The New Pictures

Dead End (Samuel Goldwyn). Most Manhattan streets come to a dead end at the East River. This, and the fact that often on Manhattan's East Side only a course of masonry separates the triplex apartments of the rich from the cold-water flats of the poor, were about all Playwright Sidney Kingsley (Men in White) needed to write one of the most successful plays of the 1935 Broadway season. A large measure of its success was due to Norman Bel Geddes' superrealistic set and to the children Messrs. Geddes & Kingsley cast as the gang which contributed most of the noise and all the excitement to the show.

Producer Samuel (''The Touch") Goldwyn, for all Hollywood's physical resources and the more elastic dimensions of the screen, has not improved on the single set Designer Geddes squeezed into the little old Belasco Theatre stage, but Playwright Lillian Hellman's (The Children's Hour) cinema version enlarges the play's design, intensifies its mood, sharpens its implications. And Producer Goldwyn was smart enough to import the Geddes-Kingsley gang en masse, the whole dirty, ruthless, gay, heroic, nasty, sadistic crew of them. In their transplanted metropolitan hell, Tommy (Billy Halop), Dippy (Huntz Hall), Angel (Bobby Jordan), Spit (Leo Gorcey), T. B. (Gabriel Dell) and Milty (Bernard Punsly) again speak in the thickened explosives of New Yorkese, roast mickeys (potatoes) in street fires, harass the brass-buttoned doorman of the neighborhood's swank apartment house, defy a flatfoot (policeman), beat the dickens out of a rich kid (Charles Peck), plan a gang war. When the rich kid's old man tries to have Tommy pinched for copping his son's watch Tommy slashes him with a pocket knife and runs away. Interspersed in this frieze of juvenile delinquency are adult characters whose unanimous disillusionment adds the last drop of poison to this bitter scene, notably Tommy's sister Drina (Sylvia Sidney) who is picketing for a wage high enough to enable her to move Tommy out of the slums, the young architect (Joel McCrea) who dreams of some day being able to rebuild the slums but at the same time wants passionately to leave them, the cop who thinks that arresting kids is a humiliating job for a man, Baby Face Martin (Humphrey Bogart), the gangster who comes home to find his mother loathes him, and his old sweetheart Francey (Claire Trevor) is a physical ruin. The not unhappy ending of the screen version of Dead End is no less valid than that of the stage original, should strike even the most critical cinemagoers as art rather than artifice.

The famed Dead End gang is two years older than it was when Broadway first saw them, but they are still as harum-scarum off the set as on. Their rowdy doings have alternately amused and exasperated Hollywood. On the train to California last spring they annoyed other passengers by playing ball in the aisles. All but 18-year-old Leo Gorcey were required by California law to attend school three hours daily, but they considerably shortened this stint by dashing out to imaginary rehearsals. They loudly and unfavorably compared their adult colleagues with the players in the stage company. Their passion for breakneck bicycling was made the subject of a ukase from Sam Goldwyn--the kids called him "Pop"--whereupon Gorcey and Jordan bought rattletrap automobiles, drove them in such a fashion that they soon had five tickets from the police. Two of them clubbed together, bought a tuxedo for social occasions, wore it in sequence at the same dinner. In their violent arguments among themselves over whether or not they liked California, they agreed on two causes for complaint: they were not allowed to have their hair cut during Dead End's making; they could not do swimming scenes every day. (The garbage-laden, oil-scummed realism of Dead End's East River is only visual; actually the garbage was fresh, the refuse sterilized daily.)

Only one of the kids, Huntz Hall, whose father is a tinsmith, ever lived on Manhattan's East Side. Last week four of the kids were back in Manhattan for their first view of themselves on the screen (they were not allowed to see any rushes while the picture was under way, for fear it might make them self-conscious), will return to Hollywood about the middle of October, when the whole gang will do a Warner Brothers picture under Mervyn LeRoy.

