A few years ago the New Yorker magazine, in a breathtaking lapse of taste, published a fashion spread inspired by the iconic photographs of Dust Bowl migrants. Much as I deplored the sleek models in $400 distressed cardigans pretending to thumb rides along a dusty highway, the project tapped into a phenomenon I am hopelessly susceptible to myself: the mystique of the Great Depression. I'm attracted to the cultural products of the time: music, movies, fashion, architecture (why did the world have such thrilling elegance in a time of so much suffering?) But I'm also drawn to the zeitgeist: a profound disillusionment, ranging from wry to bitter, which stands out sharply from America's traditional optimism and innocence.
Please forgive this personal digression, but I think it is relevant to my appreciation of WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD, one of the most vividand least glamorousdepictions of the Depression I've ever seen. It's easy to romanticize freight-hopping, but this film, while thoroughly enjoyable, conveys just how awful homeless wandering was. At the same time, it helps explain the dignity that elevates those photographs of the Depression's victimsso foreign to our own graceless era. The key to every character's response to hardship is stoicism: a desire, above all, not to be a burden on others.
The film opens at a high-school dance, where the girls wear evening gowns, the kids dance to the Shadow Waltz (Warner Bros. never lost a chance to cannibalize its own products), and there are some pre-Code jokes about hanky-panky in the backs of cars. But signs of the Depression already creep in: one boy doesn't have 75 cents for admission, and when the main characters come out, they find someone has stolen the gasoline from their car, so they blithely siphon some from a handy convertible. They are Eddie (Frankie Darro, the junior Jimmy Cagney), a pugnacious but tender-hearted boy, and his best friend, the more retiring, sleepy-eyed Tommy (Edwin Phillips.) Tommy's fatherless family is already on the skids, and Eddie promises to help out, until he learns his own father has been laid off, and they too are soon on the verge of being evicted. Eddie bravely sells his beloved jalopy, then decides he and Tommy should seek their own fortune, leaving two fewer mouths to feed.
Step one, of course, is to hop a passing freight. They meet a girl their own age, Sally (adorable, freckle-faced Dorothy Coonan), a tough cookie traveling alone dressed as a boy. They are soon part of a community, with hundreds of bums crowding onto the trains and trying to evade the railroad cops who wait in every freight yard. Realizing they have the cops outnumbered, they decide to put up a fight, pelting the police with eggs and fruit. When they find out that a brakeman (Ward Bond) has raped another of the girls traveling in boys' clothes, they mete out vigilante justice. It's easy to imagine audiences cheering at these assaults on law and order. In a later, even more shocking scene, the cops come to clear out a shanty-town where the young vagrants have been living; again they fight back, but the cops turn fire hoses on them. Things get even bleaker when Tommy is run over by a train and loses his leg. Edwin Phillips is poignant without mawkishness as he tries to shrug off his loss, as he broods over being a drag on his friends, and asin the film's last scenehe miserably watches Eddie turn handsprings down the street. Frankie Darro does his usual Cagney impersonation (in a hilarious touch, when he runs into a movie theater a Cagney film is playing) but shows real talent and presence. Sadly, none of the three young leads went on to prominent careers. Dorothy Coonan (a spiffy tap dancer too) took the role of Mrs. William Wellman.
The story is packed with incident and sprinkled with comic relief, some from Sterling Holloway, but it's not really a story as much as a portrait of a time, a people, a predicament. It's amazing and yet completely credible how quickly two middle-class boys turn into ragged panhandlers (they don't even ask for dimes, just nickels), one a cripple, one stooping occasionally to petty theft. The hobo community is painted warmly, maybe sentimentally, as loyal, diverse and supportive (blacks and girls are treated as equals). But no one is having any fun; they're not wild, just bone-weary. Eddie, Tommy and Sally wind up in New York, living in a garbage dump; here their fates take a turn for the worse and then an improbable turn for the better. The kindly judge who lectures them on how things are going to be better now, they are going to get a fresh chance, as the camera pans up to the NRA ("We Do Our Part") poster over his head, will likely prompt eye-rolling today. But the audience probably cheered for this too: think how badly they wanted to hear it. The last-minute idealism fails to dull the force of the movie, which approaches the biting austerity of Woody Guthrie anthems like "Hard Traveling" and "I Ain't Got No Home in this World Anymore."
