Dead End
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Movie Reviews of Dead End
Movie Review: SUPER DVD MOVIE
Summary: 5 Stars
I RECIEVED THIS DVD LAST WEEK, AND COULD NOT WAIT TO WATCH IT
THE QUALITY AND SOUND ARE EXCELLENT,
Movie Review: AN OLDIE BUT A GOODIE
Summary: 4 Stars
Far too many movie goers are forgetful. They forget what movies were like in the early days. They forget that the times themselves were different in the early days. To truly enjoy a film made all those many years ago, you have to transport yourself into the time when it was made, when it was released. You have to place yourself totally in a different world, one without cell phones and home movies and the internet. When that happens, the movies themselves take on a whole new meaning. To truly enjoy the film DEAD END you have to transport back to those days, the first rather than last half of the 20th century. And in so doing you find yourself appreciating the story as well as the craftsmanship behind it all the more.
Okay enough speech making.
DEAD END is a classic in film storytelling, offering Humphrey Bogart at his most sympathetic and frightening in one fell swoop. And he isn't even the single main character!
Taking place in New York's lower east side in the 20s/30s era, the film takes place almost entirely on the dock there. A group of toughs (who later went to fame as the Dead End Kids then the Bowery Boys) hang out on the dock, watching the high and mighty that live in the upper class apartment high above their tenement slum.
Drina (Sylvia Sydney) is a young single girl who longs for a better life, a way to escape with her young brother and take him away from all of the squalor. But her brother has already fallen in with these kids and things don't look good. Even with the help of the man she longs for, Dave (Joel McCrea). Moving from job to job, Dave rarely notices this young woman who's interested in him having grown up with her.
Dave too wants out. He wants to move on to bigger and better things. But these seem to be nothing more than pipe dreams and his chances look slim. Even when he begins to go out with one of the upper crust citizens from the apartment building.
Enter Baby Face Martin (Bogart). On the run from the law and after some minor plastic surgery, Martin has returned to his old haunts one last time. He sees himself in the youthful gang and they worship him once they know who he is. Martin has come back to find his mother and see her before heading out.
The time he spends in the old neighborhood rekindles memories of everything from his own misguided youth to the girl he left behind. When she turns out to not have lived up to his hopes and expectations, Martin crumbles and his more violent side is revealed.
The only person who may be able to stand up to Martin is Dave. But the costs could be dear. And the future of Drina's young brother is held in the balance when he begins to follow in the footsteps of Martin.
Based on the stage play that was a huge hit at the time, DEAD END comes off as such, a play put on film. But the story itself, one of dreams and hopes of a better life for yourself and the ones you love, remains constant even in the world of today.
The acting may seem a little stiff at times, but one has to recall as I said in the beginning that this was the style of the time. It was acceptable then. It was how it was done. And at the same time, they seem to meld into their roles comfortably.
The movie stands as an indictment of the world of poverty. Its message remains true to not only those times but the present where locations such as this dead end cause countless people to turn to a world of violence as a solution. The movie may not inspire some to come out of it and walk the straight and narrow as much as it could have when it was released. But it couldn't hurt either.
Movie Review: Four and a half stars- Dead End?......dead on!!
Summary: 4 Stars
Nominated for four academy awards(winning none)this picture adapted from the Broadway play of the same name by Lillian Hellman literally grabs you by the collar and pulls you into its' world almost from the opening scene.
And this film is about TWO worlds,the rich who have built and occupied an apartment building right beside the East river and the slums who are right beside and below it.
And these are indeed seedy,crammed and bug infested slums.There are very few warts not shown.
The film opens as a garbage scow(a "gar-barge" in the vernacular) tows its' goodies on down the river and the residents brings theirs out to be picked up.The film revolves around the future Bowery Boys straight from the Broadway play to the screen.They hang around the street where a sign stands soberly over their "playground" which reads "Dead End".A metaphor to be sure and a strong one.
We are taken through the lives of many of the individuals who come into this melee and in the end come to the sobering conclusion that no matter what these people try to do
their lives will inevitably go nowhere.The gang will always be just a "gang",with the new generation waiting enviously to take
their place.A gangster who endures plastic surgery to go unnoticed has returned and ends up never leaving again.A man who went to college and trained as an architect is scraping by on odd jobs.The girl who loves him spends her existence trying to eake out a living while at the same time trying to keep her errant younger brother(part of the local gang) out of trouble with the cops.
