Time for another entry in the Oscar Film Journal, here at Enuffa.com! Still chipping away at the catalogue of Best Picture nominees....
Today's entry is the 1937 crime drama Dead End, based on the 1935 play of the same name. Dead End was helmed by acclaimed director William Wyler (Ben-Hur, The Best Years of Our Lives) and stars Sylvia Sidney (who you might remember as Alec Baldwin and Geena Davis's chain-smoking caseworker in Beetlejuice), Joel McCrea, and a young-ish Humphrey Bogart. The story all takes place in a run-down Manhattan tenement neighborhood, at a time when wealthy developers were beginning to take advantage of the view of the East River and building ritzy high-rises right next to poor riverfront property. Drina (Sidney) and Dave (McCrea) are lifelong friends who clearly have feelings for each other, but Dave has been seeing well-to-do neighbor Kay, who is also attached to a rich fellow. Drina's brother Tommy is part of a juvenile street gang involved in petty crime and bullying, but she dreams of getting out. An old acquaintance of Dave's shows up after a long absence, Hugh "Baby Face" Martin (Bogart), and we find out he's wanted for multiple murders and has been on the run for years, having changed his name and gotten plastic surgery. Martin is back in town to visit an old flame in the hopes of taking her on the road with him.
The tone and frankness of this material is surprising for the era, as this film was made after the implementation of the Hays Code. Yet it deals with ideas like gentrification, class warfare, gang life and prostitution, and depicts a pretty violent gunfight for the late 1930s. The street toughs violently attack one of the rich neighborhood kids for his pocketwatch, leaving his clothes a tattered mess. Hugh's mother is disgusted at his turn to crime and wants nothing to do with him, denouncing him as a murderer. Hugh's ex-girlfriend Francey implies she is now a streetwalker and has contracted a venereal disease. This is pretty heavy material for a Hays-era film and pulls very few punches; I can only imagine how explicit the stage version was.
The performances are stylized, very much of their era, with exaggerated accents and snappy 1930s language. The street gang especially delivers their lines like a cartoon and thus their performances feel dated, but that's not totally unexpected given the story's original medium. This is very much a stage play presented as visually engaging cinema. Bogart is quite convincing as a brutal criminal, a contrast to the anti-hero roles for which he'd become famous. Yet he still draws some sympathy after being rejected by both his mother and his ex.
Visually Dead End could be classified as pre-noir, its cinematography stunningly handled by the legendary Gregg Toland (who would later film Citizen Kane). The opening and closing shots are essentially the inverse of Kane's, at the start of the film we pan down from the NYC skyline into the Stygian depths of the slum, and vice versa at the end. The neighborhood is a masterfully crafted set, full of grimy detail and jagged, angular streets and alleys; I wonder if Hitchcock's massive Rear Window set was influenced by this one. Toland captures the oppressive poverty with intense shadows and cluttered foregrounds; Drina and Tommy's tiny apartment for example always has a piece of furniture slightly in the way of the action. During a late scene where Dave and Hugh are stalking each other in a dark alley the slits of light from above the fire escape are all that illuminate the shot. Toland was already proving himself an invaluable and influential photographer.
Overall Dead End is a pretty fascinating film, its visuals and production design lending the material an immersive quality that plunges the viewer into these austere living conditions. For kids like Tommy his path seems destined to lead to hard, violent crime like Hugh's did. These kids have no choices and no future; the rich folk who just moved in have seemingly made certain of it.
I give Dead End ***1/2 out of ****.
No comments:
Post a Comment