles—at least for males. The only staunchly ethical people in the film are female, and this may be a negative compliment: none of these women is on the ethical front lines.

As director and editor, Sayles's first problem was to balance and control the many strands. But instead of viewing this as a problem, he took it as an opportunity. He devised his film as a concourse of cinematic streams, and he made the interweaving of those streams more than a narrative method: it's almost the substance of the film.

Flow is the dominant stylistic idea. Many minutes pass before the first cut is used. We stay with one character or group until we meet others, who take us to a third, then back to the first, and so on. The first fade-to-black—and there aren't many—doesn't occur until the film is well along.

This method replicates, in the picture's very being, the texture of the city as organism, the interdependence of supposedly individual drives. The life of the city is a series of small wars and treaties and tributes, all under the sovereign eyes of a few leaders, white and black, who themselves win, no matter what happens to the small fry (which includes the mayor).

And this method is helped by the way Sayles sees his people. Very much of the film is shot quite close up, not with immense stupid screen-filling heads, but with a sense of accompaniment. We are with this man or that woman at virtually every moment. The cinematographer, Robert Richardson, gives these faces his prime attention. He even finds ways to light Vincent Spano, the chief white male, in ways that take Spano's face from its former flabbiness to some distinction.

Sayles's view of our souls is gloomy. A successful construction boss, Tony Lo Bianco, who has tried to play things generally straight, is forced under political pressure to permit arson in some of his properties. His son, Spano, feeling estranged from his father, drifts into crime. An idealistic black city councilman, Joe Morton, who is fighting corruption as well as those other blacks who think he is Whitey's tool in Whitey's politics, succumbs to the use of demagoguery as a means to success.

What's even gloomier is Sayles's one attempt at a ray of hope. A white jogger is attacked by two black teenagers, and when the jogger tells the police, the youths contend that the jogger approached them homosexually. A ruckus follows in the press. Then the mother of one of the youths (more female staunchness) persuades her son to tell the truth. At the last he and the jogger are jogging together.

This is the most blatant instance, because cheery, of a recurrent flaw. Sayles's conspectus of the city is presented with candor and considerable verve. But when he begins to dramatize, he begins to wobble. (Again like Woody Allen.) Along with many another screenwriter and playwright before him, he is honest in intent but deficient in art. His dramatic devices are as stale and contrived as those used by much less honest writers.

The romance between Spano and a divorcée is tediously predictable. The vengeance of the woman's ex-husband, the results of the arson, Spano's agreement to take part in a robbery with two patent fools—all these are mechanisms that Sayles sets up for his own ends. And he uses a demented man as a motif throughout the story the way Middle European writers once used village idiots, as symbols of latent irrationality amid seemingly rational people.

But the verve is there. I'd guess that Sayles has been studying Scorsese and has learned ways to make his picture seem to be hurtling forward even when two or three people are merely talking—by filling the shot with supplementary action, like walking down a corridor or getting into a car. Occasionally there's a really striking shot, e.g., two cops in a patrol car seen from the back seat, with the world outside fuzzy. It makes the police car a mobile fortress, a refuge, in the midst of turmoil.

Spano is good enough. Lo Bianco strives for a solidity that doesn't come easily. Sayles himself plays a low-level crime boss with acid nastiness. Morton very nearly succeeds in making the councilman likable despite the character's discomfort at his own righteousness. Barbara Williams as Spano's girlfriend and Angela Bassett as Morton's wife fill in the conventions of two conventional roles.

One unheralded return is the appearance of Lawrence Tierney as an Irish capo. Tierney played the lead in Dillinger (1945) and, though he has appeared in a number of films since then, has been chiefly noted for his off-screen escapades, sometimes in saloons. Here he has weight and conviction as a man who has seen a good deal of the seamy side and can now afford to wax philosophical.

David Strathairn, respected in the theater, plays the demented man, who is first glimpsed in prison, then winds through various scenes right to the end. Sayles has contrived a finish that reunites Lo Bianco and Spano, alienated father and son, on a high floor of one of pop's unfinished buildings late at night. Spano needs help, and Lo Bianco calls down for help into the almost deserted street. The only one down there is the madman, who merely mimics the cry for help. The camera holds on him, from above, to finish the picture.

This whole last sequence is another script gimmick, but once more Sayles almost redeems it cinematically. Strathairn is seen only in long shot—possibly the most distant long shot in the film. This contrasts with the closeness of most of the people most of the time. The long shot in itself is the best element in Sayles's irony—a distant madman mimicking cries for help in the middle of this dark, unresponding city.