Oct 18 2008
Spooks Run Wild and the Dead End Kids
No Halloween viewing last night: Mr. Hall worked late and I don’t watch that stuff without him. The closest we came to watching a movie was watching one Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” episode. Doesn’t count as a movie, though, so I won’t mention it.
Two more Hammer Dracula movies arrived in the mail from Netflix, along with an Eastside Kids flick called Spooks Run Wild. I love that movie: that was another one of our Halloween mainstays when I was a child.
The Eastside Kids were one of the various names of a group originally known as The Dead End Kids. The Dead End Kids were so-named because they were featured in a Broadway play called Dead End. It was a social drama of the time period and featured slum conditions and cursing (shocking!) - and these New York kids who were tough-talking and crude. Well, the play got made into a movie, also called Dead End. It was popular enough that the entire troupe of kids got featured in another movie about poverty and crime: Angels With Dirty Faces. This was an extremely popular (and extremely good) James Cagney movie. (You should probably check that movie out as well.)
The Dead End kids made a few other films. Members were gained and lost, and their name changed from the Dead End Kids to “The Little Tough Guys” and “The Eastside Kids”. By the time they were the Eastside Kids, it was no longer social drama; with the exception of a little patriotic melodrama during WWII, it was all about the comedy. The group’s final incarnation, The Bowery Boys, was simply straight-up low-brow comedy with no attempt at social awareness (which is fine by me).
As I said, if this is the first time you’ve ever heard of this group, you seriously need to check it out. At one time they were extremely well-known: Leo Gorcey, the sometime leader of the kids, was even featured on the original cover of the Beatles’s Sgt. Pepper’s album, but was deleted when his representation demanded payment.
