Dead End

A street in New York. On one side a luxury building newly put up by the river, on the other old tenements. Two worlds open onto the same dead end. A group of boys hangs about the street: swimming, fighting and petty theft. Dave, who wanted to be an architect and cannot find work, lives here. One day a man who left the neighbourhood comes back: Baby Face Martin is now a wanted killer and has come to see his mother and his old girlfriend. William Wyler directs. Sylvia Sidney, Joel McCrea and Humphrey Bogart are in the cast. The source is Sidney Kingsley's play. The boys are the same performers as in the stage production; they came from Broadway and made a series of films under the same name in later years. The whole film takes place on one set; the street and the riverside were built in a studio, and the design is what is most discussed about it. The subject is the relation between environment and crime. The film says it outright: boys growing up in the same street have two roads in front of them and which one they take is chance. Humphrey Bogart was not yet a star and was working in gangster parts; the character here is built as a man returning to his own childhood. There was trouble with the censors and some elements of the play were softened. Who it is for: viewers who like Hollywood cinema of the thirties and social realist drama. Who it is not for: its stage origin is plain, the thesis is explicit, and the ending is built to the moral frame of its period.