Movies featuring "Wrong Side of the Tracks"

The "wrong side of the tracks" was never more literal than in A Letter To Three Wives (1949)...

...in which the tracks were just outside that kitchen window, causing the entire Finney apartment to jump and bounce like a 4.0 on a thrust fault each time a train went by. L to R: Connie Gilchrist, Thelma Ritter, Linda Darnell (here embodying the savvy girl-with-a-plan who intends "marrying up" to escape her circumstances, and knows just how to do it).

Ritter provided her own charming take on the trope in The Mating Season (1951)...
 ...as the foreclosed hamburger stand owner and mother of yuppie John Lund who presents herself to his socialite bride Gene Tierney and, mistaken for a maid hired for a dinner party, makes herself so indispensable that she secures steady employment and remains incognito, navigating the couple through marital difficulties (among which is in-law Miriam Hopkins) with only her son any the wiser.

Barbara Stanwyck played her share of "girls with a plan" who rise from impoverished origins; perhaps the quintessential example of which was Baby Face (1933)...

...along with variations in such films as Ladies Of Leisure (1930), Ten Cents A Dance (1931), Shopworn (1932), Gambling Lady (1934) and Stella Dallas (1937). 1953's Titanic gave us a look at how "marrying up" can turn out 20 years on as she and social register husband Clifton Webb do battle in the best of taste:


Concurrent with Stanwyck, Joan Crawford was rags-to-rich-ing it in Possessed (1931), Dancing Lady (1933) and Sadie McKee (1934)...

...with Franchot Tone, Akim Tamiroff and Edward Arnold, and was still at it 15 years later in 1949's Flamingo Road...

...as a travelling carney dancer who runs afoul of corrupt sheriff Sidney Greenstreet when his political protege Zachary Scott falls for her.

Another quintessential was Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy, done in 1931 under its original title with Phillips Holmes...
 

...and in 1951 as A Place In the Sun with Montgomery Clift: