Wild Boys of the Road (1933) - film review

Eddie Smith and Tommy Gordon are two adolescent boys, from comfortable middle-class homes, who are about to leave school.  When their fathers both lose their jobs, Eddie and Tommy decide to set off and look for work in another town, hoping to raise money for their families.   On a train bound for Chicago, they meet another stray teenager, Sally, who is planning to stay with her aunt.   When Sally’s aunt is arrested for prostitution, the three friends are soon back on the road and they end up joining a gang of juveniles who are in their situation.  The gang settles in Ohio, where they form a small community, scavenging for food in the surrounding area.  When the locals complain to the police, the authorities move in and set about driving them away...

This is one of a number of films that Warner Brothers – the most socially conscious of the Hollywood studios - produced during the 1930s to spread awareness of the social ills that were blighting the American landscape at the time.  The Great Depression is featured in several of their films, but rarely as starkly as in Wild Boys of the Road, which shows the impact of the economic crisis on those who were perhaps hit the hardest - dispossessed juveniles who, because of their age, had even less chance of getting paid work than adults.     

Whilst the film now appears over-sentimentalised and politically naïve – especially when compared with other 1930s Hollywood social dramas such as Mervyn LeRoy’s  I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940) – it still has a great deal of charm and warmth, with several scenes delivering a huge emotional impact.  Some parts of the film are astonishingly bleak, and yet there are also moments of pure farce where you just cannot help laughing out loud.    

Admittedly, the performances are unsophisticated by today’s standards, mainly because the cast was largely made up of non-professional or very inexperienced actors.  Despite this, it is hard not to fall for the charms of the lead performers, especially Frankie Darro, who acts like James Cagney’s understudy and whose acrobatic skills are put to great use.

The film was directed by William Wellman, one of the most important and creative filmmakers working in Hollywood in the 1930s.  He is perhaps best known for the seminal gangster film The Public Enemy (1931), which examined the social cost of alcohol prohibition.

When it was first released, Wild Boys of the Road was generally ill-received by the critics and public alike.  It succeeded in raising awareness of an important social issue, but it failed to identify causes or venture possible solutions.  Today, the film is judged far more favourably, since it provides a powerful testimony of one of the bleakest periods in American history.   It is an engaging film, although its impact is diminished by a horribly contrived happy ending.

© James Travers 2008

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