child prison narratives

Child Prison Narratives of the 1930s as Religious Filmmaking

Anne Morey

Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Volume 37, Number 1,Spring 2012, pp. 27-42 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/chq.2012.0007

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27Child Prison Narratives of the 1930s as Religious Filmmaking

Child Prison Narratives of the 1930s as Religious Filmmaking

Anne Morey

The introduction of sound to film in 1927 offered filmmakers the richness of self-contained sound effects and the diversity and fascination of working-class speech patterns, giving new life to genres such as the gangster film in the 1930s. Jonathan Munby argues that by literally giving a voice to the ethnic mob, the talking gangster film represents a major social development over its silent predecessor (41–43). A related genre prominent in the first several years of the decade, and again in the last two, was the prison film, which was made up and down the ladder of price and prestige: from relatively inexpensive films promising representations of events ripped from the headlines (a Warner Bros. strategy), to costly pictures from the most stately of studios, MGM, requiring the talents of major screenwriters.1 What is perhaps not so obvious is that the prison film had several cells, so to speak. The Big House (1930), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), and 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1933) describe the plight of male prisoners. Ladies They Talk About (1933) dramatizes the experiences of female prisoners. And in the final category of carceral narrative, that involving children and viewed, like the adult prison films, by a mixed audience of young and old, narratives such as Wild Boys of the Road (1933), The Mayor of Hell (1933), Boys Town (1938), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), and Crime School (1938) examine the fact or threat of reform school as a response to juvenile delinquency. Strikingly, the children’s genre also has a strong religious strand.

This article explores why the carceral narrative developed its juvenile form in the 1930s, and how and why that form intersected with the religious text for the young. What generic or social work within this genre, in other words, was to be performed by either an individual or a collective juvenile lead that could not be accomplished by a mature performer of either sex, and what do

© 2012 Children’s Literature Association. Pp. 27–42

Anne Morey is an associate professor in English at Texas A&M University. Her book Hollywood Outsiders: The Adaptation of the Film Industry, 1913–1934 deals with Hollywood’s critics and coopters in the later silent and early sound periods. She has published in Film History, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, among other venues. She is presently at work on a treatment of Christian cinema as national cinema within the American film industry.

28 Children’s Literature Association Quarterly

these works suggest about the child’s relationship to the spiritual world? I will argue that, among other things, the juvenile prison film has to be imagined as participating in a web of adjacent genres, especially the gangster film and the “forgotten man” film, and as being influenced by a particular understanding of religion that hearkens back to children’s texts from the early to mid-nineteenth century in its invoking of adult male authority rather than childish innocence. It offered Hollywood the opportunity to present performers such as Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, and Jimmy Cagney—all of whom played criminals in the original gangster cycle—as also capable of providing a reformist cure for criminality by playing priests or their secular counterparts, thus constructing a text-spanning narrative of spiritual redemption and suggesting the possibil-ity of harnessing the charisma of the (quondam) offender to desirable social ends. This twist comments metatextually on the power of star discourse and potentially helped to disarm critics of the film industry who found the glam-orization of gangsters reprehensible.

Before turning to an analysis of the generic features of these narratives, it is useful to sketch the ways in which the juvenile prison of the 1930s film both consolidates earlier Progressive Era concerns about child rearing and expresses new alarms engendered by the economic collapse of the Depression and its accompanying pressure upon families. Nancy Lesko notes that the effect of late nineteenth-century child study and Progressive Era reform efforts was to extend the period of adolescent dependency (through additional years of schooling, for example) in order to avoid pathology (63). Alarm over the precociously independent child was on display in social science research of the 1920s. This was exemplified in studies such as Robert and Helen Lynd’s Middletown (1929), which collected comments from parents decrying the ways in which cars and public amusements such as movies separated children from parental supervi-sion (Mintz 215); the artifacts of contemporary entertainment were perceived as undermining new projects for the protection of children. The Depression then reversed the previous gains in schooling (typically through school clo-sures); the new economic circumstances extended the economic disadvantages of childhood even to adults, further undermining adult authority. Children left home, or were driven out, out of economic necessity, and they and their families turned to institutions that were ill equipped to serve them (Mintz 242–43). Precisely because families were thrown upon the resources of the state to an unusually great extent, then, an important function of the juvenile prison film was to distinguish between the good and the bad institution. In keeping with these films’ relationship to religious rhetoric, the former is consistently associated with personal and charismatic leadership.

The generic coherence of the juvenile prison film is signaled in part by a shared narrative structure. The Mayor of Hell and Crime School begin with the arraignment of delinquent boys following upon the commission of a crime; the boys are sent to a reformatory where they are brutalized, and to which a quasi-religious rescuer arrives in the form of a reformist replacement warden.


