 |
| Director William Wellman |
WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD B USA (68 mi) 1933 d: William Wellman
You read in the papers about giving people help. The banks get it. The soldiers get it. The breweries get it. And they’re always yelling about giving it to the farmers. What about us? We’re kids! —Tommy (Edwin Phillips)
A companion piece to John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940), this film was largely a response to newspaper headlines about America’s transient youth, but also a Russian film about countless gangs of street kids by Nikolai Ekk, THE ROAD TO LIFE (1931), predecessors to even more starkly realistic films like Buñuel’s portrait of the young wretched of the earth living in the slums of Mexico City in LOS OLVIDADOS (1950), or Hector Babenco’s chronicling of Brazil’s burgeoning population of street children in PIXOTE (1981), where three million homeless children were living in São Paulo’s shanty towns. The film is also something of a follow-up to Wellman’s earlier film BEGGARS OF LIFE (1928), starring Louise Brooks as a train-hopping hobo who dresses like a boy to survive (think Linda Manz fifty years later in 1978 as a runaway in Terrence Malick’s elegiac DAYS OF HEAVEN), with far more effective camerawork in this film by Arthur Todd than the rather studied cinematography in the earlier Wellman film, beautifully capturing the restless spirit of life on the road with dazzling location work on speeding trains. Even today it’s hard to fathom the staggering repercussions of the Great Depression, as by early 1933 twelve million workers were unemployed, almost 25% of the American workforce. What’s not commonly known is that millions of children were affected by shortened school years, with approximately 5000 schools closing altogether, causing 40% of high school aged youth to be out of school, up to 60% in rural areas, where three million of those jobless were young, between the ages of 16 and 25. Seeing no hope for employment, many hopped on freight trains taking them to various parts of the country seeking better job opportunities. Just as the Great Depression lingered through the 1930’s, so did the large number of individuals riding the rails across America. In 1927 over 50 percent of transients thrown off the railroads were men in their forties or older, but by 1932, 75 percent of those accused of trespassing were under 25 years of age, boys and girls alike, young hobos who typically owned only the ragged clothes on their backs. It’s important to remember all this happened prior to the implementation of things like welfare, unemployment insurance, and Social Security, the first signs of federal intervention in local affairs. That is the backdrop to this film, a cautionary tale warning youth of the dangers of running away and riding freight trains, struggling against the unstable hardships of hobo existence, always met in every train yard with a crowd of policemen with clubs, where even today the U.S. has the highest poverty rate of children in the industrialized world (America's Poor Are Worse Off Than Elsewhere), but the film had an unintended effect, actually serving to romantically entice many to the adventure of travel on the road, the exact opposite of its aim. The screenplay by Earl Baldwin is an adaptation of David Ahern’s story Desperate Youth, where this pre-Code movie brings a hard edge and unflinching depiction of poverty and the victimization of youth that is rare to find in Hollywood.
The weakest part of the movie is the melodrama that frames the picture, as the beginning and ending are formulaic, the kind we see in hundreds of other pictures, shot in a Hollywood sound studio, indistinguishable from anything else made at the time. Eddie (Frankie Darro) and Tommy (Edwin Phillips) are two small-town California high school kids doing what all kids do, showing up at a dance where they mingle and occasionally dance with local girls, but the spirit of their best buddy friendship is stronger than the allure of any girl, or God forbid a love affair. When Eddie realizes his friend is down on his luck, having no money to his name as his single mom is going through an extended period of hard times, he turns to his dad for help, only to discover he’s just lost his job as well, and even for a teenager, this is powerful stuff, as it hits him like a ton of bricks. When he and Tommy commiserate about their future, they decide the best way they can help their parents is to hit the road, hoping to find work elsewhere, as that will at least be “one less mouth to feed” for their struggling families. With this, they hit the railroad yard and hop the first train out of town. Once the film shifts to location shooting, the entire mood changes, becoming in the 1930’s what the French New Wave inspired in the 60’s, as it was no longer an insipid formulaic movie shoot, overreliant on script and staged drama, but real life as it happens, where the spontaneous energy is suddenly vibrant and innovative, giving the director free reign in what he chooses to shoot, exhibiting more creative control on the sheer look and feel of the picture. Wellman’s grim location shooting captures the bleakness of that moment in history, as these kids are out of options, having nowhere else to turn, suddenly finding themselves on their own at such a young and tender age. On the train they run into Sally (Dorothy Coonan at 19, the future Mrs. Wellman, who got her start as an uncredited Busby Berkeley dancer), a runaway girl who dresses like a boy with a cap on her head and talks tough, like the rest of them, a necessary survival instinct, as there are literally hundreds of other kids just like them, surrounded by vultures who prey on the weak, so the kids deliberately kept separate quarters from the adult camps. As their numbers multiply into a small army of a hundred or more living in out-of-the-way Hooverville roadside encampments, Eddie becomes a de facto leader in defending their hobo jungle against an onslaught of police in scenes that are given a documentary look, revealing there was no shame in standing in breadlines all day when millions of others were just as destitute. Made about the same time as King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread (1934), Theodore Caplow, who founded the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia, wrote in The American Sociological Review in 1940, “Between ten and twenty thousand illegal train riders are apprehended daily on American railroads. Between two and three thousand were killed every year between 1920 and 1938, and a somewhat greater number injured,” TRANSIENCY AS A CULTURAL PATTERN.
