“Dead End” (1937)

Someone suggested that the film “Dead End” (1937) needed its own thread. So here goes. The movie was adapted from the stage play of the same name. The 1930’s, with the economic and social upheaval of the Great Depression, was a time of Social Realism in the Arts. The play, by Sidney Kingsley, was an effort to show urban slum life in more realistic terms. It succeeded in helping foster a movement to “clean up” those areas of cities (Ironically enough, by creating large scale housing: The Projects, which developed their own issues as time went by.) That said, the realism portrayed was out-of-bounds for Hollywood and major changes had to be made for the adaptation in light of the recently implemented Production Code. All of the profanity of the play was excised, for example.

In the play, the lead character is “Gimpty,” a disabled and failed architect reduced to working odd jobs in the slum. In the film, he is Dave Carroll, played by the healthy, strapping Joel McCrea, who is caught between being a “kept” man to a wealthy society type, and his childhood sweetheart, Drina, (Sylvia Sidney – last seen as the chain-smoking deceased case worker in “Beetlejuice.” (1988) and the grandmother will a love for Slim Whitman, in “Mars Attacks!” (1996) who is desperate to keep her kid brother, Tommy, (Billy Halop) from a life of crime with his pals, the Dead End Kids. Coming back to visit the neighborhood, is successful gangster, “Baby Face” Martin, played by Humphrey Bogart. His return is not what he expected. His mother, played by Marjorie Main, has long suffered from his career and rejects him. His childhood sweetheart, played by Claire Trevor, has, well – here’s when the play has to be cleaned up. In that work, she is a prostitute dying of social disease. In the film, this is only implied.

There are other familiar faces: Wendy Barrie as the socialite keeping McCrea, Alan Jenkins in his reliable sidekick role to Bogart’s hoodlum. And, of course, the original six actors playing the Dead End Kids – Halop. Bobby Jordan, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Bernard Punsley, and Gabriel Dell.

Kingsley was moved to write the original play while walking in the area around Queensborough Bridge. At the time, glittering fortress-like residential towers were rising in areas which were otherwise on their heels. The interaction helps drive, in part, the action of both the play and film. It seems to have some relevance today when, looking at the Manhattan skyline, a forest of new, glittering, residential towers are rising.

Hollywood wouldn’t be Hollywood if they didn’t tinker with Kingsley’s very downbeat play ending. McCrea’s Connell and Bogart’s Martin cross paths a final time and though not everything is resolved, it is a bit more hopeful finish on film.