Kinder auf den Straßen

Forget the Kleenex, bring the Bounty paper towels to experience William Wellman's depression masterpiece. This huge emotional epiphany packs a wallop.

Frankie Darro and Edwin Phillips portray the juvenile leads Eddie and Tommy, with Darro's performance effective and appealing. Their characters indulge in the usual teenage shenanigans until the depression overtakes their parents. As times toughen, and Eddie's father can't find work, Eddie decides to sell his jalopy to help out. This sets up the first of many splendid scenes, as Eddie's tough-guy veneer drops just long enough to share raw emotions with his father (Grant Mitchell). Zero cringe factor here, Wellman excels at emotions between men and it's never maudlin.

Hitting the (rail)road to find work, Eddie and Tommy encounter Sally, an adorable, nose-scrintching Dorothy Coonan dressed as a man. And the three set off across the country, with high ideals and optimism clashing with depression realities. Brutal and raw, this is a journey you, too, must take. A page of America's history told so expertly as to make you laugh and cry simultaneously.

Ms. Coonan (Sally) quit films after "Wild Boys" to marry director "Wild" Bill Wellman, and remain his his wife until his death in 1975. My highest recommendation.

Wild Boys of the Road (1933)

*** 1/2 (out of 4)

William A. Wellman directs this Depression era drama about two boys (Frankie Darro, Edwin Phillips) who run away from home and jump on the railroad route in hopes of finding a job so that they can help their families back home. Once again there must have been something inside of Wellman because there's a lot of passion in this film aimed at the poor who must do what they can to try and survive. This is a very hard hitting film that looks at this kids in a very serious light and it makes for a terrific little gem that deserves more attention than it's gotten within film history. Both Darro and Phillips are terrific in their roles and the chemistry they offer is great. Wellman's future wife, Dorothy Coonan, is also very good in her role as the boys buddy. The first twenty-minutes of the film shows the boys as normal teenagers but then we see their parents lose their jobs and thus forcing them to hit the road. This set up really sells the rest of the film and it also helps us see the suffering they're going to go through for the rest of the film. Wellman does a great job with the tender side of the story as well as a couple great fight sequences where they boys attack some railroad police as well as a rapist. Darro has a bit of Cagney in him and his performance here seems to have had a major influence on what we'd eventually see from The Dead End Kids.

This is truly a very great Classic Film about how living conditions were for the very young and old. It clearly shows how the Depression Years effected everyone in America and were very bad times for people of all races. Mothers and Fathers were unable to support their families and children had to go on their own, or run away and find some sort of child labor. Frankie Darro,"Saratoga",'37 and Dorothy Coonan Wellman,(Sally). gave great performances eating sandwiches on a flatbed railroad car and headed to Chicago. Sally had an aunt who lived in Chicago and when she arrived, she was greeted with a huge cake to share with her friends. However, her aunt seemed very successful and greeted her with open arms, but her apartment was soon raided, as she was a HOOKER! This is a sad film, but tells the truth about the growing pains in America!

Mention the Great Depression and most folks draw a blank or nod off. After all, who wants to be reminded of soup kitchens, dour old men, and dust bowls. Seventy years later and it's a closed book, forgotten and unlamented. Now and again, however, that dusty book needs re-opening. Because, in spite of the best efforts of the best of us, the past is not alway past. This edgy little Warner Bros. production provides a brief picture of the youth of that day, a harrowing story of survival amidst economic collapse.

The movie wouldn't work so well without the contrast the first half-hour provides. Darro and friends are typical middle-class teens, fun-loving and care-free. It's a world of proms, necking parties, and harmless pranks. Then without warning things change. Why they change is never really explained which is the way it should be. For most kids knew nothing of stock markets and dis-investment. They only knew that suddenly Dad doesn't go to work anymore and mom cries a lot, bills pile up, and no one gets a job, anywhere. Middle-class privilege plunges into no-income poverty, and Darro and his buddy do like millions of others. They hop a freight, hoping the next town, the next state, the next someplace, will give them a chance to make a living. What they get instead are private armies, battalions of cops, and a forest of billy clubs. They're driven on to the next jurisdiction and the next welcoming committee. Nobody wants the footloose unemployed adding to their own local problems. Maybe the attitude's not charitable, but it makes practical sense.

The battles atop freight cars and in hobo jungles are expertly filmed and dynamically staged, a stark panorama of social desperation. These scenes make up the movie's centerpiece. If anything they're mildly presented compared to the actual blood-letting that surrounded the desperate and up-rooted. Union organizing was especially bloody and bitterly fought-- an explosive topic Hollywood has only timidly touched on over the years. Nonetheless, the nail-biting episode on the train track stands-in for at least some of the actual pain and suffering caused by those crisis years.

Darro may be small, but he's energetic, something of a younger Cagney. His determined spirit to keep going no matter what is convincing, and helps drive the others on. I expect it also had that effect on audiences of the day. I like the way director Wellman suggests the kids can set up their own constructive community, if given half-a-chance. Some reviewers complain about the final scene with the understanding judge. Yes, it is pretty contrived, but it wasn't unrealistic given the package of New Deal reforms then in the works. If those measures didn't exactly solve the economic crisis (only WWII did that), they at least offered hope that the problems would no longer be kicked down the road to the next jurisdiction.

Wild Boys may not be the most honest or best movie on those tumultuous years. Still, it does furnish a provocative and entertaining glimpse. In any event, some books should not remain closed. After all, who knows when the unfortunate history of that era may again repeat itself.

One of the surprisingly realistic dramas that Hollywood created in the early 1930's has teenagers hitting the road during the hard times of the Great Depression.

With their east coast (New "Yawk?") accents, and rough around the edges "Bowery Boys"-style (harken, Leo Gorcey!), Frankie Darrow and a gang of displaced down-on-their-luck (formerly middle class?) teens band together and roam the countryside on foot or by rail, getting into hot water seemingly everywhere they go. Amazing graphic scenes for 1933 include a kid's leg being amputated by a train and an attempted rape scene.

Miserable living conditions and hunger are also depicted with kids lying cheating and stealing to stay alive, but willing to straighten themselves out when given a chance.

You'd think Warner Brothers was taking a risk financing a film that was so bleak and lacking in entertainment value for people that may have been LIVING the kinds of scenes shown, but the film also seems like a propaganda piece for Roosevelt's New Deal. There's a Roosevelt look-alike judge who places his hand, almost in a blessing, on poor Frankie's head and says "things are going to get better very soon".

Overall, Wild Boys of the Road is an interesting social drama that deserves more exposure and recognition.