One day, Baby Face Martin—a childhood friend of Gimpty, but now a notorious killer wanted by the FBI—returns to the neighborhood. In Kingsley's didactic scheme, Martin represents the worst-case scenario of what the slums can produce, and he functions as an obvious contrast to Gimpty's humanistic social ideals. The play's two emotional high points are Martin's reunions—first with his mother, and then with his former sweetheart, Francey. His mother spurns him, recoiling from his presence. When he offers her money, she slaps and curses him. The scene with Francey offers another of the play's stark contrasts. Here, Martin recoils when he discovers that she has become a prostitute and is suffering from a venereal disease. Francey not only accepts his money but asks for more.
The final plot strand involves the neighborhood gang, focusing particularly on Tommy, Drina's brother. In another of the play's contrasts, the gang members’ lives are paralleled with that of Philip Griswold, a pampered child who lives in the high-rise apartment with his well-connected parents and a nanny. In one scene, some of the boys beat up Philip and steal his watch. When Philip's father catches Tommy, he locks him in a stranglehold, retrieves the watch, and calls the police. While struggling to free himself, Tommy manages to cut Mr. Griswold with a knife and escapes. Griswold is not seriously hurt but insists that the police catch Tommy and arrest him.
These two plots converge as Gimpty informs the FBI of Martin's whereabouts; a gunfight ensues, and Martin is killed. Likewise, another gang member, Spit, informs on Tommy, who eventually gives himself up. Griswold insists on pressing charges, but Gimpty pleads for Tommy, claiming that reform school will only make him a hardened criminal like Martin. Griswold refuses to relent, and Tommy is taken away by the police. The play ends with Gimpty's promise to Drina that he will use the reward money for informing on Martin to hire the best lawyer possible for Tommy. Gimpty and Drina leave together as the curtain falls.
Goldwyn was interested in the rights to the play from the very beginning. Merritt Hulburd wrote to Goldwyn on November 8, 1935, a little more than a week after Dead End opened, and informed him that a common stock company called Dead End Inc. owned 50 percent of the film rights. Hulburd advised, “While there is [a] definite element of risk from a business standpoint in this deal, we feel that since we are solely interested in acquiring rights to this play, it is a worthwhile undertaking.”5 Two weeks later, Hulburd notified Goldwyn that someone had offered “substantially in excess of $100,000” for the rights to Dead End. He believed David Selznick had bid $150,000 for the play and warned that Goldwyn would have to top that offer.6 The next day, Goldwyn closed the deal for $165,000. “That was the great thing about Goldwyn,” Wyler said. “if there was some great material and he wanted it, he would just buy it, just like that.”7 Wyler had reason to be excited. On the night Wyler saw the play with Goldwyn, the producer hired him to direct the film—it would be Wyler's third assignment directing a prestige property. After they reached an agreement, Goldwyn put down a $25,000 good-faith deposit and left for Europe.
Goldwyn wanted Sidney Howard, who had just scripted Dodsworth, to adapt Dead End as well. Hulburd wrote to Howard in September 1936, saying that he needed him to start at once. Howard, however, was busy working on Gone with the Wind, so Goldwyn turned to Lillian Hellman, whom he cajoled by writing, “Believe me, I do not think there is anyone who can write ‘Dead End’ as well as you can.”8 At the time Hellman, was busy completing a social play of her own called Days to Come; in adapting Kingsley's play, she would manage to insert some of her ideas about labor and unions.
For the role of Drina, which was made more prominent in the film, Goldwyn insisted on Sylvia Sidney, who was under contract to Walter Wanger. Sidney had already starred as an oppressed working girl in Josef Von Sternberg's An American Tragedy and in King Vidor's film of Elmer Rice's Street Scene, which Dead End resembled in some details. (Wyler telegrammed Goldwyn that Margaret Sullavan, whom he would soon divorce, would be a good choice for the role if Sidney was unavailable; as it turned out, Sidney got the role.) Joel McCrea was once again chosen to costar as Dave Connell—Gimpty's new name for the film. This revised character would lose his limp and, instead of informing on Baby Face Martin, would hunt him down and shoot him himself.
