Dead End (1937)
Robert Warshow states in “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” that the gangster is “what we want to be or what we are afraid we will become.”1 That observation certainly sums up Dead End, the first film in which Humphrey Bogart played a gangster to perfection. The picture picked up on a theme in The Public Enemy and developed it further: “The bad kids grow up to be bad adults, and the Dead End Kids are at a similar risk in Dead End.”2
Sidney Kingsley’s social protest drama Dead End opened at the Belasco Theater on Broadway in October 1935, to rave reviews for a successful run of sixty-five weeks. The film’s director, William Wyler (Dodsworth), saw the play in March 1936, and prevailed upon independent producer Sam Goldwyn to buy the screen rights for him. Wyler was particularly impressed by the elaborate set that designer Norman Bel Geddes had constructed for the play: a “narrow tenement street dead-ended at the East River and ran up against a swanky new high rise.”3 Gregory Black adds,
A sturdy masonry wall, guarded by a row of spikes on top, separates the wealthy residents of the East River Terrace apartment building from the squalid tenement buildings that line the other side of the street. The lives of the characters are determined by which side of the spiked wall they live on.4
A gangster, Baby Face Martin, a boss in the New York underworld, comes back for a visit to his old neighborhood. The members of the local youth gang, led by Tommy Gordon, idolize Martin. Tommy is being raised by his older sister Drina, who has little control of the boy. He inevitably gets into trouble with the law. The final curtain falls with Tommy probably headed for reform school, where he might well grow up to be the next Baby Face Martin. Indeed, the chief concern of the play, and the film derived from it, is that the rebellious, delinquent boys in the slums will grow up to be gangsters. Pauline Kael endorsed the play because it “radiates the Broadway social consciousness of the 1930s.”5
Goldwyn entrusted the screenplay of Dead End to playwright and screenwriter Lillian Hellman. Joseph Breen, the film industry censor, advised Goldwyn that the movie should be less emphatic than the play in “showing the contrast between the conditions of the poor in tenements and the rich in apartment houses.” Hellman remembered Goldwyn instructing her to “clean up the play,” but what he really meant was to “cut off its balls.”6
But Hellman managed to retain the play’s social consciousness in her script. Drina Gordon, Tommy’s older sister, is committed to social action that will provide a better life for her and Tommy, without getting involved with such underworld types as Baby Face Martin. Drina, writes Mike Cormack, “as a socially committed heroine, is without equal in 1930s Hollywood.”7
“In 1937,” William Wyler told me,
I filmed Sidney Kingsley’s play Dead End, which dealt with kids growing up in the New York slums. I asked Sam Goldwyn if I could make the film in New York, because the background was so integral to the plot. But he said, “I’ll build you a pier on the East River and some tenements right here on a Hollywood sound stage.” Everyone marveled at the huge waterfront set, which was constructed as the principal setting of the film, but to me it looked very phony and artificial. I heard later that Dead End was instrumental in getting new legislation to clean up the slums in New York City, because these kids needed better surroundings to grow up in.
Some of the reviews raised this point. “That was a pleasant surprise to me, because the slums depicted in the film never looked like the real thing to me,” Wyler concluded.8
William Wyler, director of Dead End (1937), at the time the author interviewed him.
Few critics agreed with Wyler that the film’s gigantic riverfront set, designed by Richard Day, looked artificial; in fact, several reviewers praised its authentic look. Charles Afron observes that the Broadway origins of the property are not disguised in a film like Dead End. “Instead they are made into a virtue.”9 The action of the film takes place in one central waterfront setting. During filming, Wyler extended the action principally by staging it throughout the slum tenement, from the basement to the roof. The constant movement between the various playing areas kept the movie from becoming static.
After the opening credits, which are painted on traffic signs, the movie opens with a printed prologue:
Every street in New York ends in a river. For many years the dirty banks of the East River were lined with the tenements of the poor. Then the rich, discovering that the river traffic was picturesque, moved their houses eastward. And now the terraces of these great apartment houses look down into the windows of the tenements.