The previous warden schemes to remove this replacement and appears to succeed for a time, while something happens to suggest to the boys that their rescuer has abandoned them (in The Mayor of Hell, Cagney hides out after shooting a political rival, while in Crime School Bogart leaves the institution briefly to visit the sister of one of his charges). After the boys have been goaded into wrongdoing or near-wrongdoing that would discredit the lenient system of the reformer, order is restored, the reformer is vindicated, and the boys are acknowledged to be on the way to redemption. The Christian family, initially suggested by the image of the reformer with his flock, is then created on an individual level through the union of the reformer with a female assistant/ co-pastor: a nurse in the case of The Mayor of Hell and the sister in Crime School.

While Crime School is overtly a remake of The Mayor of Hell, similar plot trajectories may be found in other films as well. Even Boys Town follows this template, although with significant variations, since it does not depict a reform school or a prison but rather an ideal community under the aegis of Father Flanagan, who is, of course, ineligible for conventional romantic treatment. Nonetheless, the reform school or prison looms over Boys Town because it is the unrepresented twin of the institution that Flanagan founds. The film’s opening in the death house, for example, suggests what happens to boys who go wrong, and Men of Boys Town (1941) provides the previously unshown “bad” reformatory that constantly threatens the inmates of Boys Town. The conflict between good and bad warden in the same institution is rendered more subtly in Boys Town through the struggle between Father Flanagan and an unsym-pathetic newspaperman, while the institution’s perennial lack of funds hints that Flanagan must also battle a spiritually bankrupt public. The arraignment scene present in the other two films also occurs early in this narrative, with Father Flanagan permitted to stand bond for the children. Finally, even in the hagiographic Boys Town, the boys briefly feel abandoned when Flanagan must be elsewhere during a mounting crisis that could destroy the school. In all three films, boys who feel deserted after having been helped are briefly part of a potentially or actually destructive mob. Men of Boys Town significantly takes up this abandonment theme as the major engine of its narrative.

Angels with Dirty Faces might be said to represent a variation on the Boys Town theme. The Dead End Kids who populate the film are never arraigned and sent to a reformatory, because a dynamic priest is already selflessly trying to minister to them. Because the boys are hard cases, however, Father Jerry requires a formidable example to frustrate their attraction to crime. This he finds in his childhood friend Rocky, who cannot be a good example in life but whose dying “yellow” (contemporary slang for cowardly behavior) will be suf-ficient to keep the boys from a life of crime. Thus we may wish to distinguish between two classes of carceral narrative: one represented by The Mayor of Hell and Crime School, in which the reformatory or prison is shown directly; and another in which a priest struggles to prevent his charges from going to prison, but in which the specter of prison is nonetheless powerfully present.


This distinction between categories of carceral narrative typically governs films containing child protagonists; stories about adult male criminals imagine re-form as an altogether more difficult prospect, one that is especially hard when commenced within prison, although it may be possible for younger relatives of inmates (as in Invisible Stripes [1939]). If the priest and the prison represent the two poles of forgiveness and punishment, both also represent dramatiza-tions of the importance of adult authority to the child’s moral and spiritual development. In the 1930s, a troubled era eager for strong leaders and father figures, the Christian family requires its patriarchal head.

Wild Boys of the Road provides another variation on the Boys Town nar-rative, with a conclusion in which a sympathetic judge, rather than a priest, offers the boys the opportunity heretofore denied them. Wild Boys might be considered the child version of the “forgotten man” narrative, which typically presents a neglected veteran of the First World War destroyed economically by the Depression and pushed to the margins of society, the man who is willing to work and to whom society already owes a debt that it will not acknowledge.2 Indeed, Wild Boys may be seen as a remake of one of the foremost adult examples of this type of film, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, and notably deploys actor Frankie Darrow of The Mayor of Hell in a similar role as the principled ringleader of potentially delinquent boys. Wild Boys and Boys Town both have juvenile characters that appear to participate in this trope, and it is best to think of the gangster film, the prison film, and the “forgotten man” film as overlapping with each other in complicated ways in both their adult and juvenile versions. Of the three genres, however, it is the juvenile prison film that is most clearly connected to a religious discourse.

In Wild Boys, two boys become tramps in the depths of the Depression to save their parents the cost of keeping them; in order to survive, they become involved in petty criminal acts, largely defiance of railroad police. After expe-riencing a train accident and being traumatized by the rape of a female friend by a railroad bull, the boys found a self-governing community, a homeless boys’ republic established in sewer pipes. As with the forgotten man, there is nothing morally wrong with the protagonist, but his desire for success makes him an easy mark for a pair of holdup men who involve him in a crime without his knowledge.3 The film concludes with the intercession of a wise and compas-sionate judge, whom we are to understand simultaneously as the counterpart of the priest figure in similar films and as a surrogate FDR, inasmuch as he is photographed beneath an NRA placard stating “We do our part” and invokes that phrase in talking to the children. He makes it possible for them to earn their fares back to their families. In contrast to the ending of Fugitive, in which the protagonist famously says “I steal” in answer to the question of how he lives after he has been hounded out of decent society, Wild Boys suggests that it is possible to empty the mobile reformatory that tramping represents and reintegrate these children back into society. In this regard, all the carceral nar-ratives I have just sketched insist in varying degrees on the importance of a wise


intercessor, even as they also demand, as we shall see, that boys be permitted to govern themselves.

