Dead End

Based on the eponymous Broadway play by Sidney Kingsley, and with a screenplay penned by Lillian Hellman, wife of crime fiction pioneer Dashiell Hammett, William Wyler’s Dead End was the first film to feature the Dead End Kids, a troupe of child actors who played troublemaking, thick-accented street urchins in a string of films mainly during the late 1930’s and 1940’s (here they’re supporting characters circumstantially connected to the main story). Combining elements of the coeval French poetic realism, naturalism, and film noir, Dead End opens with an aerial panorama of a studio-bound waterfront slum (and closes with the camera returning toward the sky), featuring buildings and bridges and boats, ultimately spotlighting a group of youths surrounding a fire barrel like witches around a cauldron. The neighborhood’s denizens, all of whom dream of brighter horizons, include aspiring architect Dave Connell (Joel McCrea), his wealthy mistress Kay Burton (Wendy Barrie), his lifelong friend Drina Gordon (Sylvia Sidney), and her little brother Tommy (Billy Halop), whose stabbing of a local man has him running from the police. Taking place over the course of a single night, the film also features rising superstar Humphrey Bogart as bitter gangster Baby Face Martin, who’s returned to the hood to plan a kidnapping, confront the mother (Marjorie Main) who wishes he were dead, reunite with former girlfriend Francey (Claire Trevor) who’s descended into prostitution, and, quite literally, stab someone in the back. Nominated for the Academy Award for best picture, the film establishes a distinctive atmosphere of nocturnal activity, such as diegetic piano music from a high-class party that fills the darkness in which Baby Face and his thugs enact their violent plots. Between Richard Day’s art direction and the cinematography of Gregg Toland, who would go on to achieve legendary status working on Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941), an extraordinary palette of expressionism combines angular buildings with beams of light that penetrate smoke and fog as characters traverse rooftops and hide in the shadows.