A 1937 social realist movie directed by my fantasy boyfriend William Wyler (I fell for him in Five Came Back) and adapted to the screen by Lillian Hellman from the Broadway play by Sidney Kingsley. This was the second Hellman screenplay ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
scioscribe and I watched together, though we didn't realize it till the credits started. We picked it because of Wyler, and because it was a Humphrey Bogart movie neither of us had seen.
Its stage roots are very, very evident as almost all of it takes place in the same set, the street between a luxurious building for the wealthy and the ratty apartments for the poor. A gang of poor kids play in the street, jump in the river, and harass a rich kid; Humphrey Bogart, a gangster, returns to his old neighborhood with his face disguised via plastic surgery (good work, surgeon!); Drina (Sylvia Sidney), the sister of a kid trying to join the gang, works all day and spends her spare time doing activism for workers' rights. And that's only a few of the multiple intertwining plots, all thematically related to class divisions and the injustice of poverty.
Drina is a great heroine and made me realize how rare it is to see politically active characters in American movies nowadays, unless the movie is specifically about being an activist (and those are rare too.) You just don't see movies where the main story is about something else but the heroine mentions having to go join the protest line.
Bogart slouches over a rail, smoking and being ridiculously sexy in a suit; Drina smokes and dreams of justice and escape and looks ridiculously sexy in a hat. The beautifully shot smoke and the way he and Drina gesture with cigarettes made me wish we had something equivalent that looked great on film and enabled so many fraught gestures and allowed you to easily strike up conversations with strangers, but didn't stink and cause cancer.
In some ways the movie is stagey and dated, and in others it's startlingly relevant. The income gap and separate worlds of poverty and wealth have only increased since then, as has the use of the police and criminal "justice" system to ensure that the poor stay in their place - and stay poor. As is this multilayered bit of dialogue:
A gangster, disgusted to learn that his girlfriend became a prostitute to survive while he was in jail, snaps "Why didn't you starve first?"
She retorts,"Why didn't you?"
It's a minor movie for Wylie, Hellman, and Bogart, but it's well done and worthwhile. The gang of kids got so popular that they starred in a bunch of subsequent movies in which their rough edges got sanded off. They mostly ended up as alcoholics who died young, sadly, except for the one who read medical books on the set and bailed on acting to become a doctor.
Dead End
scioscribe and I watched together, though we didn't realize it till the credits started. We picked it because of Wyler, and because it was a Humphrey Bogart movie neither of us had seen.Its stage roots are very, very evident as almost all of it takes place in the same set, the street between a luxurious building for the wealthy and the ratty apartments for the poor. A gang of poor kids play in the street, jump in the river, and harass a rich kid; Humphrey Bogart, a gangster, returns to his old neighborhood with his face disguised via plastic surgery (good work, surgeon!); Drina (Sylvia Sidney), the sister of a kid trying to join the gang, works all day and spends her spare time doing activism for workers' rights. And that's only a few of the multiple intertwining plots, all thematically related to class divisions and the injustice of poverty.
Drina is a great heroine and made me realize how rare it is to see politically active characters in American movies nowadays, unless the movie is specifically about being an activist (and those are rare too.) You just don't see movies where the main story is about something else but the heroine mentions having to go join the protest line.
Bogart slouches over a rail, smoking and being ridiculously sexy in a suit; Drina smokes and dreams of justice and escape and looks ridiculously sexy in a hat. The beautifully shot smoke and the way he and Drina gesture with cigarettes made me wish we had something equivalent that looked great on film and enabled so many fraught gestures and allowed you to easily strike up conversations with strangers, but didn't stink and cause cancer.
In some ways the movie is stagey and dated, and in others it's startlingly relevant. The income gap and separate worlds of poverty and wealth have only increased since then, as has the use of the police and criminal "justice" system to ensure that the poor stay in their place - and stay poor. As is this multilayered bit of dialogue:
A gangster, disgusted to learn that his girlfriend became a prostitute to survive while he was in jail, snaps "Why didn't you starve first?"
She retorts,"Why didn't you?"
It's a minor movie for Wylie, Hellman, and Bogart, but it's well done and worthwhile. The gang of kids got so popular that they starred in a bunch of subsequent movies in which their rough edges got sanded off. They mostly ended up as alcoholics who died young, sadly, except for the one who read medical books on the set and bailed on acting to become a doctor.
Dead End
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