The importance of adult moral and spiritual authority in all these texts is such that they appear to have little in common with such influential late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century religious or semi-religious novels of childhood as The Secret Garden, Pollyanna, and Elsie Dinsmore, in which the child becomes the primary representative of religious potency, the figure upon whom adult salvation depends. There is no hint in Boys Town, say, of New Testament verses such as “Except ye . . . become as a little child, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven,” or “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God,” which helped in signal ways to shape the neo-Romantic, child-centered vision often associated with the Christianity of that period. Rather, the children’s carceral narratives of the 1930s suggest the religious attitudes of earlier novels such as The Wide, Wide World, whose heroine’s virtue depends to a significant extent upon her readiness to accept the spiritual authority of the older man whom she will eventually marry, or The Fairchild Family, in which the children owe their moral improvement to the careful guidance of their pious father.

The juvenile prison film’s Fairchild Family–like representations of children as actual or potential criminals occurred in the context of a culture alert to the threats and remedies contained in powerful media such as newspapers and the film industry itself. Precisely because Hollywood understood its audience dur-ing the 1930s to be essentially unitary and undivided by age or experience—so that every adult text was potentially a children’s text as well—it was extremely sensitive to accusations that its products constituted little more than rehears-als of methods of wrongdoing or the glamorization of the criminal lifestyle. Consequently, like the adult gangster film, the juvenile prison film represents a zone of significant narrative negotiation for the film industry, generically and otherwise. The Production Code, which was written in 1930 and given an enforcement mechanism in 1934, particularly targeted genres that focused on social deviance, such as the gangster film and the fallen woman film. This suggests that the newly vigorous enforcement of the Code after 1934 might explain the two peaks in the production of gangster films over the course of the decade: the first more or less continuous with the introduction of sound through 1933; and the second at the end of the decade, when the gangster film might be said to be modulating into the crime fighter film through offerings such as “G” Men (1935).

The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, the industry organization that performed the self-censorship represented by the Production Code, clearly saw a need to be defensive about the social value of the Holly-wood product, particularly where children were concerned.4 Thus it argued in its publication Motion Picture Monthly that gangster pictures were a force for morality. In a self-serving move, under the title “Debunking the Gangster,” the MPPDA published an interview with Judge Cornelius F. Collins in which


he observed that “reliable motion picture concerns have in mind the dangers inherent in any medium of expression which reaches all the people and they have wisely taken steps to avoid showing the criminal that a life of crime pays. If there is one transcendent lesson to be derived from the average motion picture it is, that good triumphs and evil is punished” (2). Famously, some critics of the industry doubted that the death of the criminal in the gangster film’s final reel made up for seven previous reels of glorious clothing, flattering newspaper headlines, fast cars, faster women, and the linguistic and practical fun of gats, rods, heaters, and tommy guns, and their doubts help to explain the interpolation of a charismatic, or at least sympathetic, priest or reformer in the juvenile prison film.

Even critics disposed to protect the film industry’s right to creative freedom worried that children would be seduced by the glamour of movie criminality. By the 1920s, liberal Protestant critics in the main were opposed to censorship of the film industry, but their efforts to improve film content by urging voluntary self-regulation and changes in the industry’s economic structure were unavail-ing. Protestant pressure groups were further discredited by the revelation that they had been receiving kickbacks from the MPPDA. Into the breach stepped a newly well-organized and articulate Catholicism. Martin Quigley, publisher of an influential trade paper, promoted the efforts of Father Daniel Lord, who consolidated the guidelines resulting from previous attempts at self-regulation and joined them to a coherent philosophy of story construction. Joseph Breen, an active Catholic layman, assumed control of the Production Code Administration in 1934, demanding studio allegiance to Lord’s Production Code but rendering it palatable by assisting the process of filmmaking through suggesting solutions to narrative impasses rather than by forbidding the film-ing of particular stories. While a new Catholic triumphalism—elsewhere on display in Al Smith’s presidential campaign and Father Coughlin’s enormous influence as a radio personality—might explain the prevalence of priests in narratives about delinquent boys, the fascination with priests as sympathetic workers among the urban poor goes back to the silent period (e.g., Intolerance [1915] and Regeneration [1915]). As I have argued elsewhere, Protestant min-isters were less favorably represented in film, being associated with joylessness and inadequate masculinity, a pattern that remained largely unbroken until the late 1940s (“Figure”). Thus the sympathetic judge or warden, while not explicitly religious, serves as a nondenominational analog to the dedicated, virile fighting priest such as Flanagan or the protector of St. Louis newsboys, Father Dunne (Fighting Father Dunne [1948]). Indeed, the reformer may be seen as the enlightened man who is making the best of new social insights, as the priest makes the best of old narratives of redemption.

