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| Images courtesy of United Artists |
Originally a director-for-hire on silent westerns for
Universal Pictures before starting a tenure with United Artists and the Samuel
Goldwyn Company which resulted in some of his greatest films including Wuthering
Heights, Jezebel, The Best Years of Our Lives and eventually
the 1959 multiple Oscar winner Ben-Hur, William Wyler saw debatably his
first true screen masterpiece in 1937’s urban crime drama Dead End. Based in the slums of New York on the East
River beneath the Queensboro Bridge and featuring a group of young actors whose
roles in the Sidney Kingsley stage play of the same name in 1935 carried over
to the silver screen treatment, adapted for the screen by Lillian Hellman, its
one of many early screen examples of actor Humphrey Bogart as a villain while
functioning as an ensemble piece depicting class warfare between the rich and
impoverished at the titular Dead End lower half of the cityscape. As such, though relatively unknown today, it
remains one of the top ten gangster films of all time and garnered several
Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Best Art Direction, Best
Cinematography and Best Supporting Actress.
Opening on a street sign indicating the film’s title, we
happen upon the streets next to the East River where luxury apartments
inhabited by the wealthy sit adjacent to poor cockroach infested flats where a
group of hoodlum youths led by Tommy Gordon scour the streets looking to rob
and roughhouse the spoiled rich boy Philip living next door. Amid this, Tommy’s sister Drina (Sylvia
Sidney) is hoping to marry off to a rich man and escape with Tommy their
humdrum existence in poverty and crime before outside influences can further
corrupt his moral compass. Her plans are
complicated, however, by the unwelcome return of Hugh ‘Baby Face’ Martin
(Humphrey Bogart) who aims to rekindle relations with his estranged mother while
ignoring the pleas of local architect Dave (Joel McCrea) to keep away from
their community. After a failed visit
with his mother and ex-girlfriend turned prostitute, Martin redirects his
sights on kidnapping the rich boy Philip for ransom, resulting in a fiery gun
battle and chase across scaffolding and stairs when Dave catches wind of the
plan and intervenes.
A stage-to-screen success building on Humphrey Bogart’s
gangster role the year before in The Petrified Forest while also
inadvertently paving the way for a whole series of subsequent films featuring
the Dead End Kids, Dead End is perhaps best remembered for its
staggering set pieces constructed for the recreation of the New York City
slums. Designed by art director Richard
Day in what is still considered to be one of the most authentic and elaborate
film sets ever constructed, it functions as a mammoth centerpiece where most of
the principal action will take place ala Elia Kazan’s subsequent Marlon Brando
dramas On the Waterfront and A Streetcar Named Desire.
One of the first things viewers will notice
is legendary multiple Academy Award winning Citizen Kane cinematographer
Gregg Toland’s luminous and spacious camerawork, gazing up tall skyscrapers in
between ruminating over trash cans crawling with cockroaches and crumbling
alleyways. So arresting are the visuals
they almost pull you through the screen into the world of the movie. The soundtrack itself by Alfred Newman is mournful
and points to the lower end of the city as the arena of a forthcoming tragedy. Performances across the board are all
excellent with special attention to Marjorie Main as the beleaguered mother not
too happy to see her son Baby Face return.
Claire Trevor as Baby Face’s prostitute girlfriend garnered an Oscar
nomination while the three central roles of Sylvia Sidney, Joel McCrea and
Humphrey Bogart attack the screen space with all their might. And of course the aforementioned Dead End Kids
create an ensemble of juvenile delinquents in 1930s New York that feels like a
harder edgier riff on Our Gang and the Little Rascals.
Released in 1937 to rave reviews, Dead End proved to
be an essential building block in the respective careers of all who came into
contact with the project, further boosting the ensemble cast and crew’s
credibility while ushering in the Dead End Kids as a newfound youth-screen group
talent. A stage play filmed as a
flesh-and-blood reality with sometimes such authenticity including real
cockroaches the actors were taken aback, its an epic provocation that somehow
or another slipped many of its sly transgressions past the Hays Code board of
censorship and further cemented Humphrey Bogart as one of the 1930s most
formidable yet familiar faces. A
harbinger of things to come regarding the creative powers of William Wyler and
Gregg Toland who would deliver utterly stunning camerawork in Wyler’s still
pitch-perfect postwar drama The Best Years of Our Lives, Dead End functions
as a prime gangster film, an extension of film noir and among the first urban
streetwise dramas of its kind. All in
all, a surefire cinematic knockout from one of cinema’s greatest and most
versatile directors.
--Andrew Kotwicki
