The 1930s - Then and Now - #3 - Wild Boys of the Road (1933) and Girls of the Road (1940)

Wild Boys of the Road (1933) and Girls of the Road (1940) are vivid portrayals of the youthful perspective on the worst years of the Great Depression. The teens and the young adults facing the national economic crisis probably understood little of its causes and were helpless to change the course of the deeply troubled economy.  While feeling the same brunt of the calamity as their fearful parents, this generation that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt would later say “has a rendezvous with destiny” when World War II began could still show resilience and optimism that their elders no longer possessed.

Wild Boys of the Road, directed by William Wellman, is a message film, as many films during the Great Depression with “the times” as its topic inevitably had to be, but the story is well told, vigorous, and without the preaching nature, except for perhaps the last ten minutes, as a film like Our Daily Bread (1933) which we discussed last week here and which was made in the same year.

Wellman was a master at shooting stories full of dramatic action, and this pretty simple tale of teens following the well-worn, desperate trail of hoboes to find work because they cannot find jobs in their own town, has moments that are fiercely compelling.

The start of the movie couldn’t be more deceptive. Frankie Darro has the lead as Eddie and Edwin Phillips plays his best pal Tommy. They are a couple of high school sophomores going to a dance. Their girlfriends are giggly and sweet and inconsequential to the story and we lose them at the beginning of the picture. Somehow, they don’t belong to the rest of what’s going to happen to Frankie Darro and Edwin, and by the end of the picture we can’t imagine these boys ever going back to those girls. They indeed have traveled a long way and they will never be who they were when they were just a couple of kids going to a high school dance.

It is an evening of white trousers and dark coats and ties, of tentatively waltzing to “The Shadow Waltz” (a hit that year in Gold Diggers of 1933 discussed here, and it’s fun to note the string of songs played in the background in this movie, including “Pettin’ in the Park” at the dance, and “We’re in the Money.”)

Darro drives an old broken-down jalopy with witty sayings and phrases on it, just as apparently all his friends do, and though his romance with his girl is innocent we can see by the verbiage on the car that he is the all-American boy, with the hormone-driven predatory attitude for high school girls. This makes his later empathetic relationship with Dorothy Coonan, a hobo girl they meet on the top of a boxcar, all the more poignant.

Note the box of Lux soap in the storeroom at the high school.

These early scenes could be right out of one of the Andy Hardy movies, and after the high school frolics when we are told that Phillips must find work because his widowed mother has only a roomer in their home for income, and Darro learns his father has just lost his job, we might think Andy Hardy is going to rush to the rescue and put on a show or collect bottles or do something to help his folks.

Grant Mitchell, his dad, acknowledges with brave humiliation that as a middle-aged man it’s going to be very difficult for him to get hired again. Darro shows sensitive concern and we have a long sequence where he manfully sells his beloved jalopy for $22 and gives the money to his dad. It’s a nice thing to do, and Darro is not an aw-gee-shucks kind of actor; he is actually quite a good, sublimely subtle dramatic actor who understands the intimacy of the camera (as well he should, having been in silents since a small boy) and we believe him. There is something a little bit more Dead End Kids about him than Andy Hardy, but even though he is fearless and smart mouthed, he is still an innocent.

A couple of months go by and Phillips has not found work, and neither has Darro’s dad. Phillips decides that he’s going to head for the open road because it will be one less mouth for his mother to worry about and she can manage for herself on the money from the roomer.

Darro comes to the same conclusion, that it is futile to find a job in this town and both boys quit school.

They really don’t know what they’re getting into, of course, and so it really starts as a boy’s own adventure. They bring a bag of sandwiches and a hop a freight. Their first rough encounter is with another teen hobo who hauls off and slugs Darro, who is amazed and somewhat appalled to discover that the bloody nose was given him by a girl, named Sally. It’s a funny bit when he tries to continue a conversation with her and he keeps his arm up to guard himself because she’s a very good fighter.

Sally, played by freckle-faced Dorothy Coonan has left home as well. (About six months after this film was released, Miss Coonan would marry Director Wellman, some twenty years her senior, would leave her film career and become the mother of seven.) Her mother has died and she has decided to go live with her single aunt in Chicago so that, like Edwin Phillips, there will be one less mouth to feed at home.