Fascinatingly, the genesis of the Payne Fund studies of 1929–33, commis-sioned by the Motion Picture Research Council, manifests the difficulty of pair-ing the minister with the reformer. William Short, a Congregational minister who viewed the influence of the movies on children with a jaundiced eye, was


responsible for orchestrating the Payne-financed research that resulted in the multivolume examination of the effects of filmgoing on children. Short hoped that the distinguished social scientists he recruited to study the matter would confirm his views concerning the malign effects of film on child development. While the volume that summarized the series as a whole, Henry Foreman’s Our Movie-Made Children (1933), argued that film did indeed damage children’s morals, the individual studies often failed to ratify Short’s presumptions.5

Indeed, the Payne Fund volume on the content of motion pictures, predict-ably, is concerned with the representation of the charismatic criminal. In the absence of data from children (although that was sought in other volumes), the Payne Fund study of motion picture content concluded from adult re-spondents that there was danger in the ability of the gangster film to present attractive protagonists. Payne contributor Edgar Dale observed in The Content of Motion Pictures that “movie criminals are not always shown as low, cowardly, weak-minded, and physically repulsive. The evidence [from films] strongly suggests that no small proportion of the criminals are accomplished in some of the social graces, and many are well dressed. Not infrequently we see on the screen criminals who are courageous and who meet danger fearlessly” (129). For all Dale’s sympathy with the enterprise of filmmaking and his insight into the nature of film story construction, this comment suggests an almost will-ful blindness to the power of stars and the ways in which they are necessarily constructed and deployed by the film industry. Yet it was typical of Dale and other liberal commentators on cinema in relation to children to worry less about the charismatic criminal (a bugbear for critics of the film industry go-ing back to the first projected motion pictures) than about the films’ failure to present a “realistic” theory of the origins of criminality. Dale complains that “in almost every portrayal of criminals, they appear ready-made. Minerva-like they spring from the head of Jupiter, full-grown and often well-armed. Only rarely . . . was there any indication that criminal patterns of behavior develop as a product of a long process of interaction between the individual and the successive social situations in which he lives” (130).

This last point is particularly significant, inasmuch as the juvenile prison film is precisely the genre attempting to discuss the origins of criminality, marking a place where the film industry could claim both that it was responding to its critics and that, by valorizing the figure of the priest, it was offering a correc-tive to the social problem at its center. It is this effort at social consciousness that leads me to suggest that the gangster film, the prison film (in both juvenile and adult versions), and the “forgotten man” film should all be considered adjacent genres participating in a public discussion about the mutual obliga-tions of society and individual. One might argue that the gangster film often discusses the individual’s obligation to society, while the prison film and “forgotten man” film discuss society’s obligation to the individual. One might further separate the several genres by suggesting that it is the discussion of life in prison, its governance, and the protagonist’s adaptation to circumstances


there—in other words, the discourse of potential or actual redemption—which separates the prison film from the gangster film, although both offer a portrait of a dysfunctional society.

Angels with Dirty Faces probably constitutes the most generically complex film among those I have already mentioned, since it is both a prison film and a gangster film. While events in the prison or death house represent only a small proportion of the film’s narrative at the beginning and the end, the conclusion in which Rocky “dies yellow” to save other boys—either at Father Jerry’s urging or through divine intervention—is so dramatic that it devours the more conven-tional gangster trappings of the middle of the narrative, placing God suddenly at the center. Generic complexity notwithstanding, the tropes that secure the adjacency of the gangster film and prison film here are what we might call the theater of penitence and a fascination with the origins of criminality. As I have noted, Angels with Dirty Faces opens and closes with significant representations of the consequences of prison: first as the place where troubled boys learn to be more efficient bad men, and later as the site of the working of God’s grace in the provision of a warning to too-imitative boys. The prison or gangster film containing the mature male or the child narrative are both fascinated with the Bildung of the would-be good boy or criminal.

In other words, pace Dale, both genres concern themselves with at least the apparent psychological origins of wrongdoing, and they tend to indict environ-ment in preference to critiquing individual perversity, at least at the outset.6 For example, both The Roaring Twenties (1939) and Angels with Dirty Faces, while otherwise concerned with the exploits of the mature criminal played by Cagney, open with sequences designed to suggest when and where the youthful bad boy becomes the hardened criminal. Cagney’s boyishness as a performer, typically described as his “springiness” or barely contained physical and verbal energy, effectively suggests the continuity between boy and man. As Lincoln Kirstein commented of the typical Cagney role in 1932, “Cagney is not a man yet, but neither is he juvenile” (467). So, for example, in Angels, Rocky (played by Cagney) and Jerry (played by Pat O’Brien) are childhood friends in the Irish stews of Hell’s Kitchen. After the two indulge themselves in stealing from box cars, Rocky falls into the hands of the police while Jerry goes free. Rocky learns further refinements to his criminality while in prison, but the conscience-stricken Jerry becomes a priest in expiation. They meet again when Rocky returns to his old neighborhood, where he finds Jerry leading a mission to the next genera-tion of would-be gangsters, played by the Dead End Kids.7 Similarly, it is Father Flanagan’s firm conviction in Boys Town that “there are no bad boys,” which is to say no naturally malevolent juvenile monsters, but rather bad environments, families, and even cities that turn good material into social waste.8

