With the recent muggings and discovered explosives, students in
Westwood have faced some near-campus scares. Late at night, with
only a cell phone backlight as a guide, the feeling is that
anything could happen.
But even scarier than Westwood 2005 is Hell’s Kitchen, New
York City, circa 1938. Crime lords are kings, adolescents are
students of the slums, and class distinctions are marks for
murder.
Such is the subject of the UCLA Film and Television
Archive’s socially concerned upcoming film series,
“Dead End Kids: New York Crime Film 1915-1948,”
presented in association with the Getty Museum.
The films, which run from Friday to Saturday at the Getty Center
and require reservations, accompany the powerful photography
exhibition “Scene of the Crime: Photo by Weegee.”
Arthur Fellig, or “Weegee,” was a New York
photographer who captured all sides of the bustling 1930s and 1940s
Manhattan. His dramatic style and uncanny ability to be in the
right place at the right time made him one of the strongest social
and artistic forces of his generation.
When the Getty requested a film series to accompany the
exhibition, the first impulse was automatically film noir,
according to Andrea Alsberg, co-head of public programming for the
Film and Television Archive and curator of the series.
Film noir, literally “black cinema,” was coined to
describe the literally and emotionally dark tendencies of American
film after World War II. Visually, Weegee’s style fit
perfectly with the dark mood of the film noir genre that arose
afterward.
However, Alsberg had a more moving proposal.
“I wanted (the series) to be films that Weegee might have
seen, that might have influenced him,” she said. “There
is no record that he saw these films, but they would have been
around when he was working.”
Weegee’s passion for revealing the crime and punishment of
the New York City streets is evidence of a possible cinematic
influence. The photographer’s social concern was shared by
various filmmakers of the time, represented most strongly by Raoul
Walsh, William Wyler, Michael Curtiz and Jules Dassin. Each of
these filmmakers contributes one film to the “Dead End
Kids” series, examining both the glory and privation of urban
gangsters.
“These films examine how society compelled these people to
turn to crime ““ poverty and the sense that there is a dead
end,” Alsberg said.
As Weegee discovered through his photographs, class is not often
a matter easily transcended. Americans were stuck in a bubble of
stagnation. The idea of a dead end was ultimately applied to a
group of young actors who in the 1930s became known as the
“Dead End Kids.”
The “Kids” started in a play called “Dead
End” (playing at the Ahmanson Theater through Oct. 16), in
which they played a group of tragic but charismatic gangsters.
“They were very natural. They were wise-cracking, dirty
and good-looking. And because they were young they were
sympathetic,” Alsberg said. “In a way, they acted as a
Greek chorus, reflecting back to the audience what the audience was
seeing.”
Like Weegee’s photographs and the crime films of the
’30s and ’40s, the acting troupe brought a simultaneous
sense of sympathy and tragedy to gangsters and their cohorts.
Starring in over half a dozen films during the most turbulent era
of Manhattan crime, they appear in two of the films screening this
weekend.
In photographing Manhattan citizens of all social levels, Weegee
was only too familiar, not only with the humanity of his previously
faceless subjects, but with the stark contrast between the glorious
and the heartbreaking.
The earliest film of the series, Raoul Walsh’s
“Regeneration,” examines this contrast with the same
poignancy Weegee strove to achieve. Using non-professional actors
and documentary-style shooting techniques, the 1915 film was the
first to go into New York City for shooting.
“”˜Regeneration’ was shot on location in the
same area that (Weegee) would have photographed,” Alsberg
said.
William Wyler’s cinematic adaptation of “Dead
End” (1937), the first film starring the Dead End Kids, and
featuring Humphrey Bogart only a few years before the height of his
career, used Oscar-winning cinematography as a testament to the
devastation of the Depression.
“For people who were not living in those urban areas, to
see how those people lived was very important. Filmmakers went into
the tenements and showed the rats scurrying on the floors,”
Alsberg said. “The best way to have people look at things
that they were unfamiliar with was through fiction
films.”
The last two films of the series, Michael Curtiz’s
“Angels with Dirty Faces” (1938) and Jules
Dassin’s “Naked City” (1948) were each
revolutionary in their own way.
“Angels” deliberately defied code under full Warner
Brothers’ studio support, daring to make an enjoyable film
with rebellious characters, with hopes to expose injustice.
With location shooting and gritty methods, “Naked
City,” the only film of the series considered film noir,
retained a pseudo-realism contrary to the glorification of
gangsters in previous films.
“(These filmmakers) didn’t shy away from the issues
of the day. They used a quasi-documentary style, especially
“˜Naked City,’ with location shooting,” Alsberg
said. “If you’re actually shooting downtown, it’s
not a fabrication.”
Though all of the films take place or are shot in New York City,
Weegee’s home and workplace, the microcosm of New York
reflects America as a whole.
“New York is a small place; you have the very poorest to
the very richest on a small island. In a day, you can see
everything. In L.A., we’re better able to ignore it. The
social issues are the same ““ we’re just spread out
more,” Alsberg said.
“Even today, you have the sense that there’s no room
(to move up socially). This might be difficult to look at, but look
at it anyway because it exists.”