Dead End

Dead End

1937. USA. Directed by William Wyler. Screenplay by Lillian Hellman, from the play by Sidney Kingsley. With Sylvia Sidney, Joel McCrea, Humphrey Bogart, Wendy Barrie, Claire Trevor. Sidney Kingsley’s Broadway play was cleaned up considerably for the Samuel Goldwyn version; one of the alterations transformed Kingsley’s hero, a handicapped artist, into dashing young architect Joel McCrea. McCrea appears to be the only middle-class resident of a newly gentrified East Side tenement block where Bowery Boys rub shoulders with millionaires, and working girl Sylvia Sydney worries that her little brother will fall in with the wrong crowd. Humphrey Bogart, in a role that would help lift him from character parts, is the gangster who returns to his old haunts, looking for refuge and his old girlfriend (Claire Trevor), now a prostitute. 93 min.