Wild Boys of the Road

 

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.

Tokyo-Ga

Japanese director Yasujirō Ozu   

Actor Chishû Ryû   

Chishû Ryû visiting the grave of Ozu in Tokyo-ga   

Ozu grave   

Getting the shot with Yûharu Atsuta   

German directors Wim Wenders meets Werner Herzog atop Tokyo Tower in Tokyo-ga   

TOKYO-GA               B                   
Germany  USA  (92 mi)  1985  d:  Wim Wenders

If in our century something sacred still existed… if there were something like a sacred treasure of the cinema, then for me that would have to be the work of the Japanese director, Yasujiro Ozu. He made fifty-four films. Silent films in the Twenties, black-and-white films in the Thirties and Forties, and finally color films until his death on December 12th, 1963, on his sixtieth birthday.

With extreme economy of means, and reduced to but the bare essentials, Ozu’s films, again and again, tell the same simple story, always of the same people, and the same city, Tokyo. This chronicle spanning nearly 40 years, depicts the transformation of life in Japan. Ozu’s films deal with the slow deterioration of the Japanese family, and thereby, with the deterioration of the national identity. But they do so not by pointing with dismay at what is new, Western, or American, but by lamenting with an unindulged sense of nostaligia the loss taking place at the same time.

As thoroughly Japanese as they are, these films are, at the same time, universal. In them, I’ve been able to recognize all families, in all the countries of the world, as well as my parents, my brother and myself. For me, never before and never again since has the cinema been so close to its essence and its purpose: to present an image of man in our century, a usable, true and valid image, in which he not only recognizes himself but from which, above all, he may learn about himself.

Ozu’s work does not need my praise and such a sacred treasure of the cinema could only reside in the realm of the imagination. And so, my trip to Tokyo was in no way a pilgrimage. I was curious as to whether I still could track down something from this time, whether there was still anything left of this work. Images perhaps, or even people…Or whether so much would have changed in Tokyo in the twenty years since Ozu’s death that nothing would be left to find.

—Wim Wenders opening narration, Ozu Notes 2 Richie - Willamette University

Made between English-language film Paris, Texas (1984) and Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin) (1987), Wenders actually takes a road trip to Japan in the spring of 1983, taking a break from shooting the American film in search of discovering any remnants of late Japanese director Yasuhirō Ozu in today’s Tokyo, some twenty years after he died, using a film language that is personal, powerful and evocative, described by Wenders as a “film diary,” but it's also one of the finest examples of a filmmaker using the medium to honor the work of another, much like the Olivier Assayas pilgrimage to Taiwan when shooting HHH – A Portrait of Hou Hsiao-hsien (1997).  With Wenders narrating the film, it ranges from explicit focus on Ozu’s filmmaking, where Wenders interviews Ozu’s regular cinematographer, Yûharu Atsuta, and one of Ozu’s favorite actors, Chishû Ryû, using clips from his films, to chaotic and often unsettling contemporary scenes of Tokyo, becoming entranced by the wider landscape while observing the country and its culture, where the film screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival.  In distinct Wenders style, the opening shots of Tokyo are completely modernistic, with a dynamic sounding synthesizer soundtrack by Dick Tracy (Laurent Petitgand, Meche Mamecier, and Chico Rojo Ortega), Dick Tracy - TOKYO-GA [OST (19:13), that shows little compatibility with Ozu.  Framing the opening and closing of the film with images from Ozu’s TOKYO STORY (1953), Wenders goes looking for many of the iconic images that reoccur throughout Ozu’s career, the trains, rooftops, elevated electric wires, laundry hanging from a line, boats chugging slowly across the harbor, and children at play, then superimposes images from another filmmaker into the middle of his own film, which has a way of aesthetically communing with another artist, making the film itself specifically about filmmakers and filmmaking, where certainly part of the film’s desire is not only to pay tribute to those that came before him, but to examine the director’s own place among the pantheon of cinema itself.  Throughout the film, Wenders is moved to contemplation, like this particular moment where he photographs his own reflection in the window of a moving train, “We gasp and give a start when we suddenly discover something true or real in a movie, be it nothing more than the gesture of a child in the background, or a bird flying across the frame, or a cloud casting its shadow over the scene for but an instant.  It’s a rarity in today’s cinema to find such moments of truth, for people or objects to show themselves as they really are.”