The film proper begins with a panoramic shot of the New York skyline, after which the camera pans to the waterfront below. Finally, the camera zeroes in on the film’s elaborate principal setting, a slum street that comes to a dead end at the waterfront. A luxury apartment building has been erected where the slum frontage has been cleared, so that the apartment complex adjoins a tawdry tenement on the waterfront. The film’s action takes place in and around the towering rental apartment building and its neighboring slum dwelling. Edith Lee calls this slum tenement one of the seediest sets in Hollywood history. Richard Day’s expression of poverty includes “every crack in the wall, thick coats of dust, peeling paint, and stairways that creak.”10
The tenement is where the members of a local juvenile gang live. As the camera explores the narrow corridors and cramped living quarters, the viewer gets a sense of the confinement that the boys who live there must endure. This slum dwelling is what Michael Anderegg terms a “labyrinthine trap.”11 Moreover, the tenement is located on a dead-end street, which symbolizes how the boys have already reached a dead end; that is, they have no prospects for a promising future. Underscoring this point, Black writes that it is clear that the kids “have little education and no skills and are destined to live in the slums; only a miracle will save them from a life of crime.”12
That is why, Black continues, Joseph Breen, the industry censor, stressed that this film offered a strong plea for the elimination of the slums as a means of crime prevention. In fact, the ads for the picture aptly referred to “Dead End, cradle of crime.” Carl Rollyson comments that Lillian Hellman was praised by most reviewers of the film for “producing a taut script” that retained much of the play’s unvarnished realism.13
A former inhabitant of the riverfront tenement, Baby Face Martin (Humphrey Bogart) comes back for a nostalgic visit to his old stomping grounds. He is a notorious figure in the New York underworld, and the members of the youth gang revere him. “He is the future, as far as these youngsters are concerned,” writes Graham Greene; furthermore, Martin’s early life as a juvenile delinquent growing up in this grubby neighborhood “is there before your eyes in the juvenile gangsters.”14
Martin has come home to see his mother and old girlfriend. His meeting with both women proves to be a disaster. He spies his mother (Marjorie Main) from a distance and “calls after her excitedly,” says James Neibaur, “like a child with a good report card.”15 “Mom!” he shouts as he runs toward her. Her hostile response to his greeting is to slap him soundly across the face as she spits out her words at him: “Don’t call me Mom!” She tells him in no uncertain terms that she despises him and everything he stands for, and then she angrily turns her back on him and stalks away.
Humphrey Bogart (left) and Billy Halop (center) with the Dead End Kids in Dead End (1937). This is Bogart’s definitive performance of a gangster.
His meeting with Francie (Claire Trevor), his erstwhile girlfriend, is equally painful for him. He happens upon her on the street and invites her to rekindle their old relationship by coming away with him. She replies pathetically, “Look at me good—I’m not what I used to be.” Francie steps out of the dark doorway in which she has been standing and into the sunlight. Mike Cormack writes that Gregg Toland lights Francie in a “harsh and unflattering” way at this point. The glaring light of day mercilessly exposes her as the shabby, diseased prostitute she has become. Although there is no direct reference to Francie’s advanced case of venereal disease, only a young and naïve moviegoer would fail to infer what she suffers from. With deep revulsion, Martin slips her a few bills and turns away from her, as his mother had turned away from him. Hunk (Alan Jenkins), Martin’s sidekick, who has accompanied him on his trip to the old neighborhood, advises Martin, in the wake of his two bitter confrontations with the past, “Never go back; always go forward.”
Bogart’s handling of the two aforementioned scenes are reason enough to justify the critical opinion that in Dead End Bogart gives one of his finest performances as a gangster. Bogart skillfully suggests that this gangster’s tough exterior hides a sensitivity that yearns for the love both of his mother and his old flame. Martin’s sole satisfaction while he is back in the old neighborhood is to bask in the adulation of the gang of tough kids on the block, who admire him for making good in the rackets uptown.
Tommy (Billy Halop), the ringleader of the gang, looks up to Martin more than the others do. Thus, Tommy, in particular, takes to heart Martin’s advice to always carry a knife, since, as Martin says, “You never know when you will have to use it.” Consequently, when Mr. Griswald, the father of a rich boy who lives in the nearby luxury apartment building, confronts Tommy for roughing up his son, Tommy pulls a penknife on him, grazes his hand with it, and gets away from him. Drina (Sylvia Sidney), Tommy’s sister, who constitutes the only family he has, is distraught when she learns that her kid brother is being pursued by the police at Mr. Griswald’s behest.
