Dead End Kids!

I have been familiar with the "Dead End Kids" (perhaps more famously known as the "Bowery Boys") for many years, but I had never seen Dead End, the 1937 movie by director William Wyler which launched their careers. Now I have, and I can report it's a pretty interesting and even at times compelling flick.

The movie adapts a Broadway play which featured these chaps who are only part, albeit an exceedingly memorable part of a narrative which focuses on the toils and travails of people who live cheek to jowl in the tenements of the poor and terraces of the rich at the end of a New York City street. It's a morality play about the value of human beings regardless of their environment and how that environment can lay foundations for complete lives.

We follow Tommy and his sister Drina (Sylvia Sydney), two siblings who are trying to do the right thing by one another despite painful poverty. Tommy is part of a gang of boys who have little to do aside from swimming in the river and causing trouble with each other and others youngsters on the street. Adults wander in and out of this setting, some rich who sniff at the poverty they usually are able to ignore, some poor who live alongside and within the poverty, and some who have escaped and have returned. The latter is found in the form of Baby Face Martin (Humphrey Bogart), a gangster who wants to see his Mother (Marjorie Main) and his old flame (Claire Trevor). He finds that his romantic notions have given way to grim and harsh reality and his response is violence. Violence too marks the life of Tommy and we see two individuals at the two ends of a life turned to crime. What happens is the stuff of the tale.

It's a classy production with a stellar set and functions very much like a filmed play. The static setting is livened by clever camera angles and occasional scenes set inside the tenements, though we never set foot inside the swank apartments of the well-to-do. The story here is about the rough and tumble of the Great Depression and the swelter of the immigrants who found themselves bundled together in situations which demand the most of them and which demand often more than they can deliver.

Highly recommended.

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