The prison, perhaps somewhat unexpectedly, thus emerges as a site of potential regeneration because in the hands of the proper reforming spirit it is a controlled experimental environment, with overtones simultaneously of the scientific and the sacred. In keeping with the afterglow of the Progressive Era worship of the


selfless professional who tempers his educated understanding with mercy and horse sense, most of these films stage the central drama between the forces of cor-ruption and worldliness (bad wardens, sadistic guards, uncaring newspapermen, slovenly parents) and the forces of redemption (good wardens, priests, kindly judges). Generally we see an opposition between the reformer—associated with a higher sphere because he comes from outside the world of the reformatory or prison—and the functionary, altogether too comfortable within it. A prison for men, as opposed to one for boys, is more likely to have an honest, careful warden, presumably because the audience of inmates is less susceptible to uplift through exposure to this morality tale. The reform school or boys’ prison narrative, in contrast, requires that the struggle between good and evil be dramatized for the boys themselves in their own environment.

So, for example, The Mayor of Hell and Crime School both revolve around the replacement of an evil warden who delights in starving and beating the boys with a warden who feeds them well and urges them to become useful citizens without recourse to the lash—that is, who believes in leading them upward rather than only in punishing them. Not only does the outcome of this struggle between light and darkness have a direct bearing on the boys’ fates; its presen-tation as a kind of morality play for their edification is the most important part of their moral redemption. Underfeeding and beating are less personally important to the young inmates of a reformatory than is the demonstration by the end of the narrative that they live in a self-cleansing society that won’t indefinitely tolerate injustice, fraud, and brutality. The resolution of the prob-lems of the reformatory within the adult world is what will permit the children’s passage back into civil society. To some extent, youth itself, coupled with a good example, can be an insulator from the corrosive effects of wrongdoing.

The fascination with language—the authority of words versus the authority of the Word, perhaps—is another area in these films in which youth and maturity may be set at odds with each other in narratively useful ways. In Men of Boys Town, the long-reformed Whitey Marsh meets up with a tough-talking seven-year-old whose accounts of his criminal prowess in the accents and vocabulary of a hardened mini-Cagney appear to be being played for laughs. The penalty for failing to take this speech seriously, however, is a stint in the reformatory for Marsh, who despite his own origins as a street tough has been unable to discern the sincerity behind the gang argot when delivered in a shrill treble. Precisely because moral theater is the point of these films, they exhibit as a group strong sensitivity to the relationship between representation and reality—often, as in Boys Town, in the form of an interpolated critique of newspapers.

The film industry experienced friction with the newspaper industry in the 1930s. Film, unlike print journalism, had no guaranteed First Amendment freedoms, the result of the Supreme Court decision in Mutual v. Ohio in 1915, which determined that film was a fundamentally imitative art form and that consequently nothing of value would be lost if, unlike the press, it were sub-ject to prior restraint. This lack of protection left the film industry vulnerable


to external attempts at censorship at the state and municipal levels, which it successfully coopted by stages up until 1934 through the introduction of the MPPDA and the Production Code. Nonetheless, the newspaper and the newspaperman represented a set of freedoms that the filmmaker could only envy without participating in, explaining the glee with which the film industry produced and promoted films about unreliable reporters, editors, or owners, which run the gamut from Five Star Final (1931) to Citizen Kane (1941).9

Newspapers, consequently, are objects of mingled admiration and dislike in 1930s films, and any film about a systemic social injustice or form of criminality is unimaginable without them. In Scarface (1932), for example, newspapers are famously the elaborately presented stalking horse for the film industry itself, which uses the comparative freedom of the press to justify its seductive portrait of the delights of the Capone-like crime spree. The newspaper, the film implies, is only exposing the ugly boil on the body politic—if it is there, it must be pre-sented to the citizenry, whose responsibility it will be to use this knowledge to empower itself to destroy the crime lords and any corrupt officials who might shield them. Film could likewise argue that it was not creating these figures out of whole cloth but rather engaging in a form of lightly fictionalized reportage. Indeed, film had a great advantage in not being necessarily tethered to only the facts that could be known. As Boys Town and Angels imply, film can tell the story that the newspapers miss, through the surrogate of the reformer who is both participant and author—and thus a stand-in, through the mechanism of parable, for the film industry itself.