Through Wenders’ eyes, Tokyo is an often overwhelming urban landscape, viewed as nearly incomprehensible while he searches out the obsession with all-night pachinko parlors, lined with rows of cramped players sitting next to one another, each lost in a game of mechanical solitaire, followed each night by a lone “nail man” who meticulously checks each of the machines after closing time, observing with a voice that’s flat and emotionless, “This game induces a kind of hypnosis.  Winning is hardly important.  But, time passes, you lose touch with yourself for a while, you merge with the machine, and perhaps, you forget, what you always wanted to forget,” with Wenders suggesting the game actually numbs the lingering, post-traumatic effects of World War II.  But he also discovers the presence of people lined up at a golf driving range sitting atop a skyscraper, watching the collective motion as they each practice their own swing, or swat baseballs from the roof of a department store, or discover a miniature golf stadium, while also discovering a prevalence for fake food displays in restaurant windows, a culturally unique way of promoting their menu, a stark contrast to the photographs that look decidedly less appetizing in fast food restaurants, with the director even venturing into a factory that manufactures lifelike, wax models of Japanese food, amusingly noting that the companies let him film everything except the employees eating.  While riding in trains, including an underground train system with high-tech tube maps, or taxi cabs offering channel surfing television options, we witness the constant presence of street advertising, the mesmerizing symmetry of criss-crossing commuter trains, or citizens in mass ascending or descending escalators, while on the street teenagers have already adopted an American sock-hop identity, wearing jeans or poodle skirts, saddle shoes, and club-embroidered (Tokyo Rockabilly Club), satin windbreakers dancing to the music of the 50’s and 60’s, with the guys doing their best Elvis Presley imitation, resorting to rare body contact when learning new dance steps, but we also catch an occasional glimpse of the elderly, a person reading manga, or an incalcitrant young child that simply refuses his mother’s insistence that he walk in a train station.  For Wenders, “The more the reality of Tokyo struck me as a torrent of impersonal, unkind, threatening, and yes, even inhuman images, the greater and powerful became in my mind the images of the loving and ordered world of the mythical city of Tokyo that I knew from the films of Yasujirō Ozu.”

While there is a luscious beauty to witnessing picnics in parks during the height of cherry blossom season, including a lingering impression of watching children play baseball on a cemetery path overrun by a cascade of blossoms, the key to the film is the presence of significant visitors, where there is a chance encounter with French filmmaker and essayist Chris Marker in a small bar appropriately called “La Jetee,” as Marker was working on the finishing touches of his own incredible film masterpiece Sans Soleil (1983) at the time, while fellow compatriot Werner Herzog also turns up dressed in a suit and tie atop the Tokyo Tower, an Eiffel Tower inspired substitute, where Herzog looks so out of place from his natural habitat, staring out over the artifice of high-rises and modern office buildings, uttering something superfluous like, “When I look out here I see that everything is cluttered up.  There are hardly any images to be found.  One has to dig deep down like an archeologist.”  But Wenders is on another kind of mission, “just to look, without wanting to prove anything.”  While it comes as no surprise that the smaller, more intimate world of Ozu has been swallowed up by a rapidly overgrown, technologically advanced, neon cityscape, where giant exteriors have drown out all suggestions of a quieter, more reflective world, the most powerful images of the film come from lengthy interviews with two of Ozu’s closest collaborators, now both in their 80’s, including Chishû Ryû, the director’s favorite actor who appeared in over 35 of his 54 films, always playing a more mature father figure much older than himself, giving all credit for his performances to his illustrious director, suggesting he would never have been a star without him.  Ryû takes Wenders to see Ozu’s grave, marked with a single Japanese character that stands for “nothingness.”  Camera operator Yûharu Atsuta started out as an assistant cameraman during the silent era and after 15 years was promoted to cameraman, working only for Ozu for the next 25 years, claiming he was a man of few words, but cared deeply for his crew, knowing precisely how he wanted films shot, where we see him enact how he setup those tatami shots for Ozu.  Preferring to shoot indoors on a controlled set, the director was bothered by observers during location shooting, so outside shots were mostly transitional, including his memorable litany of trains that appeared in nearly every picture.  Ozu would check out locations only by foot, with Atsuta saying “they would only stop looking when they passed out,” likely holed up in a neighborhood bar, which could lead to an appearance in one of his films, becoming a place where lonely fathers drown their sorrows.  Both men were proud to serve Ozu, passing up greater salary opportunities to stick with him, where their sincerity is apparent, with Atsuta displaying a prized gift from Ozu, a custom stopwatch used by the director to meticulously time his shots.  Trying to explain why he retired after Ozu’s death, Atsuta breaks down in tears and cannot continue, literally humbled by the moment.  Despite Wenders’ contention that the world of Ozu’s Japan no longer exists, his revealing interviews suggest otherwise, where perhaps it can only be found by the traveler who is in no hurry, someone like Ozu, who has the time to sit and observe the minute details of people’s behavior.