Dead End (1937) September 15, 2006
Posted by John Hodson in : Film & DVD Reviews, Humphrey Bogart, Crime / Noir / Thriller , trackbackFirst published in another form at The DVD Forums.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be Humphrey Bogart, possibly the only thing Woody Allen and I have in common. That and the specs (plus the neuroses).
Who wouldn’t want to be the hard-bitten Rick Blaine, the resourceful Philip Marlowe or the quintessential noir detective Sam Spade? Who wouldn’t want to sweep Ilsa Lund off her feet, slap Joel Cairo around, or trade zingers with Vivian Sternwood Rutledge?
Well, ‘nobody wouldn’t’ is the simple, if clumsy, answer; these are characters as strong as, in reality, we are weak. They are desirable to women, unbeatable, implacable, always carrying a sharp wit and a loaded gat - and they are all, most definitely, Humphrey Bogart. Even in my pre-teens, I quoted him, practiced the famous lisp, pulled an imaginary snap-brimmed Fedora over my eye, his picture on my bedroom wall, next to la Dietrich, Karloff, Cagney and George Best. Here’s looking at you kids…
For Bogie, the road to stardom was a marathon, not a sprint; from his first screen bit part to the breakthrough of The Petrified Forest - a role he won only because of the stubborn intransigence of Leslie Howard, for which Bogart was forever grateful - took 16 years, time he spent playing ‘anyone for tennis’ types on stage, scratching around. Even then, Duke Mantee seemed to have typecast him as the heavy, sneering and catching bullets for the next few years in the final reel, usually from Jimmy Cagney or Eddie Robinson.
It wasn’t until Bogart took the part of Roy ‘Mad Dog’ Earle in High Sierra, made the public weep for a doomed criminal, and got rave reviews, that audiences - and more importantly Jack Warner - at last began to see Bogart as something other than the guy they always booed. The following year came the wonderfully cynical Sam Spade, the chase for the black bird, and a film that made this intelligent middle-class New Yorker one of the biggest stars in the Hollywood firmament - at nearly 42 years old.
At the heart of Bogie’s ‘bad guy’ period, came the 1937 Samuel Goldwyn production of Dead End, but Bogart wasn’t just on show here as mere cannon fodder; he was beginning to flex his quite considerable acting muscles (the apogee of which is arguably seen in John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre or Nicholas Ray’s sublime In a Lonely Place) and Hugh ’Baby Face’ Martin gave him the opportunity to do just that.
Made the year before Angels With Dirty Faces, the film spawned the ‘Dead End’ kids (aka the ‘Bowery Boys’) and there are indeed some similarities between the two movies. We have a group of no-hope kids, living dirt poor, stealing, thumbing their noses at authority, who respect and emulate those that came from the same environment and who are now full blown hoodlums. But in ‘Angels’ Cagney - even while he blazing away at the forces of law and order - was always the hero figure; he wasn’t evil, just, well, just ‘a kid who couldn’t run fast enough.’ Obviously Warner, never one to miss the main chance, spotted the potential in simply tweaking the story for his studio’s massively successful gangster series, while knocking off some of its harder edges.
If Rocky Sullivan was just a good kid who took a wrong turn (and who shoots the occasional cop), Bogart’s ‘Baby Face’ Martin is scum; a cold-hearted stiletto wielding killer in a $150 hand made suit, who, with some relish, advises kids to use broken bottles, rocks and knives in a street fight.
Ostensibly, director William Wyler’s film stars lovers Sylvia Sidney and Joel McCrea and their attempts at finding happiness in the hell’s kitchen of New York’s Lower East Side. But there is little doubt that while Bogart, rapidly climbing the ladder to real stardom, is on screen, he’s the real focal point. He is little short of brilliant; and this is another part (the others being the aforementioned High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon) that Bogart won after George Raft turned it down. Raft thought the part was unsympathetic and was shocked at the scene where Martin’s mother cracks him in the chops. There’s even a Warners memo, by the way, considering Raft for Casablanca, though, in truth, the role of Rick was always going to be Bogie’s; who else could have brought that part to such vivid life? I’d love to have been a fly on the wall, however, when Raft visited his agent…
The story; Martin (Bogart) has returned to his old haunt to look up his aging ma (Marjorie Main, who specialised in such) and an old flame, tart with a heart Francey (Claire Trevor - she too rather cornered the market here didn’t she). Gangster Martin, a killer of eight men, is on the run, having just had plastic surgery. He thinks he’ll find some kind of valediction by returning home, but he’s rejected by his horrified mother and disgusted that his one time girl is now a disease ridden prostitute.
He bumps into the next generation of hoodlums, the local tenement street gang, gives them advice on street warfare but is warned off by one of his dockside contemporaries, Dave (McCrea), local guy trying to make good, who can’t make his mind up between Drina (Sidney), sister of the gang leader Tommy (Billy Halop), or the upmarket Kay Burton (Wendy Barrie).
The deeply disappointed Martin comes up with a ’slash and burn’ scheme to kidnap Kay’s younger brother, and Dave, who knows that mixing it with the gangster could mean a knife in the belly, determines to stop him. Meanwhile Tommy seems to be on the inexorable slide towards Reform School; can anyone save him?
Based on Sidney Kingsley’s successful stage play (he also wrote the play Detective Story that Wyler filmed so memorably in 1951) and adapted for the screen by the redoubtable Lillian Hellman, Dead End is a raw slice of social realism, that must have shocked Broadway theatre-goers. With it’s crowded, cockroach infested, tenements filled with rotting garbage, abusive and drunken parents and lawless, filthy children in rags, it pulls no punches.
There’s no doubt about the film’s political sympathies - in the ’30s it was still possible for those on stage and screen to hold liberal views without being tagged a ‘Red’, or, at least, not find yourself on someone’s blacklist - when Drina displays a handsome bruise given to her by a policeman while she was on a strike picket line. Meanwhile, literally looking down on this squalor are the newly built waterfront apartment blocks, filled with dance music from the party going rich, that seem to belong to another world. It’s no fun, need I make the point, being poor.
Nominated for four Oscars, there’s plenty to admire in Wyler’s film; fine acting all round, a sharp script, a quite ferocious Bogart, who, it must be admitted, saves the movie from at times from slipping into mere melodrama, and a noble McCrea (a part, in lesser hands, that could quite easily have slipped into ‘pompous’). There’s an admirable set design from Richard Day and Julia Heron, and some super cinematography by the legendary Gregg Toland, who bookends the film with trademark shots that descend from the skies above New York into the greasy tenements, and back again. At times, it might seem a little stagebound, betraying its roots, but it adds, rather than detracts, to the charm of the piece.
A word too, for some of the more minor cast members - you’ll catch Ford punch-bag Ward Bond as a doorman, Thomas E. Jackson from Public Enemy and Allen Jenkins (the voice of ‘Officer Dibble’) as Martin’s hang dog sidekick Hunk. It’s a taut 92 minute movie; exciting (there is a gun battle of extraordinary viciousness), intelligent, funny and entertaining.
MGM’s transfer of the film on R1 DVD (it’s also available quite cheaply in R2) is quite excellent. There’s hardly a mark or blemish to be seen and it’s beautifully clear; the original elements must be in remarkable condition. If I were to be picky I’d ask for a little more contrast, but, honestly, this is jaw-dropping, top-drawer stuff for a film coming up for 68-years-old. Of course, there are no extras, and subtitles are available in English, Spanish or French. Highly recommend.
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