For the role of Baby Face, Goldwyn wanted James Cagney, who had just won a case against Warner Brothers breaking his long-term contract. Reeves Espy, a Goldwyn executive, advised his boss that even though Warner Brothers was appealing the decision, there was no reason that Cagney could not be approached. He warned Goldwyn, however, that becoming embroiled in a Warner-Cagney fight was not advisable. The part was next offered to George Raft, who turned it down because he thought the character too vicious. Finally, the role went to Humphrey Bogart, who had recently won acclaim on Broadway as the gangster Duke Mantee in Robert Sherwood's The Petrified Forest, a role he reprised in the film version. Marjorie Main reprised her stage role as Martin's mother, and Claire Trevor was cast as Francey.
Goldwyn wanted to cast the street kids from among the usual group of Hollywood child actors, but Kingsley, with Wyler's help, convinced him that this would be a mistake, and the actors from the original stage production were hired. Kingsley explained, “I had spent many months working with these kids, and they were as close to the real thing as he could find; and although they had individual problems, they were gifted and precisely the characters—nobody could play them as well.”9 Indeed, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Gabriel Dell, Bernard Punsley, Bobby Jordan, and Billy Halop did so well that they were dubbed “The Dead End Kids” and went on to sign contracts with Warner Brothers, which made a series of films about their exploits.
Wyler wanted to shoot the film in New York to capture the authenticity that Kingsley had tried to achieve in the play. Goldwyn, however, disliked location shooting because it meant he had less control over his directors. So he hired Richard Day, who had just won an Oscar for the set design on Dodsworth, to build an elaborate set duplicating a ghetto street with shops and seedy apartments and even the balcony of a luxury apartment; one end of the sound stage was excavated and filled with water to stand in for the East River. The result was much like the stage set, only on a grander scale—it cost Goldwyn around $100,000. It was the talk of Hollywood, although Wyler hated it and found it “phony”: “It was very fashionable in those days to build in the studio even when the real thing was standing somewhere. That was one battle I lost.”10
Despite all the effort and expense he had put into duplicating a slum, Goldwyn wanted it to be clean. Wyler would litter the set each morning to make it look authentic, but Goldwyn was horrified and insisted that Wyler clean up the street. When Wyler refused, the producer picked up the debris himself and threw it away. “Goldwyn didn't like dirt,” Wyler recalled. “Everything in his movies had to be clean.”11 Even the soundtrack was free of city noises. As Scott Berg notes, Goldwyn's “pictures had a distinctive look about them—a feel that was always tasteful, even in an East Side slum.”12 Goldwyn's desire for fastidiousness was reinforced by Joseph Breen, who wrote, “We would like to recommend in passing, that you be less emphatic, throughout in the photographing of this script in showing the contrast between conditions of the poor in tenements and those of the rich in apartment houses.”13 The filmmakers should refrain from showing “the presence of filth or smelling garbage cans, or garbage floating in the river, into which the boys jump or swim.” Breen felt that such details would “give offense.”14
Wyler compensates by creating his most expressionistic film. Although much of Dead End takes place outdoors, the film has an interior feel. It is composed of numerous vertical shots, diagonal angles, and frames within frames, thus embracing within its mise-en-scène Kingsley's notion that environment can trap individuals and crush them. On the stage, Bel Geddes's set made the audience feel as if they were watching the activity of a real New York street. Wyler, in turn, emphasizes the artificiality of his film set, taking Kingsley's stark patterning of character and situation for his stylist
ic blueprint. He imprisons his characters in space and relentlessly manipulates them there. The film is intricately structured, featuring shaded close-ups, elaborate setups, and quick vignettes.
Wyler's vision was aided by important modifications in Hellman's adaptation of Kingsley's play, taking into account the suggestions of both Goldwyn and Breen. Hellman's emphasis on stark character opposition (as exemplified in The Children's Hour) rather than internal conflict made Kingsley's characters easy to shape. However, she made some significant alterations in the characters. As indicated earlier, Gimpty is renamed Dave and, as portrayed by Joel McCrea, is more heroic than his stage model. No longer a cripple—Kingsley's awkward symbolism had to go—the film's Dave is able to transcend his environment. Hellman's Dave is not ravaged by slum life; he is an active, crusading, romantic hero, and McCrea's rugged good looks only enhance that image. The speeches Kingsley gives to Gimpty—such as when he calls New York “the biggest tombstone in the world,” and his lecture on evolution, wherein he declares that the “God planted in men's hearts takes away their reason and their sense of beauty”15—are eliminated. Dave is not a philosopher; he is a doer. Kingsley himself seemed to endorse this change. In an undated telegram to Goldwyn, he wrote, “In order to give him character I agree with Miss Hellman stop He must act decisively and courageously on own strength.”16
Hellman also makes Drina a more important character. This change was largely determined by the casting of Sylvia Sidney, who was a star. Drina becomes a more active figure, a labor advocate who is beaten by the police while on a picket line. In making this change, Hellman was no doubt influenced by her own play Days to Come, set in an Ohio factory where the workers strike, pitting a strike organizer against a factory owner. In Kingsley's play, Drina makes her first appearance more than ten pages after the opening, when she helps a new boy who was just cockalized (humiliated by having his pants pulled down) by the gang. In the film, she is introduced in her apartment, where she is seen ironing and explaining to her brother Tommy why they need to get out of the slums and why she is on strike. Her dual status as a surrogate mother and an activist is immediately established.
In building up Drina, Hellman diminishes the role of Kay (Wendy Barrie) and makes her less sympathetic. The play's Kay occasionally leaves her luxury apartment to spend time with Gimpty in his slum apartment, but in the film, she is so appalled by the filth and cockroaches in Dave's building that she flees. In Kingsley's play, Kay's rich boyfriend's yacht and its place on the river are associated with Gatsby-like visions of romance and yearning for Gimpty and the slum children—something they can see but can never hope to attain. This allusive imagery is mostly dropped in the film and replaced by more concrete situations, such as when Dave sees Kay standing out on the balcony, looking far away and unattainable.
In the play, Gimpty's pairing off with Drina at the end seems almost happenstance, a resigned consequence of Kay's decision to go on a cruise with her wealthy boyfriend. In the film, however, Dave only temporarily loses sight of Drina because of his infatuation with the glamorous Kay. Hellman makes it clear that Dave and Drina are naturally united by their social conscience and desire for a better world. Whereas Dave tells Kay late in the film that they are too different to have a future together, in the play, Gimpty practically begs Kay to stay with him.
The character of Baby Face Martin is also altered by Hellman. In the play, Martin is a gangster who exemplifies Kingsley's thesis that slum life breeds criminals. Gimpty emphasizes this point after Martin's death, while also evoking a measure of sympathy for his childhood friend: “Yeah…Martin was a killer, he was bad, he deserved to die, true! But I knew him when we were kids. He had a lot of fine stuff. He was strong. He had courage. He was a born leader. He even had a sense of fair play. But living in the streets kept making him bad.”17
The film's Martin is also a gangster and a criminal, and he has a sympathetic side as well. In Hellman's script and in Wyler's presentation, he becomes another of the director's dreamers—a man who, like Barney Glasgow and Samuel Dodsworth, wants to recover something of the past. He returns to his old neighborhood to see his mother and his former girlfriend. Confused and nostalgic, he seems to be in search of the boy he once was, hoping to discover where he went wrong. When he is rejected by his mother and then shattered by the realization of what Francey has become, Wyler and Hellman create parallel scenes in which Martin sits in a restaurant, brooding about what he has just experienced and trying to make sense of it. Baby Face thus becomes the embodiment of the 1930s gangster who is literally “dead-ended.” He tries to justify himself to Dave by bragging, like a traditional movie gangster, about his custom-made shirts and tailored suits—thus identifying himself with the wealthy who are taking over the neighborhood. Both the gangster and the rich (and, by extension, Kay) threaten to destroy the familial society of the streets by their excess and their idleness. Martin, however, seems to sense that his time is up; his words sound hollow, and even he knows it. A gangster who seems disgusted by his own success, he is alone (except for a lone sidekick), looking for something he has lost. He is a sad figure, not grand or outsized like the screen gangsters seen earlier in the decade.
In the play, Martin demeans Gimpty in front of the street kids, at one point even stepping on his crippled foot. Kingsley thus gives Gimpty a motivation for informing on Martin, who is later cornered and shot down by the FBI. The film's Dave, however, suffers no indignities from Martin. It is only when Martin tries to kill Dave after he interrupts a kidnapping plan that Dave retaliates, pursuing his old friend across tenement roofs and shooting him as he clings desperately to a fire escape. Martin's “fall,” however, is pathetic. He is shot by an architect, not by the FBI, and he dies in the place that produced him. The world he thought he had escaped claims him in the end.
According to Carl Rollyson, Hellman's refusal to make Dave an informer is prophetic of the stand she would take in Scoundrel Time. Even at the beginning of Dead End, a member of a rival gang wears the scar of a “squealer”—a cut that Tommy is about to inflict on Spit, when he is stopped by Dave. Rollyson writes: “It would never be right to inform in any circumstances—this is the logic of Hellman's absolutist code. There must be a decisive split between right and wrong; evil must be external to the hero, not a part of him.”18
Kingsley's play is a naturalistic document intended to demonstrate that economic inequity breeds crime. Hellman's screenplay is less didactic and a bit less grim, emphasizing character at the expense of dogma by turning Kingsley's Gimpty into a Joel McCrea–type hero and Drina into a working-class heroine. Even Hellman's prologue—slyly remarking that “every street in New York ends in a river”—seems more descriptive than Kingsley's call-to-arms quotation from Paine. She goes on to explain that, in their desire for homes with river views, the rich moved eastward until they reached a dead end, and their apartments “looked down on the windows of tenements.” Hellman's prologue introduces a story; Kingsley's is closer to agitprop.
Wyler's camera, however, manipulates space to emphasize the confinement of the slum environment. Wyler and cinematographer Gregg Toland turn Dead End into a story of entrapment in which the characters are repeatedly boxed into claustrophobic, heavily shaded places. Visually, it is Wyler's darkest and most brooding work, and the mood is compounded by the depiction of Baby Face Martin. Unlike the gangster figures of the early 1930s, whose rise from their immigrant status to lives of glamour and riches made them emblematic of the success ethic, this film's gangster is consumed by remorse. In his second inaugural address in 1937, Roosevelt promised to undermine “old admiration of worldly success as such” and to be intolerant of “the abuse of power by those who betray for profit the elementary decencies of life.”19 The New Deal's replacement of rugged individualism with social responsibility and activism made the traditional gangster figure obsolete; instead, the representatives of law and order became heroic figures in the movies. Like his real-life namesake, “Baby Face” Nelson, Dead En
d's Baby Face Martin is hunted by the FBI and, in the play, is gunned down by FBI agents.
Bogart's Martin is an extension of his role as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest, a character he originated for the stage in 1934 and reprised in the 1936 film version, reviving his flagging screen career. The Petrified Forest is an allegorical play in which Sherwood brings the gangster face-to-face with an itinerant poet and philosopher, Alan Squire, in an isolated gas station–luncheonette in the eastern Arizona desert. The poet first recognizes Mantee as “the last great apostle of rugged individualism.” Indeed, to Gramp Maple, Duke is the very spirit of America: “He ain't a gangster; he's a real old-time desperado. Gangsters is foreign. He's an American.” But modern America, according to Sherwood, has no use for either the poet or the gangster, and Squire eventually tells Mantee, “You're obsolete Duke, just like me.”20 Organized crime has made the lone gangster outmoded, and the burgeoning industrialized America has no place for poets. In Sherwood's play, they both go to the old frontier to die.
Kingsley's Baby Face Martin returns to New York from the Midwest (St. Louis)—thus reversing the mythic American journey—to revisit the neighborhood that shaped him. Unlike Mantee, who is described as shabby, stooped, and almost animal-like, Martin has a surgically reconstructed face and expensive clothes. This makeover does not effectively disguise him, though, because he is immediately recognized by Dave. Most important, this aging gangster is nostalgic, hoping to rediscover who he once was, and he yearns to reconnect with his mother and his first love. As he explains to his sidekick, Hunk, in a line that was written for the film, “I'm getting sick of what I can pay for.” Like Wyler's restructured and reimagined Barney Glasgow, who returns to the woods looking for his lost self, Martin makes the same journey with the same destructive results. Martin, like the prototypical screen gangster, is killed, while Barney belatedly realizes that he has ruined his own life. The gangster and the businessman suffer similar fates.
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