1937 was a difficult year in the United States (and elsewhere as the Nazis and Imperial Japanese began using the power accumulated in the first part of the decade) but offered artists a window to create works with challenging, personal visions. I hardly want to go overboard in praise for Dead End yet this film demonstrates many qualities we are hard pressed to find these days in films featuring teenagers.
For a start, director William Wyler, working with screenwriter Lillian Hellman, crafted a nearly documentary look at life in a changing Manhattan where the poor folks where really poor and the rich folks were completely divorced from that reality, uncomfortable when it came in contact with them, and as always taking whatever they want from their lessers. In one scene, to illustrate, a woman seeking a comfortable life fell in love with a poor but noble guy from the neighborhood and was even thinking she could give up her easy life for him until she saw the huge cockroaches crawling on top of the garbage bin in the hallway of his tenement building; she raced out of there fast as her legs would run down the staircase.
Humphrey Bogart, Joel McCrea, and Sylvia Sidney are the adult stars and each has a strong performance. McCrea and Bogart grew up as part of an age group in the neighborhood but while Bogart left to become a big time hood and killer, McCrea scraped through college for a useless (due to the Depression) degree in architecture–he’s the noble guy I mentioned–and Sidney, very young and beautiful, is simply trying to earn enough to keep her and her teenage brother fed and under a roof. She loves McCrea but until just before the end, he sees her as the little girl she was growing up and not the adult beauty she’s become.
The key characters in this film, though, are the teenage boys around whom most of the action revolves. In subsequent movies, most of the crew became known as the Dead End Kids, but this was the first to feature them. I’m talking about Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall, Billy Hallop (he plays Sidney’s brother), the whole gang, which sometimes was called the Bowery Boys. These kids were kids, spitting at authority because they knew there was nowhere lower to go and reform school was little different from a life where their clothes were always torn and they had nothing better to do than fight each other or the gang two blocks over.
Definitely recommended
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