Leaving crotch-biting prepubesquent ninjas behind us forever, let us return to a youth troupe I like: The Dead End Kids. Well…kinda. I’ve already considered the official Dead End Kids movies, but now we come to the first (of three) spinoffs: Little Tough Guys
After Warner Brothers completed their first Dead End Kids film, Crime School (though it is in fact the second overall – we’re already getting confused!), Universal sought to borrow their youthful sextet for a single, one-off picture, Little Tough Guy. This was made before Angels with Dirty Faces, and itself engendered the new franchise – hence Little Tough Guys and Dead End Kids developed in parallel, with a great degree of cast confusion.
Anyway, Little Tough Guy. Universal could only get four of the six “Dead End Kids” – that is, Billy Halop, Huntz Hall, Bernard Punsley, Gabriel Dell. Leo Gorcey and Bobby Jordan did not make this temporary stopover at Universal. In Leo’s stead, Universal cast his brother, David Gorcey, thus starting his career as the most prolific non-Hall actor in all the franchises’ films – though David never appeared in an official Dead End Kid picture.
Also cast was child actor Hal E. Chester, who has no prior connection to the troupe (David at least had a similar Broadway background). Chester’s acting career proved mostly uneventful, but his later career as producer is more impressive – ‘50s sci-fi/horror epics include The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and Night of the Demon.
The Little Tough Guy films were not yet billed as such, nor connected to the Dead End Kids until later reissues – this is getting incestuous and confused. Nonetheless, Little Tough Guy had to distinguish itself as a different product in the youth-in-peril gangster genre. Universal accomplished that by simply making Little Tough Guy much, much lamer. As “Dead End Kids,” the troupe’s films were A-efforts, highlighted by adult superstars like Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney, and helmed by equally top-shelf directors. In Little Tough Guy, though, there is no lead adult – the kids become the main characters, which put their acting skills (great at persona, much iffier at genuine emotion) up to scrutiny. They are now less of a uniform mass. There is at least one genuinely distinct character among them, lead boy Billy Halop’s Johnny Boylan. (Another character, Pig – played by Huntz Hall – is distinguishable, but I admit I’ve yet to connect name to face with these lads.)
Whereas the Dead End Kids films were serious dramas, with the subtlety and subtext that implies, Little Tough Guy is a full-on melodrama, with all the heavy-handed, one-reading-only weeping, hand-wringing and over-emotional lamentation that implies. Frankly, Little Tough Guy plays like a crappy, years-later sequel to the great early Dead End Kids films, even though it was made simultaneously. Director Harold Young, whose bizarre and under-stocked career includes The Mummy’s Tomb and The Three Caballeros, lends nothing to the proceedings, content to use those cheap ‘30s standards, the motionless camera and the flat, proscenium shot. Little Tough Guy is still professionally made, not quite a B-movie, but it’s still completely affectless.
As a melodrama, Little Tough Guy seeks to depress its audience with the impoverished plight of the Boylan family – spurred on by father Jim’s false arrest over murdering a police officer at a picket line (stock footage gets employed far less artfully than in the Dead End Kids films – okay, I’ll stop harping on that distinction). This is an onus on the matronly Mrs. Boylan (Marjorie Main, Ma Kettle herself), who has to scrimp and save when she’s not busy yellowing the walls with her tears. Johnny’s older sister Kay (Helen Parrish) is slightly more stoic, though still pretty generous with the wailing and the gnashing of teeth. (God, melodrama!) As for Johnny, his response is to lash out at society at large, falling in with five other kids I’ll call the “Little Tough Guys” slightly ahead of schedule.
The Little Tough Guys are essentially no different from their “Dead End Kid” portrayals, only…dare I say, a little less rambunctious. This unwillingness to commit to the troupe’s central premise is a major fault of the film. As always, they bear highly amusing monikers – Pig, String, Ape, Dopey and Sniper. (Halop, as lead, is the sole performer to ever merit a surname.) They act as newsboys on the street, peddling papers ‘30s style with promises of scandalous titillation for a nickel a piece. That’s when they’re not busy stealing frankfurters off of equally kleptomaniacal dames.
Combine generic, context-free scenes of the Little Tough Guys doing their thing with scenes of Johnny at home pleading with Kay. They plead and plead, in a most hamstrung and unconvincing fashion, about nothing in particular. The dialogue is never exactly bad, but it’s overly expository, all done in that awful ‘30s style of “filmed play.” You know, the fad of over-loading a film with talk talk talk due to the “novelty” of the talking picture – this when the literally stage-bound Dead End spoke in an effortlessly visual language. The entire movie follows this pattern, and it goes on for way too long – and it’s an 80 minute film!
While an actual plot struggles to generate itself, the Little Tough Guys add a seventh boy to their repertoire, though Cyril Gerrard doesn’t even merit mention as one of the troupe. Rather, he’s the sort of hoity toity rich brat-snob they assaulted in Dead End, a most caricatured snooty upper crustoid – hell, Cyril is played by freaking Little Lord Fauntleroy, Jackie Searl! No matter, Cyril ingratiates himself into the Little Tough Guys’ coterie, with promises of endless cash, butlers, and jaunty jalopies. Cyril is either the most or least interesting figure in the film, depending on how you read him – as a pure Cyril-cipher, or a human being with untold layers of nuance this movie otherwise has no conception of. (I prefer the latter, but it’s hard to give it credence…More on Cyril later…)
Now the plot can get underway – that plot being a chronicle of Johnny’s descent into hoodumism and juvenilia. It is spurred on with the rejection of his father’s appeal – there’s some suggestion Pa Boylan will get the chair, but there is no follow-up on this thread now its purpose has been served. Sloppy work, really.