Newspapers thus simultaneously represent both the public and elite respon-sibility to that public, although that responsibility is often shown as neglected by employing the trope of the publisher or reporter who is interested only in facts and is thus ignorant of the spiritual drama unfolding before him. One of the peculiarities of 1930s films is their apparent simultaneous faith in the great unwashed and distrust of it, often present in the same narrative. With genuine good government, criminality has no purchase, but where is this good government for the masses to come from? The juvenile prison film offers a sur-prising answer, and one not typically present in the adult prison film: namely, that good government arises from the masses themselves, as long as they have an appropriate moral authority to follow. Boys Town, The Mayor of Hell, and Crime School all represent the good reformatory as one that does its work by teaching the boy to control himself and demonstrating the rewards of good citizenship until being a good citizen becomes second nature. This redeem-ing process is coupled with the suasive power of the glamour and Christian authority of the good father figure in the form of the charismatic star: Tracy in Boys Town, Cagney in The Mayor of Hell, Bogart in Crime School, and O’Brien/Cagney in Angels with Dirty Faces. This influence, of course, represents what the film industry as moral arbiter might be able to do for the nation’s youth while suggesting why the same stars might appear in roles on both sides of the law.


From Wild Boys of the Road to Boys Town, the boys’ prison film is fascinated with the self-governing reformatory community, which was undoubtedly an artifact of the period. Father Flanagan’s Boys Town, as Kenneth Kidd discusses in chapter four of Making American Boys, was founded in 1917 upon those principles, and much Progressive Era energy was expended on exploring more effective reform schemes for wayward youth. The sociological periodical Charities, for example, reported extensively in 1903–04 on the structure and success of the George Junior Republic, which, like the representations of boy government in the films mentioned above, employed “boy judges, boy lawyers, boy politicians, boy laborers and boy craftsmen” (“Town Meeting” 574–75). In 1903 as in 1933, one of the great set pieces of such accounts is the transcrip-tion of a court scene, in which boys are shown meting out appropriate justice despite their youth and inexperience. Not only do these scenes vindicate the faith of the reformer who has entrusted his charges with such power, they also rebuke the adults who nearly destroyed the young people through their misuse of authority. Significantly, however, the power shared with the boys is secular power, while spiritual authority is reserved for the reformer himself. A boy can function effectively as a politician, a worker, a judge; apparently, and contradicting the insights of the child-centered religious texts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he cannot be expected to be a priest.

Indeed, the juvenile prison film and the adult prison film implicitly contrast child and adult capacities for self-government. Beyond the administration of rough prison justice by inmates against stool pigeons, the adult prison film does not show the same faith in the possibility of self-government by inmates within the prison walls. Hence the importance of the wise prison warden in the latter genre, whereas he is often absent from the opening passages of the juvenile version, leaving a vacancy into which the priest and his obedient flock of children can flow together. Boys Town presents this contrast between sal-vageable youth and unregenerate age with its famous opening showing Father Flanagan ministering to a young man about to go to the chair, who reveals that his criminality had its origins in his neglected and friendless childhood. Flanagan returns to the mission that he runs in downtown Omaha to tell the adult men that he will now focus on rescuing children, implying that the men are a lost cause.

It would be easy to read this endorsement of youth as merely a helpful sentimentalization designed to enlist the public behind the salvific project of Boys Town, but I think that the invocation of troubled children does more than simply attempt to address the origins of criminality or provide a feel-good atmosphere. The prison or the reformatory (or Boys Town, which was techni-cally neither but operates similarly in the film and is denigrated as a “reform school” by an unsympathetic character in Men of Boys Town) is a metaphor for contemporary social structure, which has been discredited by the exigen-cies of the Depression. By giving children a presence in a democracy of their own making, these films suggest that with appropriate spiritual guidance, the


common man can participate and succeed against the machinations of an elite who might wish to subvert the operations of the republic. The children, of course, represent a fresh start where old lags would suggest opportunities squandered, a lack of enterprise, or ingrained criminality. But they have other significant attributes as well.

Perhaps the most unexpected is their kinship with the gangster on the basis of shared youth. It may surprise us that the character played by Cagney, for example, who is not exactly a gangster but rather a corrupt ward boss who is not above shooting a rival, should become the reform-minded warden of the reformatory that is the setting for The Mayor of Hell. Yet his energy and “springi-ness” make him appear ideal in that role as a bigger boy among boys, not a sober and judgmental adult. Here Kirstein’s observation that Cagney is neither juvenile nor adult is helpful, because it appears to address part of the Cagney charisma: the strange ability to wed a kind of innocence to a taste for mayhem. It also suggests a continuity between the boy culture operating in the shadow of the gangster film and the older boy culture that preceded it, represented by figures such as Theodore Roosevelt and Douglas Fairbanks, who were similarly energetic boy-men and natural tribal leaders of youth. The gangster on the make is a young figure in most of his appearances in the 1930s, in outlook if not in chronological age. Rico Bandello and Tony Camonte in Little Caesar (1930) and Scarface, respectively, are presented by the stars who embody them (Edward G. Robinson and Paul Muni) as naive but quick learners, impressed by new toys and ready to delight in the strategic aspects of their craft as gangland masters. Similarly, their sniveling deaths are attempts to suggest the malignant aspects of the juvenility of the gangster. Even such a mature figure as Wallace Beery, who plays Butch in The Big House, is shown to indulge in juvenile tastes such as cockroach racing, suggesting that the criminal is for both good and ill an overgrown boy who above all needs a father—or a Father.

Children also permit an exploration of ethnicity, framed specifically in the context of Christian community, that might not be possible with adult charac-ters. Boys Town, Crime School, and The Mayor of Hell all contain sequences in which the audience understands that the prison or the reformatory must, like an ark, hold samples of every type present in the republic. In Crime School and The Mayor of Hell, the ethnicities of the parents of the delinquents are played for laughs—Jews, Italians, and Greeks speak with broken grammar and heavy accents. Yet the films insist that every ethnicity, including WASPs, is contributing its mite to the waste stream of the republic, and the children speak uniformly in the accents of the deprived and delinquent. They constitute a multiethnic and, in some instances, multiracial group of a kind not to be explored in main-stream dramatic films again until the 1940s. Gangster films typically dramatize interethnic warfare (Italians against Irish, à la Scarface, for example), while the children’s prison film offers a rare glimpse of interethnic solidarity, as when a black boy grasps the hand of tubercular Skinny, a white boy, to comfort him during their first night in prison in The Mayor of Hell. For all the black/white


solidarity in shared misery daringly on display in I Am a Fugitive, there is no touching simply to comfort between adult men across the racial divide. Boys Town similarly demonstrates interethnic solidarity in a religious context, in the scene in which Whitey Marsh experiences the heterogeneous grace before meals that prevails there—all the boys must thank the divine for their newfound good fortune, but how they do it (Christian, Jewish, and Native American practices all briefly figure) is up to them.

But for all the idyllic aspects of this youthful society, there are places where these films seem to imply distrust of even this most regenerate population. Here they mobilize, curiously, another trope beloved of 1930s films, the scene of mob violence. As mentioned earlier, Boys Town, The Mayor of Hell, Crime School, and Wild Boys all contain sequences in which the boys assemble to mete out justice extralegally in the form of an enraged crowd straight out of a lynching scene in films such as Fury (1936) or Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). In all instances the mob responds to a miscarriage of justice, but it is nonetheless destructive and frightening in Wild Boys, The Mayor of Hell, and Crime School, where it results in the death of bad adult authority figures; and remarkable visually in Boys Town, which is otherwise so measured and controlled in its representation of boy anger and aggression. (In that film, the mob assembles to address the threat represented by Whitey Marsh’s brother and his confederates, who are wanted by the police and who have taken Marsh hostage.)

The scenes of mob violence may have been gratifying to a sense of under-class oppression in the 1930s—as one character observes in Boys Town, “They can’t kill us all,” thereby suggesting a praiseworthy solidarity. They also echo an expected trope of the adult prison film, namely the prison riot or outbreak, a staple in films such as The Big House and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, suggesting an interesting generic modification attendant upon the movement from adult to child version of the carceral narrative. But, like the newspapers that are simultaneously reformers’ foes and friends in the gangster film, these scenes of mob violence imply uneasiness with the specter of a populist utopia, a young self-governing community on the march without the immediate and responsible leadership of the adult man who is their spiritual authority. In this trope, of course, the films participate in widespread ambivalence about the causes and cures of social dysfunction during the 1930s: a combination of blame for discredited elites—bankers, politicians, and too-zealous profession-als, whose stand-ins in these films are bad wardens, corrupt guards or railroad bulls, and uncaring newspapermen; and concern with a newly energized and potentially undisciplined polis—the mobs or enthusiasts mobilized but not supervised by figures such as Huey Long and Coughlin, whose stand-ins are the rioting boys. The enraged boys provoked past endurance, coupled with the priest or reformer whose presence tames the destructive energy, offer a soothing representation of the way out of this social impasse. Not only is the reformer or priest present to control the mob, he is there to explain to authority how the mob came into being, implying a threat to the elites should reform be


withheld. And his presence throughout the film is primarily as the author of a new kind of boy through a new kind of community.

The claustral community of boys is the place where the narrative of delin-quency is rewritten, sometimes literally, by the reformer and priest. All of the juvenile prison narratives under examination here suggest that the fictional narrative of redemption is in fact the tool of actual redemption. Eddie’s at-tempt in Wild Boys to hold up a movie theater box office (a suggestive target, to say the least) directs official attention to his plight and provides him with the means to secure and retain honest work. Father Flanagan attempts to stop the publication of prejudicial stories about the supposed failures of Boys Town, in order that the community not be misrepresented and thus caused to fail. Flanagan’s slogan, “There is no such thing as a bad boy,” similarly assumes what it sets out to demonstrate, precisely so that demonstration will be possible. Father Jerry likewise realizes that the press is simultaneously enemy and tool. In his guise as crusading priest, he speaks out against crime and corruption on the radio, making him a target for crime bosses and forcing Rocky to come to his aid. More importantly, his plea to Rocky that he forsake the comfort of a dignified walk to the electric chair in order to be a shaming example to his child admirers demonstrates his knowledge of the power of the press and his ability to rewrite the narrative of Rocky’s criminal trajectory and character. We know, and Father Jerry knows, that Rocky is honorable and brave, whether or not he dies “yellow” in fact or only in perception. Those reading the newspaper accounts of his end, including the children, are given only the dismissive re-portage that insists he lived and died a coward. The viewer’s understanding of the criminal is thus linked through dramatic irony to that of the best informed and ultimately most powerful character within the narrative—the authoritative priest who has the ability to rewrite the destinies of other characters, just as, we might note, the studio has “rewritten” the star from gangster to reformer from one film to the next.