Bad Guy (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) employs Bruce Cabot as the ambiguous vehicle of a muddled moral message, incidentally hums a high-voltage hymn in praise of those not-altogether-unsung industrial heroes, trouble-shooting power linemen. Not so complete nor so convincing a picture of their dangerous trade as was Slim (TIME, June 21), Bad Guy shows enough shots of electricity running wild to give audiences some jolting moments; shows also Hollywood's dawning awareness of the exciting dramatic possibilities that lie on the industrial frontier.

Whether "Lucky" Walden (Bruce Cabot) was a selfish rat who would stop at nothing to feed his various cravings or whether he was really the swell guy his brother Steve (Edward Norris) insisted on remembering, is not made altogether clear. Lucky and Steve, graduates of the same orphan asylum, are expert high-wire workers, first-rate troubleshooters for a power company. Lucky is a better lineman than Steve but he does not confine his trouble to working hours. When he smashes a gambler's head in and the gambler dies. Lucky lands in the penitentiary, is just saved from the electric chair by Steve's well-meaning machinations. Paroled Lucky proceeds to steal Steve's girl, gets into various minor difficulties which culminate in his arrest on the old murder charge. With no other way out. Lucky gets Steve to help him break jail. He gets out all right, but down at the power plant, where Lucky goes to get his gun, they are having a little trouble with those big overhead cables. . . .

Only drawback to Bad Guy is that the sensational shots of man-made lightning snaking through the air in 40-ft. arcs are likely to inspire more respectful attention in a lay audience than Bruce Cabot's cheerful swagger.

Love Under Fire (20th Century-Fox) is an agreeable lot of nonsense adroitly arranged (for no good reason) against the j background of a Spanish revolution. Neither belligerent is identified and no political knuckles are rapped, so that Loyalist and Insurgent sympathizers alike may I leave their boos at home. The unpretentiously preposterous plot concerns the tribulations of a Scotland Yard operative, Tracy Egan (Don Ameche). who has fallen in love with Myra Cooper (Loretta Young), whom he met while liberating his repressions on a Continental holiday. Just as the guns begin to pop, Tracy gets a phone call from the Yard ordering him to bring in Miss Cooper, suspected of a jewel robbery. The local military party, whose uniforms resemble those of the Canadian Mounted Police, are also looking for a jewel thief--an English girl who visited a bank vault before the looting started, got away with the "Peralta diamonds." Further and frequently risible sequences: Lieutenant Chavez (Harold Huber) thrice presenting triumphantly to his general what he thinks are the missing diamonds, thrice consigned to a firing squad for his ineptitude; Borrah Minnevitch and his gang of lunatic harmonica players going musically crazy; the captain of a British freighter stopped and searched at sea, proclaiming his outraged feelings in lan guage as colorful and crossed-up as the Union Jack.

Make A Wish (RKO). Producer Sol Lesser, who guided the tiny footsteps of Jackie Coogan and Baby Peggy to their place among the infant stars, last week presented his present protege, Bobby Breen, in his third leading role. Nine-year-old Actor Breen (real name: Isidore Borsuk), whose Irish nomenclature imperfectly disguises him and whose shrill nasal singing tends to raise the hackles of the sensitive, is one of radio's gifts to the cinema. Basil Rathbone, who is forced by the exigencies of his role to regard this child with affection, was never cooler.

As different from the competent juveniles of Dead End (see p. 61) as rat biscuits are from tea biscuits, the tots of Make A Wish are discovered in a paradisal boys' camp, where Chip (Bobby Breen), although a new boy, becomes an instant favorite with everybody, apparently because of his bugle-like voice. Across the lake from the camp John Selden (Basil Rathbone) is summering, trying to get a start on his new operetta. Chip and Selden strike up a beautiful, laughing friendship, the operetta goes forward by leaps & bounds, and when Chip's mother, Irene (Marion Claire), comes for a visit and turns out to be a singer too, the end is clearly in sight. No amount of misunderstandings can do more than postpone the inevitable scene in which Rathbone, looking slightly ashamed of himself, comes into Irene's dressing room after the triumphant first night of his and her show, while Bobby Breen carols a sugary Oscar Straus tune (Make A Wish), at only three-quarters of his usual volume, outside the door.

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