Anyway, Johnny angrily hurls a rock through the judge’s coupe. He then flees the cops, and is captured. He’s sent to a detention home – this event is the cue for another volley of self-pitiable weeping. But this is all something of a detour, as the Little Tough Guys soon bust Johnny out of the clink with a genuine bed sheet rope. Never thought I’d see one of those!
Now Johnny is loose, wanted by the idle policemen, and without a solid notion in his head. Rather he (with Cyril pulling the strings – maybe) orchestrates a rash of thuggery which is still put to shame by the base level behavior in Dead End Kids. (Okay, sorry, no more Dead End Kids, I swear!) “EPIDEMIC OF PETTY CRIME!” the newspapers crow! We don’t get to see this happening, mind you, nor do they even fashion a stock footage montage to get the point across. No, the newspaper is all we get.
Instead, the Little Tough Guys are seen lounging in Cyril’s pad, imbibing champagne and celebrating their spree of trivial vandalism. Okay, about Cyril: He admits here his apparent reasons for abetting the Little Tough Guys. Apparently, it is to break of his standard wealthy ennui, to see how the other side lives. Basically, it’s a sociological experiment.
But that doesn’t hold with what Cyril does next. When it seems the cops might be closing in on the Little Tough Guys, Cyril goes straight to his (judge) father (no meaning for it, simply eases the casting process). He tattles on his streetwise friends, allowing the cops to really close in on them. As Cyril tells the police, it’s all been a sting on his part, entrapment meant to bring down some local nogoodniks. Hmm…if that’s true, Cyril is indeed the sissiest goody-two-shoes Little Lord Fauntleroy possible. But if it isn’t… Methinks Cyril was playing all sides at once, for the sheer pleasure of puppeteering others. Indeed, this strikes me as what The Dark Knight’s Joker would’ve done at that age. So Cyril’s either a namby-pamby or a budding psychotic – take your pick.
The outcome remains the same – the cops make their move on the Little Tough Guys just as they (the boys) are robbing a drugstore. (This is their intended masterpiece – huh?) Most of the lads are easily caught, but Johnny and Pig make a defense with pistols from within the drugstore like mini mobsters. It’s like Cagney’s imminent last stand in Angels with Dirty Faces, only…sorry, that was Dead End Kids.
Pig races out with intent to surrender. Instead, the policemen kill him instantly – eh, it’s easier than rehabilitation, really. As for Johnny, still holed up in there, Kay does like Pat O’Brien in Angels with Dirty Faces – sorry, sorry! – and goes in alone to talk him down. So he surrenders, but isn’t immediately assassinated, since Johnny has an arc the movie wants to play out.
Johnny stands at trial, as do the surviving Little Tough Guys. The judge prattles on at lengthy, lengthy, lengthy length, all about reformation and reform school and schooling and yada yada END MOVIE! No, here they feel the need to let every single adult character have a speech explicating the inherent good in Johnny – how he among all the boys has the best chance to turn right, and help his family. (So…is his father dead now?) This is overreliance on explanatory dialogue, because surely otherwise we wouldn’t get the incredibly subtle (melo)dramatic point. Okay, whatever, the judge’s sentence still stands, because what else was going to happen, meaning all that yammering was simply for the audience’s sake. Nice to know studios assumed their consumers morons in the ‘30s too.
Okay, so credits, right? No! The Little Tough Guys play together in a marching band of all things, presumably at that reform school – END! Johnny’s family, whom we just saw, returns to hug Johnny and endlessly belabor his inevitable reconstitution. Didn’t we just talk about this?! Must it be talked about again?! END! Okay, it seems my screaming of the word eventually did some good, as the movie does now end. Oh thank you!
Really, Little Tough Guy is a perfectly mediocre little film. But that doesn’t matter, because it was successful. Hell, the “Dead End Kids,” or “Little Tough Guys,” or whatever you want to call this Broadway troupe transplanted into Hollywood, they had effectively carved out a little subgenre for themselves, like The Three Mesquiteers and singing cowboy trios. Little Tough Guy, for all its blandness, came out very early in the cycle, when audiences were responding to the second-hand dramatic effects at Dead End’s core. It was the Depression, delinquency and poverty were rampant, and these movies provided an outlet for that. And the boys do have a natural chemistry, an audience-friendly mien.
I endlessly salute both Warner Brothers and United Artists (the Dead End guys) for forcing quality onto their products, but one must admit Universal had the key. Quality didn’t matter, people would go to these movies anyway. And the Little Tough Guys, as Universal’s franchise would soon be known, managed to out-produce Dead End Kids by a factor of two. And that was just the beginning! There’re still over 80 movies to go!
Related posts:
• Nos. 2 - 15 (1938 - 1943)
• No. 7 Junior G-Men (1940) Chapters One - Three
Chapters Four - Eight
Chapters Nine - Twelve
• No. 10 Sea Raiders (1941) Chapters One - Six
Chapters Seven - Twelve
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