Through all of this the rich that live for all intents and purposes WITH them live in a totally different and exclusionary world.There is one door that opens onto the street but this ironically is a "service entrance" and only used by the rich in a crunch which is hardly ever. And the doorman who guards this entrance(the lowliest cog in the apartment buildings' staff)astonishingly looks down his nose at the "low-lifes" just a few feet from the door step.This being a further tool to emphasize the disparity between the "igorance-is-bliss" rich world and the utter hopelessness of the slums.
This is one powerful film with alot to say and one that stays with you long after you watch it.
In conclusion you won't find a better picture of its' kind anywhere,it's cast is pure dynamite and the director creates the RIGHT atmosphere from beginning to end.On the techincial side this is a great print from the film vaults but more importantly it is a must own movie for any collector....period!
Movie Review: `Aren't they sweet?' `Yes, from a distance.'
Summary: 4 Stars
William Wyler's DEAD END opens with a crane shot of the beautiful skyline of New York City before descending down to a festering tenement slum abutting an imposing, polished upper-class apartment that stands like a walled and guarded castle. Gentrification has hit the East Side.
DEAD END is about poverty and crime, an examination of the social roots of that obsession of `30's movies, gangsterism. DEAD END is also the movie that first foisted the Dead End/East End/Bowery Boys on the movie-going audience. Before settling into a mediocre and prolific b-movie career in the `40s and `50s, the studios paired the Boys with a number of tough guy stars - Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, John Garfield. Of all the combinations this one is the most successful, in my opinion. At any rate, the Boys are more restrained, for once their schtick subservient to the script and the movie.
The rich moving in next door to the poor created tensions that attracted the attention of playwrights and Hollywood. The poor worry about labor strikes and putting food on the table. The rich practice their French at the breakfast table and hold swank parties deep into the morning. Drina Gordon (Sylvia Sidney) and Dave Connell (Joel McCrea) are two poor people who want a better life, want out of the slums. Although hard-working and educated, Connell has a college degree in architecture, they're stuck in a dead end, mired in hopelessness. The quickest out, of course, is through crime. `Baby Face' Martin (Humphrey Bogart) is a success story, of sorts. A famous gangster who dresses as good as the swells in the castle, Martin wants back in - at least in enough to enjoy a mother's warm welcome or a reunion with an old love who didn't become a prostitute and isn't suffering from late-stage syphilis. Claire Trevor's Francey plays Martin's old flame, and with the censorship of the day it takes a little effort and imagination to connect the dots and make sense of things when Bogart recoils in horror.
DEAD END still entertains. Don't be too fooled by the dvd cover art. Bogart is the third lead in this movie, and the main story takes place between the Sidney and McCrea characters. This urban melodrama is less about crime than the root causes of crime, and everyone is on the top of their game. Strongly recommended.
Movie Review: Lives Collide at Various Dead Ends
Summary: 4 Stars
When DEAD END was released in 1937, it received four Oscars including one for best picture. It didn't win but the power that was present in every scene is as noteworthy now as then. Residents of New York often overlook that they live on an island--no matter where they turn eventually they hit a dead end. Director William Wyler applied this dead end as both a symbol and metaphor for the various collisions of lives that intersect at the edges of the East River. There are the dirt poor who can never leave. The Bowery Boys (Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Billy Hallop) are a resident gang of teenage punks who live only to act as predators on helpless victims or to idolize older miscreants who have gone to reform school, lived a high life of crime, and have returned to their origins. Humphrey Bogart is one such but in his case, he desires anonymity. He is wanted by the police, has had plastic surgery to hide his features, but returns to reconnect to his mother (Marjorie Main) and a previous girlfriend (Claire Trevor). Both attempts end disastrously. Bogart's accomplice in crime Hunk (Alan Jenkins) warns him that in life, one must never look back, only forward. This adumbration becomes the film's subtext. Those who seek to return to the Way Things Were are foredoomed to defeat. Sylvia Sidney is Trina, a hard-working decent young woman who loves Dave (Joel McRea), who desires another (Wendy Barrie), herself a former lower class resident who seeks to marry into money. Trina's brother (Garbiel Dell) is wanted by the police on an assault charge, and she must decide whether flight with him is the answer. Bogart as the vicious gangster is the center of both plot and theme. It is he who attracts the others by forcing them to respond to his antiquated notion that one can indeed Go Home Again. He can't, of course, and neither can they. DEAD END is an early masterpiece that presents the grittiness of a hardscrabble existence that demands that everyone make the same choice as did Bogart. That he failed does not invalidate the efforts of others to succeed. DEAD END ends as a celebration of the realization that perhaps Bogart was not wrong to try in the first place.