Here's what Criterion has to say about the 65-minute film:
Lionel Rogosin's landmark of American neorealism chronicles three days in the drinking life of Ray Salyer, a part-time railroad worker adrift on New York's skid row, the Bowery. When the film first opened in 1956, it exploded onto the screen, burning away years of Hollywood artifice, jump-starting America’s postwar independent-film scene ...
Developed in close collaboration with the men Rogosin met while spending months hanging out in neighborhood bars, "On the Bowery" is both an indispensable document of a bygone Manhattan and a vivid and devastating portrait of addiction.The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1957.
Check out the trailer here...
Metrograph is at 7 Ludlow St. just north of Canal. Find the movie times here.
And this screening is part of a larger Rogosin retrospective at the theater.