Still thought-provoking and moving after all these years, this earnest socially conscious and road-drama offers a realistic view that resonated with Depression-era audiences and offered them a message of hope with Roosevelt's New Deal, something most critics of the day found over-simplified and naive. The story centers on two California teens who find their once comfortable lives ruined when their fathers lose their jobs during the Depression. To find work for themselves, the adventurous lads sneak aboard a New York bound freight. They aren't gone long before they discover just how many lives have been devastated by the stock market crash Soon the two hook up with several other youths just like them, including two streetwise girls. In this way, the kids find much-needed solidarity. Tragedy strikes when a brakeman rapes one of the girls and the boys retaliate by killing him. The group makes it to Ohio when they are caught and forced off the train. Ingeniously, they begins using sewer pipe and other found commodities to build a little city, their own private utopia where no one has more than anyone else. More come to live there, but unfortunately some of the residents begin stealing from the nearby town and the authorities destroy the humble shantytown forcing the hungry, destitute youths to resume their trek. Another disaster strikes when one of their gang has a terrible accident. Soon afterward the group disbands so that only the original two and one of the girls actually make it to the Big Apple. By this time they no longer the opportunistic adventurers the once were; now they are only hungry, tired and deeply depressed. Desperate, they join a ring of thieves. Fortunately they are caught and sent to a kindly judge who lectures them and fills them with New Deal ideals and instills in them the sense of hope they will need to go on. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
Review by All Movie Guide
All Movie Guide
liked it.
Despite some flaws,
William Wellman's bitingly realistic depiction of the bleak prospects awaiting the hordes of teenagers who took to the road in search of work during the Depression remains one of the most memorably affecting features on that era. While talented tough-kid
Frankie Darro (as Eddie Smith) is the ostensible star, the film is episodically structured around a group of these rail-riding kids and the ease with which characters are dropped and picked up underlines the randomness of their lives. The film is permeated by the director's characteristic mixture of harshness and tenderness, as comic interludes alternate with scenes of abject desperation. As usual, Wellman was testing the limits of censorship, with a then-shocking suggestion of rape, and in the film's best-known scene, a mutilation which still has the power to disturb. The initial naïveté of these kids may seem incredible in a far more cynical age, but Wellman, who had taken to the road himself 20 years earlier, imbues their disillusionment with a depth that feels personal. Although the film is bereft of any political or economic analysis of the causes of the Depression, and the unbelievably positive tacked-on ending seems to bely everything that's gone before, it's difficult to imagine how it could have been otherwise in the Hollywood of the period. It also seems possible that the ubiquitous figure of the cop-as-obstacle spoke to contemporary audiences more eloquently than any analysis. ~ Michael Costello, All Movie Guide