Two scenes in the movie at this juncture are noteworthy for Wyler’s use of visual imagery. There is, first of all, the scene in which Tommy cowers in a shadowy cellar stairway as he hides from the cops. As Cormack observes, Wyler shows us “Tommy’s face in close-up, crushed by the shadow of the prisonlike bars of the stairway railing.”16 This image implies that Tommy is already imprisoned by his wretched life in the cruel and indifferent world of the slums.
Another scene in which Wyler’s visual knack stands out is that in which Dave Connell (Joel McCrea), Drina’s boyfriend, has a confrontation with Martin in an alley while Hunk is standing by. Dave warns the mobster to stay away from the neighborhood kids because of his bad influence on them. The pair get into a scuffle; Martin then pulls a gun on Dave and retreats down the alley. Dave, in turn, grabs Hunk’s gun and pursues Martin up a fire escape. Dave fires upward at Martin, who falls into the alley below, where he soon dies. The image of Martin’s ignominious fall from the top of the fire escape to the ground below symbolizes that he has been knocked off the pedestal on which Tommy and his gang had placed him. Martin’s downfall recalls that of Little Caesar and Tom Powers in The Public Enemy.
When Martin’s mother discovers that he is dead, she screams in anguish—she really did love her son. The leader of the police squad, who shows up after Dave kills Martin, is played by Thomas Jackson, who had a similar role in Little Caesar. Here he reassures Dave that he will get the reward for bringing down a public enemy. As the film draws to a close, Dave promises Drina that he will bail Tommy out of jail with the reward money, since Martin had a price on his head. He will use the money to save Tommy from going to reform school.
But the movie’s final scene implies that the rest of Tommy’s gang will not be so lucky. As the boys disappear into a dark alley in long shot, Wyler photographs them through a fence, reminding the viewer once again that these delinquent boys are imprisoned in the harsh, grim world of the slums (the cradle of crime). They remain convinced that they must stick together in their gang to survive.
Novelist and screenwriter Graham Greene, who was also a film critic, describes Dead End as a “magnificent picture of the environment that breeds the gangster.”17 By the same token, Joseph Breen emphasized that the film offered a “strong plea for slum elimination,” so that youngsters can grow into mature and decent citizens.18 The movie was also endorsed by the Catholic Legion of Decency in similar terms. What’s more, Dead End was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Picture, an honor accorded to no other gangster picture up to that time. In addition, Claire Trevor, Gregg Toland, and Richard Day were also nominated for Oscars. Although none of them won, it was still a stellar showing.
It is interesting to note, as a footnote to the film, that Tommy and the other members of his gang were referred to in publicity layouts for the movie as the Dead End Kids, even though they are never called that in the movie itself. The young actors who played the gang members continued to be billed as the Dead End Kids in the films they made together after Dead End for the next couple of years in an effort to cash in on the huge success of the movie. They costarred with James Cagney, for example, in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938). The title of the later movie is actually a reference to the boys singing a snatch of “If I Had the Wings of an Angel” in Dead End, implying their wish to escape from their prisonlike ghetto.
Billy Halop broke away from the group in the early 1940s, with the hope of building a career as an actor, but he failed to do so. The rest of the group continued as the East Side Kids (1940–1945), and then as the Bowery Boys (1946–1958), in a series of low-budget second features as they became “aging delinquents.” Halop and the others gave their best performances in Dead End. Indeed, they never recaptured the “vibrancy and sheer animal spirits they exhibited for Wyler.”19
It is significant to note that Greene, when he was a film critic in the 1930s in London, praised Dead End. In 1942, an American film, This Gun for Hire, based on a Greene novel, was released by Paramount. Alan Ladd plays Raven, a cold, hardened killer who is much like Baby Face Martin. “Gangster films began turning very dark” in the late 1930s, according to film historians Gerald Mast and Bruce Kawin, with movies like Dead End concentrating on the “inevitability of crime in urban America, and on criminals who were not simply selfish and tough like Little Caesar,” but downright pathological, like Raven in This Gun for Hire.20
Greene published the novel A Gun for Sale in England, in 1936; it was published in the United States in the same year as This Gun for Hire. Paramount produced a film version in Hollywood under the same name in 1942.
