NFR Project: 'Wild Boys of the Road' (1933)

 

NFR Project: ‘Wild Boys of the Road’

Dir: William Wellman

Scr: Earl Baldwin

Pho: Arthur L. Todd

Ed: Thomas Pratt

Premiere: Oct. 7, 1933

67 min.

There’s a lot to unpack here. This is another of the Warner Brothers’ gritty realistic productions so common from the studio in the 1930s. It was slated to be much more downheartening than it eventually became. It is also a movie that haunts my nightmares.

Wild Boys of the Road documents the true-life plight of hundreds of thousands of teenagers who left their homes during the Great Depression and went on the bum, looking for work. Two friends, Tommy (Frankie Darro) and Eddie (Edwin Phillips), hit the rails and start traveling across the country, looking for better times. They meet young Sally (Dorothy Coonan), dressed as a boy, and the three pal up and head for Chicago, where Sally’s aunt lives. That destination turns out to be a whorehouse, which is promptly raided. The three move on.

Disturbingly, a railroad worker (Ward Bond) rapes another young woman, and is pushed to his death by the hoboes. Later, the kids are leaving the train as it pulls into the yard. Eddie hits his head on a signpost, and falls over the tracks. While the others watch helplessly, the train severs his leg.

I was far too young when I saw this scene as a kid. Director Wellman surely knew how to stage the scene; the flurry of edits that conveys the horror of the moment is unforgettable. Again and again as a child, I ran over the seeming inevitability of doom.

A local doctor completes the amputation of Tommy’s leg, and the three continue. They wind up in New York City, where Eddie, trying to earn some money with which to start a job, falls in unknowingly with some gangsters and is arrested for robbery.

The pals go before a judge, and Eddie give a stirring speech about the unfairness of it all, and asks the judge to lock them up. In the original screenplay, the kids were sent to reform school, much as they would in real life. Somebody at Warner Brothers must have been convinced that that much realism would not be acceptable, so they rewrote the ending so that the judge decides to help them all.

Despite the imposed happy ending, the film is a blistering look at normal people’s lives and the struggles they faced.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Imitation of Life.