It sounds like kind of a maudlin phrase, “one less mouth to feed,” but it was an extremely common sentiment not just during the Great Depression but certainly before that in the many ages of destitute families and not enough food to go around. Many older children were put to work early or simply just put out of the house.

So many teen boys joined Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps for just that reason, to save resources at home and not be a burden.  My father did.

The duo becomes a trio and there is something very goodhearted and tender in the way that Darro and Phillips relate to Dorothy Coonan. We have seen Darro’s high school girlfriend and his girl-chasing sentiments painted on his jalopy, but his reaction to Dorothy is sometimes protective and at other times a genuine equal partnership, and we sense that he cares about her and needs her as much as he does Edwin Phillips. It is a friendship without sexism and they have an odd mixture of the sense of responsibility of adults and the innocence of children.

They arrive in Chicago and Sally’s aunt, played by the wonderful and versatile Minna Gombell, welcomes them into her apartment and feeds them a very large chocolate cake about the size of North Dakota. There is a player piano in the apartment playing some kind of bluesy tune, which is a signal to us that all is not right; and indeed, there is a man and a woman sitting at a table drinking. While the kids are in the kitchen chowing down, the cops raid the place and take the three grown-ups off. The kids beat it out the window. Apparently, Auntie is involved with a pretty rough crowd even if she seems very nice.

They are back on the road and the longer they travel, the more hoboes they meet:  Young people like themselves, older men, other girls all dressed to disguise themselves as boys for safety, African-American kids, and always in every train yard a crowd of mean railroad cops with clubs.

We get our moment of pre-Code salaciousness when one girl hobo played by Ann Hovey, tarries alone in a boxcar at a fire to dry her sweater. She pulls it off and sits in her bra to warm by the fire, when a brakeman played by Ward Bond sees her and he gets fresh. When the kids later come back for her they see her disheveled, terrified, and we discover without so many words that Ward Bond has raped her. “He put his hand over my mouth so I couldn’t scream!”

As we know, this line and this situation is the least “dated” thing about this movie. It’s happened before, it’s happening now. Perhaps we have become too cynical about hearing those words, having heard them for generations.

But the young hoboes are angry and shocked enough so that when Ward Bond reappears, they beat him up and they even shove him off the moving train.

Another freight yard and more cops. The adventure is wearing thin and soon it will become dangerous. As they scatter away from the police, Edwin Phillips runs and sickeningly smacks his face into a sign. Dazed, he stumbles and falls on a railroad track. He is barely able to crawl away from an oncoming train, but not before it plows over his leg.

The kids fetch a local doctor, who amputates the leg right there in the hobo jungle.  That may be a little hard to believe, but Phillips and Darro cry together, and that makes it real.

We next see another hobo jungle and Phillips with a crutch. He can’t hop freights very well anymore and he suggests splitting up and letting the other two try their luck. They won’t part from him. Darro even breaks into a medical supply store and steals an artificial leg for Phillips, but it is not the right size and it is useless. More cops come to flush out the hobo jungle, this time literally with water hoses.

The map tells us they eventually make it to New York City and another hobo camp in a garbage dump. I don’t suppose it’s the same garbage dump that William Powell lived in when he was a “forgotten man” in My Man Godfrey (1933) in the same year, and which we discussed here, but the hobo dumps certainly were crowded those days.

Their luck is about to change. Darro is offered a job operating an elevator in the city, at $12 a week, and it is touching that he plans to keep the trio, his little family, together. He says that they will go to a cheap rooming house and rent two rooms – very chivalrous of him – and they will find Dorothy Coonan a job doing housework and Phillips doing a job selling newspapers. They are thrilled, the three of them. Hope has returned and they are joyful.  There is only one drawback: Darro will need a new alpaca jacket as part of his work uniform and it will cost him at least three dollars to get one. He goes panhandling and mistakenly gets involved in the robbery of a movie theater. Kind of neat that a James Cagney movie is actually playing on screen when the melee breaks out.

A cop finally nabs the three of them and they get taken to juvenile court. It looks like the end of the road.

