William Wyler (19 page)

Wyler's vision was aided by important modifications in Hellman's adaptation of Kingsley's play, taking into account the suggestions of both Goldwyn and Breen. Hellman's emphasis on stark character opposition (as exemplified in
The Children's Hour
) rather than internal conflict made Kingsley's characters easy to shape. However, she made some significant alterations in the characters. As indicated earlier, Gimpty is renamed Dave and, as portrayed by Joel McCrea, is more heroic than his stage model. No longer a cripple—Kingsley's awkward symbolism had to go—the film's Dave is able to transcend his environment. Hellman's Dave is not ravaged by slum life; he is an active, crusading, romantic hero, and McCrea's rugged good looks only enhance that image. The speeches Kingsley gives to Gimpty—such as when he calls New York “the biggest tombstone in the world,” and his lecture on evolution, wherein he declares that the “God planted in men's hearts takes away their reason and their sense of beauty”
¹⁵
—are eliminated. Dave is not a philosopher; he is a doer. Kingsley himself seemed to endorse this change. In an undated telegram to Goldwyn, he wrote, “In order to give him character I agree with Miss Hellman stop He must act decisively and courageously on own strength.”
¹⁶

Hellman also makes Drina a more important character. This change was largely determined by the casting of Sylvia Sidney, who was a star. Drina becomes a more active figure, a labor advocate who is beaten by the police while on a picket line. In making this change, Hellman was no doubt influenced by her own play
Days to Come
, set in an Ohio factory where the workers strike, pitting a strike organizer against a factory owner. In Kingsley's play, Drina makes her first appearance more than ten pages after the opening, when she helps a new boy who was just cockalized (humiliated by having his pants pulled down) by the gang. In the film, she is introduced in her apartment, where she is seen ironing and explaining to her brother Tommy why they need to get out of the slums and why she is on strike. Her dual status as a surrogate mother and an activist is immediately established.

In building up Drina, Hellman diminishes the role of Kay (Wendy Barrie) and makes her less sympathetic. The play's Kay occasionally leaves her luxury apartment to spend time with Gimpty in his slum apartment, but in the film, she is so appalled by the filth and cockroaches in Dave's building that she flees. In Kingsley's play, Kay's rich boyfriend's yacht and its place on the river are associated with Gatsby-like visions of romance and yearning for Gimpty and the slum children—something they can see but can never hope to attain. This allusive imagery is mostly dropped in the film and replaced by more concrete situations, such as when Dave sees Kay standing out on the balcony, looking far away and unattainable.

In the play, Gimpty's pairing off with Drina at the end seems almost happenstance, a resigned consequence of Kay's decision to go on a cruise with her wealthy boyfriend. In the film, however, Dave only temporarily loses sight of Drina because of his infatuation with the glamorous Kay. Hellman makes it clear that Dave and Drina are naturally united by their social conscience and desire for a better world. Whereas Dave tells Kay late in the film that they are too different to have a future together, in the play, Gimpty practically begs Kay to stay with him.

The character of Baby Face Martin is also altered by Hellman. In the play, Martin is a gangster who exemplifies Kingsley's thesis that slum life breeds criminals. Gimpty emphasizes this point after Martin's death, while also evoking a measure of sympathy for his childhood friend: “Yeah…Martin was a killer, he was bad, he deserved to die, true! But I knew him when we were kids. He had a lot of fine stuff. He was strong. He had courage. He was a born leader. He even had a sense of fair play. But living in the streets kept making him bad.”
¹⁷

The film's Martin is also a gangster and a criminal, and he has a sympathetic side as well. In Hellman's script and in Wyler's presentation, he becomes another of the director's dreamers—a man who, like Barney Glasgow and Samuel Dodsworth, wants to recover something of the past. He returns to his old neighborhood to see his mother and his former girlfriend. Confused and nostalgic, he seems to be in search of the boy he once was, hoping to discover where he went wrong. When he is rejected by his mother and then shattered by the realization of what Francey has become, Wyler and Hellman create parallel scenes in which Martin sits in a restaurant, brooding about what he has just experienced and trying to make sense of it. Baby Face thus becomes the embodiment of the 1930s gangster who is literally “dead-ended.” He tries to justify himself to Dave by bragging, like a traditional movie gangster, about his custom-made shirts and tailored suits—thus identifying himself with the wealthy who are taking over the neighborhood. Both the gangster and the rich (and, by extension, Kay) threaten to destroy the familial society of the streets by their excess and their idleness. Martin, however, seems to sense that his time is up; his words sound hollow, and even he knows it. A gangster who seems disgusted by his own success, he is alone (except for a lone sidekick), looking for something he has lost. He is a sad figure, not grand or outsized like the screen gangsters seen earlier in the decade.