This Gun for Hire (1942)
Greene’s book is about a contract killer named James Raven, who has a harelip that both physically symbolizes the spiritual deformity of his personality and helps one to understand the morbid loneliness that has driven him to become an embittered assassin. Because of his wretched childhood in a reformatory, Raven is obsessed with the notion that no one can be trusted, and he is convinced that betrayal lurks at every corner. Even looking at a cheap Nativity scene in the lobby of a fleabag hotel reminds him that the little plaster child in its mother’s arms is waiting for the “double-cross, the whips, the nails.” As Raven says to an onlooker, “They put him on the spot, eh? . . . You see, I know the whole story; I’m educated.”21 Professor Samuel Hynes comments, “The baby in the crèche manger will grow up to be betrayed by a friend. . . . Betrayal and cruelty are realities in Raven’s world.”22
In the 1936 novel, Raven is hired by an enemy agent to murder a government minister of an unnamed country and thus help to instigate a war. The agent, however, then betrays Raven to the police to get him out of the way, once the job has been accomplished. In the course of his fleeing from the police, Raven meets a girl whom he finally brings himself to trust, only to have her turn him in to her fiancé, who has been in charge of the manhunt for Raven all along. After a gun battle, Raven dies, so disillusioned with this life that he does not fear what will come next, which he hopes will be better than the present life.
The screenplay for This Gun for Hire was cowritten by W. R. Burnett, whose novel Little Caesar was the basis of the classic gangster picture. Several changes were introduced into the script to make the plot more relevant for wartime America during World War II. The setting was changed from England in the 1930s to California in the 1940s, where fifth columnists are selling secret formulas to Japan. Moreover, Judith Adamson opines, “Raven has a crippled wrist in his coat pocket. The wrist was an unfortunate substitute for the original Raven’s harelip, because it drastically reduced the hero’s psychological complexity.”23
Paramount chose Frank Tuttle to direct This Gun for Hire—not surprisingly since, as I have written elsewhere, Tuttle was a dependable filmmaker who had directed movies in a variety of genres, including such glossy thrillers as the original 1935 version of Dashiell Hammett’s Glass Key, with George Raft. David Thomson’s assessment of Tuttle is that “none of his films have survived as more than typical studio product.”24 Except for This Gun for Hire, Glass Key is arguably his finest achievement. Brian Baxter notes that This Gun for Hire is “one of Hollywood’s great, underrated thrillers. . . . The movie is brisk, well-acted, atmospheric, and always entertaining.”25
For years, Alan Ladd had been stuck in bit parts in films, for example, as a reporter in the last sequence of Citizen Kane, until he was selected to play Raven opposite Veronica Lake (Sullivan’s Travels). At five feet, five inches tall, Ladd had a perfect match in Lake, who was five feet, two inches tall. Furthermore, they had an on-screen chemistry that made them a box-office sensation. Tuttle managed to commandeer an experienced cinematographer, John Seitz, who had photographed Valentino’s breakout movie, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). Seitz was well known for creating a sinister atmosphere of tension and dread with menacing, shadowy lighting. This knack would come in handy for the present film.
“The film got off to a good start,” Greene remembered, “but then the heroine was introduced as a female conjurer working for the FBI, and that had nothing to do with my story.”26 The movie does indeed get off to a good start. In the opening scene, Ladd establishes Raven’s combination of boyish charm and unflinching cruelty. The movie begins in a tawdry San Francisco hotel room, “with Raven caressing a stray kitten and then slapping down the chambermaid, who was foolish enough to throw the cat out.” In a single scene, Ladd portrays a kind of gangster not seen in a Hollywood film before: a “remorseless killer with charm and sex appeal.”27
Graham Greene, author of the novel on which the movie This Gun for Hire (1942) is based.