With a short running time of just over an hour, the depiction of middle class life suddenly evaporates into thin air, becoming instead a social conscience picture given a newsreel look, which is not afraid to show a sexual assault (by an uncredited Ward Bond, no less), violence, murder, and a rather horrific accident. The Warner front office had misgivings about an astonishingly gruesome scene in which the leg of Tommie is crushed by an oncoming train, having knocked himself senseless by running into a sign to avoid capture by the “railroad dicks,” Wild Boys of the Road Clip YouTube (36 seconds), but Wellman, the maker of 82 movies in 35 years (seven in 1933 alone), and a product of the studio system, yet also a reflection of his own unique lifetime experiences, insisted on the authentic depiction of everyday dangers and living conditions and cast real hobos for the sewer pipe and city dump Hooverville sequences. Outside of the leads, the cast is made up entirely of non-professional or largely inexperienced actors, where it’s hard not to be charmed by Frankie Darro’s harrowing performance, as he assumes the role of the charismatic leader of a youthful gang of homeless and penniless vagabonds, and always remains at Tommy’s side even after losing a leg, never losing sight of their friendship. He began his career as a child actor, appearing in his first film at the age of six, yet due to his diminutive size, he continued to play teenage roles well into his twenties, doing all his own stunt work, and later became a stunt man. He is perhaps best known for his role as Lampwick, the unlucky boy who turns into a Pleasure Island donkey in Walt Disney’s second animated feature, PINOCCHIO (1940), Pinocchio (1940) - Pleasure Island/Donkey Transformation YouTube (7:22). Tougher and harder-edged than any other Warner’s movie of the 30’s, giving us an authentic window into the Depression years, especially noteworthy are the nerve-wracking scenes of kids jumping on and off the moving trains, or the police washing away a vagrant community with fire hoses, while it also displays seemingly improvisational dance moments that come out of nowhere with a free-styling Darro, Breakdance first ever YouTube (26 seconds), and Coonan doing a tap dance routine providing their own superlative moments. In the end, however, Warners made the director change the downbeat ending from the kids being hauled off to jail into something more uplifting, where the NRA plug (National Recovery Administration, unanimously declared unconstitutional 2 years later by the U.S. Supreme Court) is far from subtle, with a sympathetic judge (a deliberate FDR reference, essentially outlining the New Deal policy) instead offering them a chance after Darro’s inspiring courtroom appeal, thinking the audience would find the proposed original ending just too dismal. What really surprises in this film is that Eddie and the kids come from middle class homes, living normal lives, but the Depression has uprooted their lives and turned it upside down, where now they’re clawing and scratching for every inch of available space, always on the lookout to find work and the hopes for a bite to eat, but there were just no opportunities. Keeping a head on their shoulders and their dignity intact under those circumstances is admirable, where the old adage is “There, but for the grace of God, go I.” In December 2013, the film was selected to the National Film Registry, Complete National Film Registry Listing.
