East Side Kids

The 1935 Sidney Kingsley Broadway play Dead End was a portrait of life in the New York tenements, featuring six tough-talking juvenile delinquents.

In 1938, Warner Brothers signed these six actors for a series of Dead End Kids dramas, the most successful being 1938's Angels with Dirty Faces with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, and They Made Me a Criminal in 1939, starring John Garfield.

In 1940 producer Sam Katzman, noting the financial success of other tough-kid series, made the film East Side Kids, using two of Universal's Little Tough Guys, Hally Chester and Harris Berger.

He added former Our Gang player Donald Haines, Frankie Burke, radio actor Sam Edwards, and Eddie Brian to round out the new team.

The loose format proved flexible enough to shift back and forth between urban drama (That Gang of Mine), murder mystery (Boys of the City), boxing melodrama (Bowery Blitzkrieg), and horror-comedy (Spooks Run Wild), with the kids confronting various stock villains: gangsters, smugglers, spies, and crooked gamblers, along the way.

The East Side films were problem-teen melodramas until 1943, when director William Beaudine joined the series and emphasized the comedy content.

Offscreen, between 1942 and 1944, cast members Morrison, Jordan, Dell, David Gorcey, and Billy Benedict left the series after being drafted.

Durand had been the star of Columbia's series of Glove Slingers campus comedies, and lent the same earnest sincerity to his East Side Kids appearances.

Starting with Clancy Street Boys in 1943, Bernard Gorcey, father of Leo and David, played various bit parts in seven East Side Kids films.

Given the low budgets, simplistic stories, and crude, assembly-line production of the East Side Kids series, its enduring popularity relies on the cast's rambunctious energy, breezy banter, often ad-libbed and containing inside jokes, fast-paced action, and Leo Gorcey's trademark malapropisms.