Crime School

Crime School (1938)
Warner Brothers

	Associate Producer: Bryan Foy. Directed by Lewis Seiler. Screenplay by Crane Wilbur and Vincent Sherman. Story by Crane Wilbur. Music by Max Steiner. Photography by Arthur Todd. Art Direction by Charles Novi. Edited by Terry Morse. Gowns by N’Was McKenzie. Assistant Direction by Fred Tyler. Dialogue Direction by Vincent Sherman. Orchestrations by Hugo Friedhoffer and George Parish. 86 min. Cast: Humphrey Bogart (Mark Braden), Gale Page (Sue Warren), Billy Halop (Frankie Warren), Bobby Jordan (Lester “Squirt” Smith), Leo Gorcey (Charles “Spike” Hawkins), Huntz Hall (Richard “Goofy” Slade), Bernard Punsly (George “Fats” Papadopolos), Gabriel Dell (Timothy “Bugs” Burke), Weldon Heyburn (Cooper), Cyrus Kendall (Morgan), George Offerman, Jr. (Red), Charles Trowbridge (Judge Clinton), Spencer Charters (Old Doctor), Donald Briggs (New Doctor), Frank Jacquet (Commissioner), Hellen MacKellar (Mrs. Burke), Alan Bridge (Mr. Burke), Sibyl Harris (Mrs. Hawkins), Paul Porcasi (Nick Papadopolos), Frank Otto (Junkie the Junkman), Edward Gargan (Officer Hogan), James B. Carson (Schwartz), John Ridgely (Reporter), Harry Cording (Official), Hally Chester (Boy).
When producer Samuel Goldwyn bought the screen rights to the 1935 Sidney Kingsley play “Dead End”, he introduced six roguishly appealing juvenile delinquents, who were christened the ‘Dead End Kids’. These six uncontrollable youths were eventually released from their contracts following numerous minor bouts with the law and general unruliness on the set, which upset production crews and actors alike! On one particular day, they even de-pantsed star Humphrey Bogart in front of the whole company for a laugh!

Despite their roughneck behavior, Jack Warner signed them to star in this moderately budgeted programmer, entitled CRIME SCHOOL, which was a remake of a 1933 social melodrama called “The Mayor of Hell” starring James Cagney, Madge Evans, and young Frankie Darro. Made during Hollywood’s pre-code era, this violently explicit documentation of a boys reformatory didn’t do much to correct the problems within their walls, but it did win Frankie Darro a starring role in another excellent drama “Wild Boys of the Road”. Unfortunately, like most young stars, Darro’s film career eventually petered out, leaving him in mostly smaller parts, usually cast as jockeys, newsboys, or bellhops.The star of CRIME SCHOOL was Humphrey Bogart, who, at the time, was receiving so much hate mail because of the unsavory characters he was portraying at Warners,

that studio heads decided to give him an occasional “good guy” part.
Although he does a decent job as Mark Braden, the new reform school head, this picture definitely belongs to the Dead End kids. The leader of this motley crew was Billy Halop, an ex-radio child star, who already was a seasoned veteran at age fifteen when he landed the role of Tommy in “Dead End” on Broadway. The other kids were Bobby Jordan, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Gabriel Dell, and Bernard Punsly. Although almost an exact blueprint of “The Mayor of Hell”, CRIME SCHOOL was so popular that Warner Brothers did more films with the kids, occasionally co-starring them with big named stars like James Cagney and John Garfield. With titles like “Angels with Dirty Faces” (1938), “Hell’s Kitchen” (1939),(Warners’ answer to MGM’s “Boys Town” (1938)), and “On Dress Parade” (1939), the unruly lads were beginning to earn the ire of Jack Warner himself, who finally let the boys go onto greener pastures, so to speak.

For the most part, their non-Warner Brothers entries which followed were nothing but second features, with four of the original six boys concurrently featured in a series by Universal Pictures called “The Little Tough Guys”. All in all these are considered terrible films, with a lot of unnecessary slapping and punching, apparently without rhyme or reason. Amazingly, this series lasted from 1938 until 1943!
Left out of the Universal series were Leo Gorcey and Bobby Jordan, who were signed on by Monogram Pictures in a new series, which was hastily dubbed “The East Side Kids”. Fortunately, these fared much better with the emphasis more on comedy than on melodrama. Eventually former Dead Enders Huntz Hall and Gabe Dell joined the pack and that series ran from 1940 to 1945. Then, in 1946, producer Jan Grippo

approached Leo Gorcey and suggested a new series in which Gorcey would receive much of the profits. This series, The Bowery Boys, was to be the most successful and longest running, in which these rather old looking “teenagers” would churn out about four features per year from 1946 to 1958. By this time, these ‘middle-aged’ juveniles were adapting more and more to violent slapstick, much like the similar antics of the Three Stooges! Incredibly, these films have proven to be very popular over the years with all audiences of all ages, in spite of their rather low budgets and knockabout humor.

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