“Dead End” Stark City Life Portrayal

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 63, 16 March 1938, Page 11

“Dead End” Stark City Life Portrayal

SYLVIA SIDNEY, JOEL McCREA POWERFUL CAST (Mayfair: Screening Saturday.) Twenty-four hours of throbbing i life in a city street, paved with riches and poverty, comedy and tragedy, romance and hearta ahes, thunders across the screen in Samuel Goldwyn’s production of ‘ ‘ Dead End. ’ ’ Sylvia Sidney and Joel McCrea are starred at the head of a great cast in this powerful human story based on the stage hit by Sidney Kingsley as produced by Norman Bel Geddes, which set records in its Broadway run and then was cheered from coast to coast. Miss Sidney has her greatest role n.-= Drina, the girl who valiantly fought a losing battle to keep her little brother Tommy from the gangster’s fate ahead of him and to raise them both out of the slums. McCrea is seen as Dave, the poor architect she loved, who dreamed of tearing down all the tenements in the world, and loved the beautiful Kay, played by Wendy Barrie, who had found a way out of the slums into psnthonse luxury. Humphrey Bogart plays ‘ ‘Baby Face Martin,” the killer, drawn back from his gangland haunts to the slum where he was spawned, by an irresistible yearning to see his mother and his boyhood sweetheart, Francey, once more—who faced the cold steel of the G-men’s bullets, all to find that his mother hated the very sight of him and that Francey had taken life the easiest way. Claire Trevor plays Francey, Allen Jenkins is seen as Hunk, “Baby Face’s” henchman, and Billy Halop, Gabrin Dell, Bobby Jordan, Huntz Hall, Leo Gorcey and Bernard Punsley the Dead End kids from the original New York stage cast, are seen again in their unforgettable characterisations of Tommy, “T. 8.,” “Angel,” “Dippy,” ”Spit,” and Milty. Others prominent in the cast are Marjorie Main, Charles Peck, Minor Watson, ‘James Burke, Ward Bond and Elizabeth Risdon. William Wyler directed “Dead End’ from Lillian Hellman’s screenplay. The sets, chief of which is the “dead end’ slum street, where the fashionable apartments brush against the tenements of the waterfront, were designed by Richard Day. The costumes were created by Oinar Kiam. The photography is credited to Gregg Toland. ‘ ‘Dead End” is released through United Artists.