Raven keeps a rendezvous with Albert Baker (Frank Ferguson), an American scientist who is selling government secrets to Raven’s employer, who, in turn, is peddling them to the Japanese. After Raven takes the secret documents, there is a glint in his eye as he reaches into his briefcase and pulls out not the money that the scientist expects, but a gun, with which he summarily shoots Baker. Now there is no question of Baker blackmailing Raven’s employer. Raven notices the dead man’s mistress and mutters, “You weren’t supposed to be here.” In a panic, she slams the bedroom door in his face, and he shoots her through the door. He hears her body fall to the floor on the other side of the door. As Raven leaves the building, we momentarily get a glimpse of the more humane side of his personality, which he is always striving to suppress, by watching him retrieve a crippled child’s ball for her. “He is about to kill her,” Jack Nolan points out, “since she is the only witness who can place him at the scene, but he does not.”28
Later he briefly refers to his miserable childhood as an orphan. He had lived in a foster home with his aunt, who tried to “beat the bad blood” out of him. One day she branded his wrist with a red-hot flat iron, and he stabbed her to death. Because of his unhappy childhood, Raven believes that no one can be trusted, but that is as close as the movie comes to probing Raven’s character in the manner in which Greene does in the novel. Raven decides to move on to Los Angeles once the enemy agent who hired him turned him in to the cops. On the night train to L.A., he meets Ellen Graham (Veronica Lake), a female magician appearing in a revue in L.A. He dares to trust her, and she develops some feelings for him. She happens to be the girlfriend of Lieutenant Michael Crane (Robert Preston), the detective who is pursuing Raven. Accordingly, she is torn between turning him in to the police and shielding a murderer.
The movie is a fine chase melodrama, but the two songs that Ellen sings as part of her magic act are completely out of keeping with the tone of the film. Furthermore, the added complication of Ellen’s working for the FBI as a lady spy makes no contribution to the film, unless it is to back up the patriotic appeal that Ellen makes at one point to Raven about his collusion with fifth columnists: “This war is everybody’s business, yours too,” she concludes. Raven calls her speech “flag waving.” Willard Gates (Laird Cregar) is backing the revue Ellen is appearing in; he is also the “Man Friday” of Alvin Brewster, the arms manufacturer; Gates is the middleman between Raven and Brewster. Gates hired Raven to kill Albert Baker. The unscrupulous Brewster orders Gates to pay off Raven with marked bills so he can be apprehended by the police. Brewster, the cruel, aging industrialist, is played by Tully Marshall (Queen Kelly). Raven, seeking revenge on Gates and Brewster, shadows Gates to Brewster’s office at the munitions plant. When Raven draws a bead on Brewster, the old man succumbs to a heart attack; Raven aims his gun at Gates and wipes him out. Lieutenant Crane shows up in Brewster’s office, accompanied by Ellen Graham, and fires on Raven. He expires with a “little-boy smile” on his face, asking Ellen with his last breath, “Did I do alright for you?”29 He is referring to the fact that Gates had planned to have her exterminated because she knew too much about his involvement with Raven and the fifth columnists. Now Gates is out of the picture.
Despite its departures from Greene’s novel, This Gun for Hire is a good picture in many ways, and it prompted film critic Philips Hartung to say, “With all the changes in the story, the Greene original still survives. The tense excitement of the novel and its cold violence are natural cinema material. What readers of the novel will miss principally is Greene’s expertly interwoven asides on the morality of this study of evil.”30 Indeed, one also misses the haunting psychological dimension of the book. In the movie, there are few references to Raven’s background. Nor does Alan Ladd have a harelip, as Raven does in the book; as a result, we do not understand Raven’s motivation for being so cynical and pessimistic to the extent that we do in the novel, but he does come across as deeply disturbed.
Alan Ladd in his career-making role as the hired killer in This Gun for Hire (1942).
In actual fact, Alan Ladd gave a fascinating performance as Raven, which catapulted him to stardom and made the film a superior gangster picture. Tuttle rounded out his career with Hell on Frisco Bay (1955), a gangster movie in which he paired Edward G. Robinson and Alan Ladd, photographed by John Seitz. With This Gun for Hire, Tuttle can be credited with introducing a new strain into the American gangster genre: the criminal who is not only violent and corrupt, but emotionally disturbed as well. One can draw a straight line from Raven as a mental case in This Gun for Hire to Richard Widmark’s maniacal gangster in The Kiss of Death (1947) to James Cagney’s pathological mobster in White Heat (1949) and beyond.