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Manhattan, New York, the lower East Side, riverside: It's a place
littered with people most hard hit by the depression, people who have to
fend for their lives on a daily basis, living in places a little better
than holes. Their kids have little choice other than prowling the streets
all day, and it's only a question of time before they get into trouble.
And right next to this neighbourhood are the backdoors of rich folks'
homes, and you can see onto their balconies where they seem to have
parties all day and all night. Baby Face Martin (Humphrey Bogart) has
grown up in such a neighbourhood. He has since become a big time gangster,
and has famously killed eight people. Sure, technically he's on the run
from the police, but a bit of surgery keeps him out of their clutches just
a little longer. These days, he has returned to his old neighbourhood, to
reconcile with his old mother (Marjorie Main) and reconnect with an old
love (Claire Trevor) - but the old woman wants to have nothing more to do
with him, while his former flame has since become a prostitute. Though
frustrated by this, Baby Face still refuses to leave his old neighbourhood
just like that, as he sees himself in Tommy (Billy Halop) and his gang of
young hoodlums (Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Gabriel Dell, Bobby Jordan,
Bernard Punsly), who spend their time prowling the streets, committing
petty crimes and looking for trouble. But then Tommy finds himself on the
run after he had a run in with who turned out to be a judge's brother
(Minor Watson). Dave (Joel McCrea) was in school with Baby Face once,
and grew up in the same neighbourhood, but while Baby Face ditched school
before too long to become a criminal bigshot, Dave stayed honest and
became an architect - and remained dirt poor as a result. He and Tommy's
archetypical good girl sister Drina (Sylvia Sidney) are somehow a couple,
but he actually feels drawn to the next-door rich girl Kay (Wendy Barrie)
- and she feels drawn to him as well, but somehow can't accept the poverty
he lives in. Eventually, Dave gets into an argument with Baby Face which
results in a shoot-out ... and Baby Face's death. Dave suddenly finds
himself in possession of a healthy lump of reward money, which works like
a magnet on Kay. Around that time though, Spit (Leo Gorcey) snitches on
Tommy, and Tommy manages to evade arrest only just - but he's so obsessed
with catching the snitch that he blows all caution in the wind and almost
gets arrested. Dave and Drina though persuade him to give himself up
rather than spending a life on the run and becoming a celebrated corpse
like Baby Face. And Dave promises to get Tommy the best lawyer in town ...
with the reward money that he could have burned with Kay. Dead
End, a phenomenal success when released and the film that gave us the
later Bowery Boys, is a film that actually hasn't aged too
well: It's a bit too stagey to work as a movie - little wonder then that
it started life as a stageplay (with the same Dead End Kids
in the leads, actually) - and it's a bit too clichéed to spark too much
interest. At the same time though, it's easy to see why the film was as
successful as it was when originally released: It pretty much hit a nerve
with contemporary audiences, featured a story that seems to be
"ripped from the headlines", went for realism rather than
glamourisation (even if it was obviously entirely filmed on a soundstage),
and it told its story in an entertaining way and with the prerequisite
moral ending at the end. So yeah, while the film might not have aged too
well, it's still a great document of the time it was made in and is
probably best watched as such.
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find Dead End at adultvideouniverse.com
