By: Leonard Getz
If you grew up in the 1930s you knew them as the Dead End Kids. If you grew up in the 1940s they were known as the East Side Kids or Little Tough Guys. If you were a child of the 50s they were called the Bowery Boys. In the 1960s and 1970s they were on a TV program on channel 5 and 11 in New York every weekend afternoon called East Side Comedy. I’m part of the last group of fans who watched them religiously, and wondered how this phenomenon got started. I found out, and wrote a book about it called “From Broadway to the Bowery: A History and Filmography of the Dead End Kids, Little Tough Guys, East Side Kids and Bowery Boys Films, with Cast Biographies”
It began in 1935 with Sidney Kingsley’s Broadway play, Dead End about poor kids growing up in squalor, envious of the people living in the luxury apartment next to them. Destined for a life of crime the kids get a glimpse of what that life will come to when gangster “Baby Face” Martin returns to his old neighborhood and gets gunned down by the FBI.
Like other popular plays Dead End became a movie. Like no other play it spawned 92 movies spanning over 23 years. The themes and actors shifted slightly; the kids were always poor yet always prevailed, both on the screen and at the box office.
Samuel Goldwyn bought the motion picture rights, tapped Lillian Hellman to write the screenplay, and brought in Humphrey Bogart to star as the gangster. Unable to find the right actors in Hollywood to play the parts of the kids, Goldwyn offered the jobs to the same kids who created them on Broadway; Billy Halop, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Gabe Dell Bobby Jordan and Bernard Punsly. The film was nominated for four academy awards but didn’t win any. So successful and popular were the kids that Warner Brothers rounded them up and teamed them Bogart, James Cagney, Pat O’Brien, John Garfield, Claude Rains, Anne Sheridan and Ronald Reagan in 6 films, including “Angels With Dirty Faces,” “They Made Me A Criminal” and “Hell’s Kitchen”.
Cashing in on the kids early popularity meant paying the price of putting up with their pranks that, some cases, cost the studios thousands of dollars in damages. This included driving a truck into Goldwyn’s sound studio, making long distance phone calls on director William Wyler’s personal telephone, and tossing firecrackers into Humphrey Bogart’s window while he was taking a nap. The only person who didn’t put up with their mischief was Cagney who straight-armed Gorcey for ruining a basement take in “Angels With Dirty Faces”.
When Warner Brothers did not to renew their contracts, Universal Studios took Halop to be the leader of the “Little Tough Guy” film series, and Monogram Pictures put Leo Gorcey in charge of the “East Side Kids.” When these incarnations ended in the early to mid-1940s, Gorcey and Hall partnered to create the Bowery Boys comedy films that lasted through 1958.
After the Warner Brother films, critics turned their backs on them. The latter films belonged to the Saturday afternoon matinee crowd. Young audiences kept coming back to watch their tough young heroes out fight and outsmart their adult adversaries. Kids left the theatres high-spirited wise guys eager to knock off the first candy store they came across.
All 92 films are reviewed and analyzed for plot, character and themes. The Little Tough Guys and East Side Kids films focus on the war, axis spies in American, friendship, loyalty and patriotism. The Bowery Boys comedy films highlight themes of mistaken identity, hidden powers, mad scientists, search for treasure, satirizing folktales and the armed forces. Gorcey’s many malapropisms are steadily and hilariously interwoven in all the Bowery Boys movies. There are over 200 photographs, many of them rare.
How did early fame, fortune and success prepare these young actors for life beyond their comfort zone of playing rowdy kids? For Gorcey, playing a kid was pretty much all he knew and for him that was just fine. For Dell and Hall it wasn’t enough and both found their way back on stage and screen later in life doing different roles. For Punsly it hardly made a blip in his life as he became a doctor. For Halop and Jordan, it was a painful trick as neither fulfilled their acting potential. Remember the taxi driver Munson in All in the Family? That was Billy Halop.
Two and half of the original six actors were Jewish, but the wrong half. Gorcey’s father Bernard Gorcey who played Louie, the sweet shop owner in the Bowery Boys films was Jewish and born in Russian. Leo’s son wrote the book’s Foreword and Leo’s daughter Brandy added a touching tribute to her dad. Many fans know Leo had five wives but few know that between wife 4 and 5 he was engaged to an 18 year old girl who, unbeknownst to her parents, skipped her college freshman year to live with him. It was she who helped him write his autobiography An Original Dead End Kid Presents Dead End Yells, Wedding Bells, Cockle Shells and Dizzy Spells now a much sought after cult classic.
The most involved in the Jewish community, according to Reverend Gary Hall, was his dad Huntz Hall. Huntz’s married his fourth wife under a chupah, attended Yom Kippur services with her and participated in Passover seders. Young Gary recited the four questions. When she passed away Huntz sat shiva. Reverend Hall’s eulogy for his dad is included in the book,
Other family members who add to the story of the 6 original actors, all gone now, are the sons of Gabe Dell, Bobby Jordan Bernard Punsly and Billy Halop’s niece.
And what of their legacy? Dead End was not just a play than ran for 684 performances on Broadway; it was not just a series of movies made from 1937 through 1958. If you look closely, the Dead End Kids peek through every corner of our pop culture. See Huntz Hall’s picture on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper Lonely Hearts Club Band album and a space where Gorcey’s picture was removed; read Terry Southern’s risqué novel Candy where Hall is portrayed a drug addict. Could we have had the TV shows Happy Days or Welcome Back Kotter without the Dead End Kids? According to Gabe Dell Jr.’s loving double entendre about his dad, “looking for Pop is no dead end.”
From Broadway to the Bowery: A History and Filmography of the Dead End Kids, Little Tough Guys, East Side Kids and the Bowery Boys Films, with Cast Biographies” is available for purchase at www.Amazon.com. An autographed copy of the book can be purchased directly from the author. Len Getz can be reached at: [email protected].