Please forgive this personal digression, but I think it is relevant to my appreciation of WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD, one of the most vividand least glamorousdepictions of the Depression I've ever seen. It's easy to romanticize freight-hopping, but this film, while thoroughly enjoyable, conveys just how awful homeless wandering was. At the same time, it helps explain the dignity that elevates those photographs of the Depression's victimsso foreign to our own graceless era. The key to every character's response to hardship is stoicism: a desire, above all, not to be a burden on others.
The film opens at a high-school dance, where the girls wear evening gowns, the kids dance to the Shadow Waltz (Warner Bros. never lost a chance to cannibalize its own products), and there are some pre-Code jokes about hanky-panky in the backs of cars. But signs of the Depression already creep in: one boy doesn't have 75 cents for admission, and when the main characters come out, they find someone has stolen the gasoline from their car, so they blithely siphon some from a handy convertible. They are Eddie (Frankie Darro, the junior Jimmy Cagney), a pugnacious but tender-hearted boy, and his best friend, the more retiring, sleepy-eyed Tommy (Edwin Phillips.) Tommy's fatherless family is already on the skids, and Eddie promises to help out, until he learns his own father has been laid off, and they too are soon on the verge of being evicted. Eddie bravely sells his beloved jalopy, then decides he and Tommy should seek their own fortune, leaving two fewer mouths to feed.
Step one, of course, is to hop a passing freight. They meet a girl their own age, Sally (adorable, freckle-faced Dorothy Coonan), a tough cookie traveling alone dressed as a boy. They are soon part of a community, with hundreds of bums crowding onto the trains and trying to evade the railroad cops who wait in every freight yard. Realizing they have the cops outnumbered, they decide to put up a fight, pelting the police with eggs and fruit. When they find out that a brakeman (Ward Bond) has raped another of the girls traveling in boys' clothes, they mete out vigilante justice. It's easy to imagine audiences cheering at these assaults on law and order. In a later, even more shocking scene, the cops come to clear out a shanty-town where the young vagrants have been living; again they fight back, but the cops turn fire hoses on them. Things get even bleaker when Tommy is run over by a train and loses his leg. Edwin Phillips is poignant without mawkishness as he tries to shrug off his loss, as he broods over being a drag on his friends, and asin the film's last scenehe miserably watches Eddie turn handsprings down the street. Frankie Darro does his usual Cagney impersonation (in a hilarious touch, when he runs into a movie theater a Cagney film is playing) but shows real talent and presence. Sadly, none of the three young leads went on to prominent careers. Dorothy Coonan (a spiffy tap dancer too) took the role of Mrs. William Wellman.
The story is packed with incident and sprinkled with comic relief, some from Sterling Holloway, but it's not really a story as much as a portrait of a time, a people, a predicament. It's amazing and yet completely credible how quickly two middle-class boys turn into ragged panhandlers (they don't even ask for dimes, just nickels), one a cripple, one stooping occasionally to petty theft. The hobo community is painted warmly, maybe sentimentally, as loyal, diverse and supportive (blacks and girls are treated as equals). But no one is having any fun; they're not wild, just bone-weary. Eddie, Tommy and Sally wind up in New York, living in a garbage dump; here their fates take a turn for the worse and then an improbable turn for the better. The kindly judge who lectures them on how things are going to be better now, they are going to get a fresh chance, as the camera pans up to the NRA ("We Do Our Part") poster over his head, will likely prompt eye-rolling today. But the audience probably cheered for this too: think how badly they wanted to hear it. The last-minute idealism fails to dull the force of the movie, which approaches the biting austerity of Woody Guthrie anthems like "Hard Traveling" and "I Ain't Got No Home in this World Anymore."