In the play, Martin demeans Gimpty in front of the street kids, at one point even stepping on his crippled foot. Kingsley thus gives Gimpty a motivation for informing on Martin, who is later cornered and shot down by the FBI. The film's Dave, however, suffers no indignities from Martin. It is only when Martin tries to kill Dave after he interrupts a kidnapping plan that Dave retaliates, pursuing his old friend across tenement roofs and shooting him as he clings desperately to a fire escape. Martin's “fall,” however, is pathetic. He is shot by an architect, not by the FBI, and he dies in the place that produced him. The world he thought he had escaped claims him in the end.

According to Carl Rollyson, Hellman's refusal to make Dave an informer is prophetic of the stand she would take in
Scoundrel Time
. Even at the beginning of
Dead End
, a member of a rival gang wears the scar of a “squealer”—a cut that Tommy is about to inflict on Spit, when he is stopped by Dave. Rollyson writes: “It would never be right to inform in any circumstances—this is the logic of Hellman's absolutist code. There must be a decisive split between right and wrong; evil must be external to the hero, not a part of him.”
¹⁸

Kingsley's play is a naturalistic document intended to demonstrate that economic inequity breeds crime. Hellman's screenplay is less didactic and a bit less grim, emphasizing character at the expense of dogma by turning Kingsley's Gimpty into a Joel McCrea–type hero and Drina into a working-class heroine. Even Hellman's prologue—slyly remarking that “every street in New York ends in a river”—seems more descriptive than Kingsley's call-to-arms quotation from Paine. She goes on to explain that, in their desire for homes with river views, the rich moved eastward until they reached a dead end, and their apartments “looked down on the windows of tenements.” Hellman's prologue introduces a story; Kingsley's is closer to agitprop.

Wyler's camera, however, manipulates space to emphasize the confinement of the slum environment. Wyler and cinematographer Gregg Toland turn
Dead End
into a story of entrapment in which the characters are repeatedly boxed into claustrophobic, heavily shaded places. Visually, it is Wyler's darkest and most brooding work, and the mood is compounded by the depiction of Baby Face Martin. Unlike the gangster figures of the early 1930s, whose rise from their immigrant status to lives of glamour and riches made them emblematic of the success ethic, this film's gangster is consumed by remorse. In his second inaugural address in 1937, Roosevelt promised to undermine “old admiration of worldly success as such” and to be intolerant of “the abuse of power by those who betray for profit the elementary decencies of life.”
¹⁹
The New Deal's replacement of rugged individualism with social responsibility and activism made the traditional gangster figure obsolete; instead, the representatives of law and order became heroic figures in the movies. Like his real-life namesake, “Baby Face” Nelson,
Dead End's
Baby Face Martin is hunted by the FBI and, in the play, is gunned down by FBI agents.

Bogart's Martin is an extension of his role as Duke Mantee in
The Petrified Forest
, a character he originated for the stage in 1934 and reprised in the 1936 film version, reviving his flagging screen career.
The Petrified Forest
is an allegorical play in which Sherwood brings the gangster face-to-face with an itinerant poet and philosopher, Alan Squire, in an isolated gas station–luncheonette in the eastern Arizona desert. The poet first recognizes Mantee as “the last great apostle of rugged individualism.” Indeed, to Gramp Maple, Duke is the very spirit of America: “He ain't a gangster; he's a real old-time desperado. Gangsters is foreign. He's an American.” But modern America, according to Sherwood, has no use for either the poet or the gangster, and Squire eventually tells Mantee, “You're obsolete Duke, just like me.”
²⁰
Organized crime has made the lone gangster outmoded, and the burgeoning industrialized America has no place for poets. In Sherwood's play, they both go to the old frontier to die.

