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Those They Live by Night youngsters, Humphrey Bogart because it's Dead End, "the filth and fury and jumble" of social consciousness unmoored. A flurry of sirens and searchlights kicks it off, the camera fastened to the side of a charging police car as the hard-luck gelhead (John Derek) is pinned down as a cop-killer. His life of poverty, botched jobs and stickups is recounted in the courtroom by Bogart's defense attorney, who one moment visits the young hoodlum's bewildered family and taps his bosom guiltily ("Mea culpa") and in another sardonically ponders how to manipulate the stereotypes crowding the jury boy ("Mix them well and shake before using"). Derek's trajectory is from nihilistic credo ("Live fast, die young and leave a good-looking corpse") to plaintive plea ("I want to live"), at the center is his romance with a tremulous ragdoll (Allene Roberts) last seen about to stick her head into an oven. The courtroom perorations are drab, but Nicholas Ray takes off in the feverish slums, where familiar studio mugs like Vince Barnett (punchy barkeep) and Jimmy Conlin (pool-hall gnome) peek from out of smoke and shadows, wizened chiselers have monikers like "Kid Fingers" while juveniles are prematurely hardened by crime and reformatories. The resulting exposé is a cri de coeur that has the moist punk perpetually lashing out both at his guardian's impotent paternalism and at a justice system that has George Macready's scarred visage. The file is reopened in The Big Night, Crime in the Streets, The Hoodlum Priest... With Candy Toxton, Mickey Knox, Barry Kelley, Dewey Martin, and Sid Melton. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |