As a kid I developed a liking for “Our Gang” comedies, a series of American short films about a gang of poor, mainly white (but including black) children. I enjoyed the good-natured tomfoolery and minor mischief perpetrated by the juvenile gang members, particularly Spanky, Alfalfa and Buckwheat. I’m thankful that I was exposed to the “Our Gang” shorts🅐 as it pointed me towards another cinema series about the same demographic that became part of my standard viewing fodder – the Dead End Kids series of movies and its successors.

While the antics of “Our Gang” were unadulterated if sentimentalised fun, I came to prefer the more serious tone and developed storylines of the “Dead End Kids” (DEK) movies. The early movies were starkly realistic, and this was realism of the grittiest kind, rooted in the unforgiving here and now of grim slum life in America’s depression era. These kids were dirt poor, locked into a daily struggle for survival, taking every opportunity, fair or foul, to fleece or steal from anyone or anything that presented itself. At the same time their brutal experience had made them rebels with a cause – the inequities of capitalist America…impoverished slum boys who never missed a chance to decry or one-up the “better-offs” in society.

The Kids from Dead End: The DEK phenomena had its genesis in a 1935 Broadway play, Dead End🅑, by Sidney Kingsley, featuring a cadre of young actors which would go on to form the nucleus of the gang in the movie series: Billy Halop, Bobby Jordan, Gabriel Dell, Huntz Hall, Bernard Punsley🅒 and the Gorcey brothers, Leo and David. The play was successful, running for two years, Hollywood mega-mogul Samuel Goldwyn saw the show and was immediately impressed. Goldwyn bought the film rights and made Dead End as a United Artists feature film in 1937, co-starring the Kids alongside Humphrey Bogart. The film was a hit but the boys caused havoc during the production, crashing a truck into a soundstage, prompting an annoyed Goldwyn to unload them to Warner Brothers.

Warners Bros’ crime school graduates: At Warner Brothers the Dead End Kids made six features, typically in supporting roles to big stars (Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Cagney, Pat O’Brien, Anne Sheridan, John Garfield and Bogart). In They Made me a Criminal (1939) starring Garfield, the Kids don’t make an appearance until 25 minutes into the film. The Warners’ series followed the studio’s formula of serious social crime dramas with the Kids heavily involved in the plot and also lending some comedy relief (‘Dead End Kids’, www.boweryboys.bobfinnan.com). Billy Halop was acknowledged as the leader of the gang and was purportedly paid more than the other boys, leading to some bad feelings within the group. Despite the DEK success at Warners the studio was disenchanted with the group’s off-camera antics (more impromptu hell–raising) and released them from their contracts after their sixth film.

Little Tough Guys: Universal decided to get in on the act, cashing in on the DEK’s appeal with its own (B–movie) series. Billing the gang as the “Little Tough Guys”, Universal made 12 features in the late 1930s–early 40s, featuring at one time or other all of the original Kids except Leo Gorcey. Shemp Howard, one of the popular “Three Stooges”, appeared in two of the LTG movies, and was acknowledged by Huntz Hall as an influence on the slapstick style of comedy that the group later developed.

East Side Kids: The Dead End Kids morphed into a new incarnation called the “East Side Kids” in a series made by Monogram Pictures. These were 22 films made as low-budget imitations of the DEK movies, initially crime melodramas with comedic overtones, but as the series evolved, the comedy angle took greater emphasis. With Halop gone by this time, Leo Gorcey and Bobby Jordan were now the gang leaders. As the series progressed, the comedy duo of wise guy Leo Gorcey and zany but dim Huntz Hall became the focus in films like Million Dollar Kid and Spooks Run Wild (a horror comedy headlined by an ageing Bela Lugosi) (www.boweryboys.bobfinnan.com). As a variation on the usual criminals that the boys routinely cross swords with, in Let’s Get Tough (1942) they find themselves this time trying to foil Nazi and Japanese saboteurs in the US. A black former child actor of the original Our Gang movies “Sunshine Sammy” Morrison and William (“Billy”) Benedict were added to the ESK retinue of scruffy working class street kids.

Bowery Boys: Stoogesque slapstick and streetwise Abbott and Costello In 1945 the ESK series folded and was replaced by yet another name for the team of screen performers, the “Bowery Boys”🅓. Leo Gorcey this time had an enhanced stake in the enterprise, owning 40% of the production company🅔, acting as producer and contributing to the script. Gorcey also brought his father Bernard to the films’ players. Bobby Jordan left the series again and Gabriel Dell returned. The interaction of Leo Gorcey, with his malapropism-prone utterances as “Slip”, and Hunt as dim-witted sidekick “Sash”, continued to provide the central plank of the humour. The Bowery Boys series—made by Allied Artists, successor studio to Monogram—comprised 48 movies in all. The early efforts continued the standard fare of gangster melodrama, but after “Three Stooges” director Edward Bernds started directing Gorcey and Co, the films resorted more to slapstick comedy, Three Stooges-like wordplay and occasionally to fantasy themes (‘The Bowery Boys: Anything But Routine’, Ivan G. Shreve, Jr Classic Flix, 19-Sep-2013, www.classicflix.com). Abbott and Costello’s influence is also evident, there are obvious echoes of Africa Screams in the Bowery Boys’ Jungle Gents (1954) (‘Dead End Kids’ found new life as ‘Bowery Boys’, Jim Willard, Loveland Reporter-Herald, 07-July-2018, www.reporterherald.com).

By the time the final Bowery Boys film In the Money is made in 1958, the series is looking tired, stale and frayed…only Huntz Hall and David Gorcey remain of the originals (Leo’s ongoing bouts with the demon alcohol saw his forced departure in 1956, replaced by Stanley Clements), the “Kids” were now middle-aged, hardly juvenile delinquent material, and their screen work lacking the verve and punch of earlier days.

🅐  syndicated for television in the 1960s as The Little Rascals

🅑 the “Dead End” tag came from the inscription on the road sign at the river’s edge in the original, 1937 film

🅒 Punsly was the odd one out among the “young punk” band of actors, he stayed in the DEK/ESK series only till 1942 (notching up 19 films) before leaving show biz for good to become a successful physician (later chief of staff at a private hospital in LA)

🅓 the Bowery is a street and neighbourhood in Lower Manhattan, NYC

🅔 Huntz Hall held 10% himself