A kindly judge played by Robert Barratt allows Darro to explain himself, and Darro gets a nice dramatic bit where he spews out his hopelessness, his anger and cynicism about the system and we think this young man does not have an optimistic bone in his body anymore. He is almost looking forward going to jail because it can’t be any worse than being on the street.

The judge promises help to the three of them. He will place Coonan in a nice home where she will do housework in exchange for her board, he will make sure Darro gets his elevator job, and he acknowledges that Phillips will be a little harder to help but that he will do something. When the kids are taken away after the judge has dismissed the charges, the judge looks at a portrait photo on his desk of a round-faced well-fed son named Billy and he thinks to himself, there but for the grace of God goes my kid.

Don’t miss the NRA sticker at The End.  As we mentioned in our previous movie, it was a very important emblem that year of 1933.

The idea of “there but for the grace of God goes my kid,” also occurs to Howard Hickman in Girls of the Road (1940), who plays the governor of an unnamed state. It’s made seven years later, but though the employment rate has improved, the Great Depression still has its tentacles wrapped around the country. The governor’s daughter, who is also his secretary, is played by Ann Dvorak , whom we last saw in the first film of this series, Gentlemen Are Born (1934). They have just heard some statistics about teenage girls taking to the open road looking for jobs or being kicked out of their own homes, girls from 14 to 24 years old who are runaways. The movie starts with headlines and speeding cars and a collage of scenes where we see girls in perilous situations, which mostly involve being lured away by creepy men and being sexually compromised. Or murdered.

Ann Dvorak, who is a college girl, dresses with chic sophistication, and has a responsible and curious nature, wants to know how they can help these girls who live on the road. The girls are destitute, but they are treated as criminals. As she is typing up the report for her father, she suddenly changes her mind and types a farewell note to him. She is going on the road undercover.

It’s probably not a terribly challenging role for someone of the caliber of Ann Dvorak, but she has an authority on camera, she commands attention in her scenes, and it is a chance for her to look beautiful and confident.

Standing on the roadside all dressed up and wearing a snappy beret, (see our previous post on movie berets here), her first few minutes of life as a hobo are her first encounter with a leering guy who picks her up in his car when she thumbs on the highway.  He immediately puts his move on her. She immediately escapes and is observed by the cynical Helen Mack, a gum-chewing girl hobo with a backpack, typically, dressed like a young man, who takes her to a cluster of girl hoboes huddled in a shack with a fire.

One girl, played by Marjorie Cooley, pitifully carries a dress box with her wedding dress as she is going to be married next Tuesday and is traveling to the city where her fiancé is working.

Jerry, played Ann Doran, is a bit of a thief, stealing from the other girls whenever she can. Lording over all of them is the sinister and malevolent Lola Lane. Cops show up before long and drive them out, they are taken to jail and hosed down after a mini riot over food.

Ann Dvorak and Helen Mack develop a friendship and they look out for each other, though Mack is slow to trust anyone. Ann Dvorak earns Mack’s respect first when she faces off with a sheriff, with her knowledge of the Bill of Rights, and gets him to back down. Mack responds, “The Bill of Rights, when they wrote that they didn’t have paved highways and girls walking on them.”

Mack also sheds some knowledge about what it is like to live on the road and she is, in a sense, Ann Dvorak’s mentor. She says when a man loses a job he can still get along and that with a shave he can get another one, “a girl can’t.”

Though we may note that many of these girls look pretty well made-up for people who’ve been on the road for months, Helen Mack’s wry philosophy is a shorthand way of looking at difficulties that women had versus men on the road and that it was, indeed, more difficult for them. A woman who is unkempt is likely to be more judged and assumed less fit for the limited job opportunities open to her at that time than a man would be. Moreover, there is a very real, and undiscussed, subject of how does one cope with menstruation? Without sanitary supplies, or the means to buy them, a young woman might be unable to work certain days of the month and might miss opportunities because of it.

They move from freight yard to hobo jungle and back again and all the while Ann Dvorak broods, watches, and interrogates her fellow female hoboes. At one point, cops force them to get on a train to get out of the county—nobody wants to be responsible for them. Helen Mack doesn’t want to get on the train; she is tired of life on the road and just wants to stay put. As the train slowly pulls in and looms over them, its boxcars are teaming with forlorn men not allowed to get off, but forced to keep moving.

Helen Mack gets into a shoving match with a cop and inadvertently pushes him off the train. He’s fine, but Helen and Ann both leap from the train and head for the woods. Helen Mack suggests they separate but Ann Dvorak won’t let her fend for herself.

They hitch a ride on top of the truck and end up at an auto court and truck stop. Because Ann has $200, she pays for a cabin for them for the night and for one night they have baths and food and a place to sleep and things are looking up until Ann Doran arrives, having stolen Marjorie Cooley’s wedding dress. They take the dress back, but let her stay. But during the night Miss Doran takes off with everything they have and they really are on the skids now.

They eventually arrive at yet another hobo jungle, all-female, run by Lola Lane on a small lake.

We are introduced to new girls; one of them says she is the eldest of seven and just like Edwin Phillips in Wild Boys of the Road, she has left home so that there will be one less mouth to feed. She does not panhandle but she is learning to work in a beauty parlor and gets work from town to town, hoping one day she can settle down.

Mack makes a retort, “Send it in care of Lincoln Highway, U.S.A.”  The Lincoln Highway was one of the first paved major transcontinental routes, opened in 1913, a historic road that, like Route 66, fell on hard times and seemed to express the desperation of a nation during the Depression. Immortalized in songs, films, novels, and a board game, The Lincoln Highway expressed the vigor and optimism of public works of an earlier age.

The girls are fractious and though they try to pool their resources, they fight with each other and grow more dismal in their hopelessness. A trucker tries to help them; he has found Marjorie Cooley dazed and not seeming to know where she is, and he brings her to the hobo camp instead of the hospital because he’s afraid the cops would think that he ran over her.

Marjorie Cooley dies in camp and they bury her and hold an awkward funeral. Her epitaph carved in a wooden sign says “Irene. Died on the road.”

Reminds one of Grandpa Joad who died on the road in The Grapes of Wrath (1939) and they put his name in a small box and put it in his jacket, in case he was ever to be found.

How many bodies were there that died “on the road?”

They lay wildflowers at her grave and Lola Lane, shrugging off her bad girl image, starts a plaintive chorus of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot. They all join in and it is a long, slow, lulling sound until it is broken up by police sirens getting closer.

The cops raid again, but this time the governor of the state, Ann Dvorak’s dad, is with them because Ann has finally been traced to this place. Like the judge in Wild Boys of the Road, he is appalled by the condition of these women’s lives and he makes a vague promise to help. At the end of the film, a government-run camp is being constructed for the women where they are told they can rest and plan to start over and find courage.

It seems like a contrived ending, tacked on because we like happy endings, but government programs were certainly the saving grace of the Great Depression. That era is something so far back in our dim memory that many people today likely have no concept of how important it was that the government seemed to care. It was spending on public works and on social programs that saved the country during those bleak and frightening years. It is also hard for us to imagine a world where social programs and safety nets were brand-new and were untried. We may well imagine how despised they were by the more well-off in this country because we know how earnestly and savagely they are trying to remove them today.

Though government-funded public works projects were important tools to revive the economy and put people work, most of the food relief programs were actually privately run and not subsided by the government—and malnutrition was a leading factor in the rejection rate of around 45 percent of prospective Army recruits during World War II.  They had grown up during hard times.  The healthiest of the recruits were former Civilian Conservation Corps boys.

It’s one of the apocryphal stories of the Great Depression that a teacher in one government health study had told a sick-looking little girl to go home and have something to eat, to which the child replied, “I can’t. It’s my sister’s turn to eat.”

They’ve been called The Greatest Generation, those kids, the ones who had the rendezvous with destiny. Fortunately, the films of that era caught a glimpse of that, lest we forget.

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The lack of affordable housing and the devastation that medical expenses can have for struggling families is another Depression-era story that has relevance today. Come back next Thursday for One Third of the Nation (1939) with Sylvia Sidney.

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Part 1 - Gentlemen Are Born (1934)

Part 2 - Our Daily Bread (1933)

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Movies In Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century; Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star.; and Calamity Jane in the Movies.