Dead End (Samuel Goldwyn). Most Manhattan streets come to a dead end at the East River. This, and the fact that often on Manhattan's East Side only a course of masonry separates the triplex apartments of the rich from the cold-water flats of the poor, were about all Playwright Sidney Kingsley (Men in White) needed to write one of the most successful plays of the 1935 Broadway season. A large measure of its success was due to Norman Bel Geddes' superrealistic set and to the children Messrs. Geddes & Kingsley cast as the gang which contributed most of the noise and all the excitement to the show.
Producer Samuel (''The Touch") Goldwyn, for all Hollywood's physical resources and the more elastic dimensions of the screen, has not improved on the single set Designer Geddes squeezed into the little old Belasco Theatre stage, but Playwright Lillian Hellman's (The Children's Hour) cinema version enlarges the play's design, intensifies its mood, sharpens its implications. And Producer Goldwyn was smart enough to import the Geddes-Kingsley gang en masse, the whole dirty, ruthless, gay, heroic, nasty, sadistic crew of them. In their transplanted metropolitan hell, Tommy (Billy Halop), Dippy (Huntz Hall), Angel (Bobby Jordan), Spit (Leo Gorcey), T. B. (Gabriel Dell) and Milty (Bernard Punsly) again speak in the thickened explosives of New Yorkese, roast mickeys (potatoes) in street fires, harass the brass-buttoned doorman of the neighborhood's swank apartment house, defy a flatfoot (policeman), beat the dickens out of a rich kid (Charles Peck), plan a gang war. When the rich kid's old man tries to have Tommy pinched for copping his son's watch Tommy slashes him with a pocket knife and runs away. Interspersed in this frieze of juvenile delinquency are adult characters whose unanimous disillusionment adds the last drop of poison to this bitter scene, notably Tommy's sister Drina (Sylvia Sidney) who is picketing for a wage high enough to enable her to move Tommy out of the slums, the young architect (Joel McCrea) who dreams of some day being able to rebuild the slums but at the same time wants passionately to leave them, the cop who thinks that arresting kids is a humiliating job for a man, Baby Face Martin (Humphrey Bogart), the gangster who comes home to find his mother loathes him, and his old sweetheart Francey (Claire Trevor) is a physical ruin. The not unhappy ending of the screen version of Dead End is no less valid than that of the stage original, should strike even the most critical cinemagoers as art rather than artifice.