You're Not So Tough

Fresh on the Universal lot after losing their Warner Brothers contracts, the Dead End Kids are out in sunny California. They wind up on Rosina Galli's fruit ranch. She had lost her little boy years ago, and the sheriff never had the heart to tell her he found the body. Now Billy Halop tells her how he was raised in an orphanage, and she takes it into her mind he's her long lost son. Halop enjoys the perks, her openhandedness with money, but as the weeks go by, he begins to feel guilty, especially when the other Kids see this as an opportunity to steal.

In addition, Miss Galli's generous policy towards her workers has the other farmers upset. Labor agitators are pointing to her as an example of what they can afford to pay; the local association orders her to cut her wages, and if she refuses, she won't be able to get her produce to market.

There were two continuations of the Dead End Kids. Universal had one. Meanwhile, over at Monogram, the East Side Kids, under Leo Gorcey, were making more comic movies. The two competing series would fight it out until after the war, when the survivors would come together as the Bowery Boys.

After Crime School,Angels with Dirty Faces,Dead End and Hells Kitchen..this is the best Dead End Kids film in my opinion..the best of the Dead End Kids/Little Tough Guys films next being Little Tough Guy from 38. Excellent fun film. The Kids here for the Universal pictures are all here minus Jordan and Gorcey who were busy at Monogram with the East Side Kids films as the group split.

The film takes us out of the city and the kids looking for work as migrant farmers. Billy Halop goes through a roller coaster of good guy/bad guy as he pretends to be the dead son of the lady boss farmer Mama Posito. Fights between rival big business trucking produce types and the small farm makes for hyjinx. Love this one !

Just as tough and sarcastic the Dead End Kids minus Leo Gorcey are taken out of the big city and are now wild boys of the road, itinerant young people who are hobos. Now in sunny Southern California like so many migrant souls in the day they get farm work with widow Rosina Galli and her foreman Henry Armetta.

Billy Halop who had the moniker Thomas Abraham Lincoln put on him at the orphanage he was raised since he was a foundling starts to work a con whereby he pretends he's the long lost son of Galli. For the rest of the film we are on edge as to whether he will rip her off as he originally intended or actually help her fend off some of the bigger farmers angry at her because she pays better wages than they do.

Now as the Code was firmly in place I don't think you doubt what Halop and the rest of them do. You're Not So Tough is a film set firmly in the social conscience driven Thirties. It's a museum piece but an entertaining one.