Kingsley's Baby Face Martin returns to New York from the Midwest (St. Louis)—thus reversing the mythic American journey—to revisit the neighborhood that shaped him. Unlike Mantee, who is described as shabby, stooped, and almost animal-like, Martin has a surgically reconstructed face and expensive clothes. This makeover does not effectively disguise him, though, because he is immediately recognized by Dave. Most important, this aging gangster is nostalgic, hoping to rediscover who he once was, and he yearns to reconnect with his mother and his first love. As he explains to his sidekick, Hunk, in a line that was written for the film, “I'm getting sick of what I can pay for.” Like Wyler's restructured and reimagined Barney Glasgow, who returns to the woods looking for his lost self, Martin makes the same journey with the same destructive results. Martin, like the prototypical screen gangster, is killed, while Barney belatedly realizes that he has ruined his own life. The gangster and the businessman suffer similar fates.

The film opens with an unbroken crane shot scanning the New York City skyline and then descending across an apartment house window, tenement roofs, the street of a slum neighborhood, and the entrance to a new luxury apartment, finally coming to rest with a low-angle shot of a policeman dwarfed by the size of the building and the sight of a tugboat moving down the river. Within the next eight minutes, Wyler introduces all the principal characters. The Dead End Kids are fooling around, awaiting the arrival of their leader, Tommy, who is impatiently waiting for his sister, Drina, to finish ironing his shirt. As she completes her task, Drina explains to Tommy that she is on strike to earn better wages so that they can escape this neighborhood. Next, we see Philip Griswold breakfasting on the terrace of a luxury apartment, surreptitiously pouring his milk into a plant.

After Tommy leaves, Drina speaks to Dave's mother, Mrs. Connell, through a barred window; Mrs. Connell is framed by the bars of the fire escape. They mention that Dave had been looking for Drina the previous night, but she was late coming home from a strike meeting. Drina comments that Dave used to wait for her, “but now…” She stops, and Wyler cuts to a balcony in the new building showing Kay looking out, framed by the leafy branches of a tree. It is a lovely, visual cut that establishes both Drina's entrapment in the slum and the sense that Kay's world, despite its proximity, is far away. Whether Dave (whom we have not met yet) could ever attain such a dream is brought into question. The film will force both Drina and Dave to face choices—hers, whether to leave the neighborhood to find a better life for herself and Tommy; his, whether to abandon Drina and the poor people he grew up with to enter the world of the idle rich.

Dave is an architect—his profession is a metaphor for his potential to create a new, just society—but he cannot find work and is forced to do menial labor. He is first seen painting the window of a local restaurant, where Drina stops to talk with him about the strike. While fixing her shoe, she notices that Dave is distracted by the sight of Kay on her balcony; frustrated by his lack of attention, she leaves.

When Wyler introduces Martin and his associate Hunk, their clothes make them look out of place in the neighborhood. Dave immediately recognizes Martin, and they talk. When Dave says that he envies Martin for getting away from the neighborhood, the gangster responds, “Yeah, far away.” His words echo the free-floating image of Kay on her balcony, but coming from Martin, they imply that money may not be the answer to escaping the slums. He confirms this suspicion when, after laughing at Dave for going to college for six years only to be forced to live off “handouts,” Martin shows off his shirt and his $150 suit but then wistfully remarks, “Sometimes I get the jitters and sometimes I get a terrific yen to stay put.” Turning away from Dave, he looks up the street to where his mother lives and then toward the river, his face partially hidden, clearly longing for something he cannot quite articulate. Martin's body language points toward love, not money, as the essence of fulfillment; it is the reason he has come home. This is the truth that Dave will rediscover when he turns away from Kay and remembers his love for Drina.

Wyler places the two scenes between Dave and Kay near the water to give them a romantic feel—similar to his use of the ocean at the end of
A House Divided
—unlike the dirty water of the East River where the boys swim. Kay admits to liking another man and reveals that she is thinking about going away with him. She says she was “hard up” when she and the other man met and is “tired of being hard up.” Like Barney Glasgow, she is willing to marry for money and security. She admits to Dave that her suitor wants to marry her, and she is tempted because she is “frightened of being poor again.” Dave agrees that poverty is terrible but asks her to wait until he hears about a potential job. In the play, Kay arranges Gimpty's job interview; the more forceful Dave of the film gets the interview on his own. And yet, in the play, Gimpty lectures Kay that “not to look forward to love…God that's not living at all!” The film's Dave is less aggressive because, like Kay, he is unsure of their relationship.