William Wellmann's pre-code Wild Boys of the Road (1933) clocks in at 67 minutes. The picture is made with the swift expressive editing and short cuts that characterized the fully mature style of silent films. The movie manages to cram an enormous amount of narrative into its short running time. An example of the movie's half-crazed efficiency is a shot intended to punctuate the narrative, establishing an end to one episode in the film: after a battle, we see an image of trampled mud and debris with a bedraggled prosthetic leg lying at the center of the still-life; it's a startling picture, painstakingly composed, and we fully expect the camera to linger on the tableaux -- but, in fact, after two or three seconds, almost before we can register what the picture displays, the screen goes to black. The picture is so brisk and action-packed that it doesn't need to strain for effects or linger on even its most extravagant pictures. The poignant imagery, even, if conveyed in telegraphic bursts is sufficient to carry the plot forward. With most movies, particularly cable-TV series, there's too much on screen for too long -- Wild Boys of the Road is about the Great Depression, shot in a documentary-style, and seems impoverished itself -- you want to see more than the picture shows you; it's a morsel not a meal.
Two teenage boys, Eddie and Tommy are best friends. We see them dancing with girls and flirting at the Sophomore Ball -- it costs 75 cents admission for boys, girls are free. The party seems merry but there are are disturbing undertones. Tommy doesn't have any money and sneaks into the dance dressed as a girl. (He gets busted and kicked-out.) After some fairly explicit necking with the girls in Eddie's jalopy (it's decorated with gee-whiz rah-rah slogans), the young man goes home where he learns that his father has been fired from the cement factory where he works. Tommy's mother is already in economic distress -- the widow has to take in a boarder to make ends meet and, in fact, there still isn't enough cash on hand. Eddie sells his old jalopy and gives the money ($22 dollars) to his father. They josh around but the tone is bleak. Ultimately, the two boys decide to leave town to avoid seeing their families humiliated by poverty. They hobo a ride on a train where they meet a girl disguised as a boy -- this is Sally who is planning on visiting her aunt in Chicago. Things go from bad-to-worse. The train is mobbed with desperate children who are beaten and harassed by the railroad dicks. One of the thugs rapes Sally during a melee in which the children fight the railroad detectives. Thirty or so boys swarm the rapist and seem to tear him to pieces -- his body is thrown out of the moving train. When the trio (Eddie, Tommy, and Sally) reach Chicago, most of the other kids are sent off to some kind of concentration camp. Our heroes, however, find their way to Sally's apartment. It turns out that Sally's Aunt is a prostitute running a speakeasy. The place gets raided just about 30 seconds after the kids are warmly welcomed by the older floozy. Back on the rails again, the three kids are once more assaulted by railroad dicks with batons and clubs. Someone points out that there are a hundred nomadic kids to the ten nasty RR employees and that they should fight back. And, so, there is a pitched battle in which the RR dicks are stoned, pelted with eggs, and end up retreating. In the course of the fight, Tommy gets knocked-out and falls onto the railroad tracks in the switching yard. His leg is horribly mangled when a locomotive rolls over it. Eddie gets a doctor because "Tommy's leg looks strange" and the limb is amputated. The kids continue their journey to nowhere and end up encamped in a huge Hooverville or shanty town called "Sewer Pipe City" -- the hobo children are living inside pre-formed concrete sewer pipes in a dismal vacant lot. Eddie steals a prosthetic leg for Tommy but it doesn't fit right and hurts him when he tries to walk with it. An army of cops arrive and there's another pitched battle between hundreds of "wild boys" and the police. The cops deploy a fire-house and ultimately drive the ragged children out of their impromptu village. Tommy, Eddie, and Sally make their way to New York where they join the hordes of adults and children looking for jobs. Some crooks trick Eddie into passing a terroristic note to a woman in the kiosk selling movie tickets. All three kids are arrested and appear in juvenile court. The Judge admonishes them. Eddie replies saying that society doesn't even want to see these young victims of the Depression and that there is no justice -- the law is just a machine for pushing these children out of sight and out of mind. This is where the movie ended in Wellmann's cut -- a paddy wagon comes and takes the kid's away while the Judge (who has a picture of his own son on his desk) looks out the window at their departure mournfully. Reportedly, this was far too bleak an ending for Jack Warner, the studio head, and, so, the movie has been retrofitted with a phony happy ending -- the kids are sent to good homes and protected by the State. In the studio cut, Eddie celebrates by hurling himself into a series of acrobatic somersaults and ends on his head, literally spinning on his noggin on the sidewalk.
Wellmann's conceives the film as a war movie. But it is an odd kind of war picture --the country is fighting its own children who have risen up in a kind of avenging, but, ultimately, helpless mob. The scene, for instance, in which Tommy's leg is amputated is full of tough-guy talk that is revealed to be ultimately the panicked banter of frightened children -- the sequence would not be out-of-place in All Quiet on the Western Front. The essence of the Depression is that the institutions in society have collapsed to the extent that they are making war on society's most vulnerable members, its children. The pre-Code elements in the film are obvious in the implied rape scene and the vicious revenge that the children take on the assailant. The battles are violent, disturbing, and chaotic. In an early scene, a boy and girl are petting in the backseat of the jalopy. The couple get up, filmed from an angle in which the girl's buttocks are pushed forward toward the camera -- Tommy slaps her ass hard to make his point that he's tired of "kissing and kissing and kissing" her. There's one astonishing scene -- the kid who plays Eddie runs down an alley pursued by cops; there's a four-foot high ash bin along the side of the alley with an 18 inch diameter opening. Eddie somehow levitates and hops right into the ash bin, performing this remarkable stunt at a full, dead run.
I recommend this movie because it is moving, brilliantly made, and, certainly, an important historical document in itself. The picture depicts how very close the US came to full-fledged fighting in the streets and revolution during the Depression. When the harassed kids fight back, the picture takes on a weirdly exciting and triumphant aspect. ( Eddie is played by Frankie Darro, a child actor who started his career as an acrobat in the circus; this was his most important role -- in later life, he worked in Hollywood as a stunt man. Of course, he was injured many times in his career, used alcohol as an analgesic, and ended up as a drunk.)
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