Big City Blues (1932)

Grant Mitchell: Station Agent

Photos 

Quotes 

• Bud Reeves : Oh, I don't think you got to really know New York.

  Station Agent : I wonder. I wonder if I didn't. I was a telegraph operator and a process server. I was a part-time life guard at Rockaway Beach. I worked on the BMT and drove a taxi. I was a rubber in a Turkish bath. Had a job on the day shift in the Hymnbook factory and on the night shift in the bowery flop house---a job they handed to let me to work out my rent. I drew wages in a hash house and a 'chink' laundry and a pet shop. For a week I sorted stiffs in the morgue and for a month worked on a coal barge. I delivered gin for a drug store in Astoria and had my own ice business in the Bronx. I met tramps and bootleggers and bishops and reporters and gun men and borough presidents and you, you come-a tellin' me I didn't get to know New York.

• Station Agent : [Handing Bud the train ticket to New York]  Here you are, sonny. $46 and you're in Manhattan. Forty six dollars... Ha, that's 22 dollars more than the Dutch East India Company paid the Indians for the whole fool island. A long and skinny bed of rock that you couldn't buy today for a million million.

• Station Agent : Say, I guess you're willing to stay around home now awhile, heh? Got enough of New York for good and all. That right?

  Bud Reeves : Well, certainly not!

  Station Agent : What's that? You mean you'd like to go back to that place?

  Bud Reeves : Of course I would! And I'm goin'. It may not be right soon, but, I'll go back. I know I will. New York's alright. It was just me that was wrong. It's a place that sorta takes hold of you. Gets under your skin. Licked me this time. Licked me bad. But, next time, maybe, well, it might be different.