OVP: Dead End (1937)

Film: Dead End (1937)

Stars: Sylvia Sidney, Joel McCrea, Humphrey Bogart, Wendy Barrie, Claire Trevor, Marjorie Main

Director: William Wyler

Oscar History: 4 nominations (Best Picture, Supporting Actress-Claire Trevor, Cinematography, Art Direction)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Sylvia Sidney-click here to learn more about Ms. Sidney (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We're going to conclude our month-long tribute to Sylvia Sidney not far from where we started.  In some ways I might have cheated you out of a bit of Sidney's career by focusing so closely on a tight range of films.  Sidney's career did continue past the 1930's, but it was never the same as her brief heyday.  The actress worked sparingly into the 1940's, eventually being declared "box office poison" and only getting work in television.  While she would have two major comebacks in her career, first in an Oscar-nominated turn for 1973's Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams (based on the reaction at the time, she was not expecting Tatum O'Neal to win & wasn't happy about it) and then as a bit player in the Tim Burton films Beetlejuice and Mars Attacks! (Burton was a longtime fan)...I just didn't feel like these really captured the theme of our series this year or of Sidney's career as an actual headliner, so we're going to finish up our month with one of the more consequential films in her career, and certainly the better-remembered: 1937's Dead End.

(Spoilers Ahead) Dead End is unusual in the way it tells its multiple stories, so I'll give you a summary of kind of where the plot is, and then try to wrap your head around the structure.  The movie takes place in the New York City slums, where wealthy residents live in locked-up apartment penthouses while below them the poor inhabit run-down tenements.  The film has at its center a group of young teenagers who engage in petty crime, but most of the actual plot of Dead End is around a series of different adults.  Principally, there's Drina (Sidney), whose younger brother is one of the gang but who hopes that she'll be taken out of the slums by a rich man who never materializes.  Her childhood friend Dave (McCrea) is having an affair with Kay (Barrie) whom he loves but who cannot provide for her in the way that the wealthy man she's having an affair with can.  Concurrently, we see Baby Face Martin (Bogart) who comes back to his old neighborhood, seeing Dave (who he knew once) and wanting to meet up with his old girlfriend Francey (Trevor).  Baby Face, though, isn't welcome here-his mother (Main) won't welcome him home, and once he meets Francey he realizes that she's now a prostitute, one who is dying of syphilis.  Baby Face & Dave get into an altercation while Baby Face is plotting his next crime (kidnapping the son of one of the wealthy penthouse owners), and in the process Baby Face dies, and Dave gets the reward money.  Despite Kay offering to run away with Dave now that he has the money, he chooses instead to help Drina, whom he has always loved, pay for her brother to stay out of a juvenile detention facility, and hopefully stopping the poverty-to-crime cycle.

Dead End feels like a screened play, which it was (the original was by Sidney Kingsley, and was adapted here by Lillian Hellman).  The teenage hoodlums feel interchangeable (a bit of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern), but there's a fascinating dynamic in their language & their attitude.  For a movie made in 1937, it feels refreshingly modern, and I think that's that it's capturing some of the youth of the era in a way that we don't see for films often, and largely wouldn't afterwards because these youths would end up just a few years later going to war.  Though the cast would change, these kids would star in a series of films for Samuel Goldwyn,that would eventually become the Little Tough Guys, the East Side Kids, and finally the Bowery Boys, a series that would stretch two decades.  I haven't seen any of these movies, and none of them enjoy the critical reputation of Dead End, but I get why Goldwyn wanted to repeat this recipe.  The youths commentating on their adult counterparts, sometimes not knowing exactly why the adults are motivated to do the foolish things they do (thus getting around some of the post-Code conversations about sex, violence, & the criminal justice system) is smart-it works really well.

This is just one of the aspects of Dead End that's a winner.  Our star is Sylvia Sidney, and she gets her due (and yet another series of moments where she can appear flummoxed against impossible odds, which kind of became her theme this month), but she's not the reason you leave this film impressed.  That would be Humphrey Bogart & Claire Trevor.  Bogart wasn't yet a proper star when this came out (hence his third billing), but he proves why he became one with a rough, merciless performance.  He is cruel, and plays his role well as an adult man who never got beyond a teenager's mentality of "me, me, me"...you see that in the way that he admonishes his mother for not loving him unconditionally, even though he's a murderer.  And you see that in the big scene he has with Claire Trevor about halfway through the movie.

Trevor plays a prostitute named Francey, one who was once the love of Baby Face's life, and whom he sees as the ideal woman.  But in the years he's been away with his criminal enterprise, she has become a prostitute, and is dying.  This is one of the shortest performances ever nominated for an Oscar-it's just one scene-but it's unbelievably good.  Trevor comes in with bravado, plays Francey just right enough that you can't quite tell what is acting & what is real, and gives us a woman who gave up a hope a long time ago, but shows it's fun to dream, if only for a second.  This is brilliant acting, similar in scope to what we'd expect from 1950's method performers, and she never mines for easy sympathy.  She gets it though with Bogart playing his childish disgust (rather than understanding) when she isn't the same woman he left behind.  In under five minutes she gives us the whole story of a woman's life, and the cruelty of her unfair impending death.

The film's final two Oscar nominations are also winners.  The Art Direction is great-the street scenes feel confined, and like they're always being looked down upon from above, so that the players know where they rank in the world.  For a film from the 1930's, everything feels like it's been lived in.  And the cinematography from Gregg Toland is beautiful & electric, using closeups (like on Trevor's pale face or Sidney's tear-stained eyes) & wide shots (the shadowy looks at the docks, or how it grabs all of the production details in the scenes where the kids are hanging on a street corner) to further tell a story.  Dead End is a masterpiece, a movie that you can't really expect-it feels fresh, modern, & is a fitting end to our month devoted to its star, Sylvia Sidney.