The child’s prison narrative thus resolves a number of otherwise intolerable contradictions by making available a Christian solution to the contest between elite and public. The way out, these films seem to suggest, is self-government under the aegis of an essentially populist, because religious, elite genuinely concerned for the “little guy.” And in thus addressing the major political con-tradiction, the child’s prison narrative defuses other troubling contradictions, such as the contest between admiring and condemning criminality; between understandings of criminality as inborn and as environmental; and between understandings of the film industry as perverter of the morals of youth and as youth’s guide and preceptor. Even a contradiction imposed by the peculiarities of stardom—the odd fact that a star may play a criminal in one drama and a redeemer in the next, while being represented sympathetically in both—is re-solved by the Christian insight that it is possible to be simultaneously the victim sacrificed for society’s sins and the spiritual leader created to redeem them.


Notes

1. Thomas Schatz offers an account of differing house styles in The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. Warner Bros. was the most socially conscious of the studios. This fact may explain its particular attraction to crime pictures, which appealed to its desire both to comment on contemporary reality and to offer audiences exciting stories (Schatz 141, Roddick 77).

2. This trope turns up in films that would otherwise be co-opted by the prison film (e.g., I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang). It also is sometimes deployed, as in Heroes for Sale (1933), to suggest the construction of an ideal community tacitly critical of mainstream society, an approach shared with Boys Town, for example. As an index of the currency of the “forgotten man” trope during the first half of the 1930s, the forgotten man can be found in a production number in musicals such as Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) as a figure of wronged innocence attacked by society precisely because something is owed him.

3. This vulnerability to manipulation is a characteristic of the forgotten man; James Allen (Paul Muni) in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is similarly unwillingly involved in a crime.

4. I discuss at greater length Hollywood’s conflicted relationship with its critics in Hollywood Outsiders. In brief, Hollywood proved remarkably adept at redeploying for its own ends the rhetoric its critics used against it.

5. For further discussion of the history of the Payne Fund studies, see Jowett, Jarvie, and Fuller, part one.

6. James Naremore intriguingly implies that Cagney’s powerful, charming star persona undermines the initial emphasis upon environment as breeder of criminals in both Public Enemy and Angels. In other words, despite the careful insertion into the script of elements of back story designed to explain the protagonist’s turn to criminality, the agency and particularity of the star as embodied by Cagney inevitably focus the audience’s attention on questions of individual choice and idiosyncratic response to experience (5–6). Robert Sklar attributes part of Cagney’s allure to his “doubleness” as a performer/character. Sklar terms him a “roughneck sissy,” both violent and gentle, sociopathic and honorable, at least by the gangster code (14–15).

7. The Dead End Kids appeared in numerous films, including Dead End (1937), They Made Me a Criminal (1939), Angels with Dirty Faces, and Angels Wash Their Faces (1939). They consequently indicate the 1930s preoccupation with representations of juvenile criminality. Dead End Kid Leo Gorcey appeared alone as the incorrigible bad brother in the Joan Crawford vehicle Mannequin (1937), suggesting the usefulness of such a character in providing a shorthand representation of a deprived social background and its societal consequences.

8. Kenneth Kidd notes that the filmic Father Flanagan shared this attitude with his original: “If he famously held that ‘there is no such thing as a bad boy,’ he decried ‘bad environment, bad training, bad example and bad thinking’” (115). A 1949 biography by Fulton and Will Oursler, Kidd adds, traced the line to a scene in Flanagan’s boyhood, when he expressed frustration at some intractable cows in his charge and was told by his father, “Eddie, there is no such thing as a bad cow. They only don’t know any better!” (qtd. on 125).


9. Another, arguably more minor cause of friction between the two industries was a product of the increasing reach of radio after 1922. Studios sought to move from print journalism to radio more of their advertising and much of their more extended promotion of films, in the form of radio plays that might previously have been presented as serializations or novelizations of film stories published in newspapers. In doing so they successfully played the two media against each other (Hilmes 56–57).

Works CitedDale, Edgar. The Content of Motion Pictures. New York: Macmillan, 1935.

“Debunking the Gangster.” Motion Picture Monthly 7.1 (January 1931): 2–3.

Hilmes, Michelle. Hollywood and Broadcasting: From Radio to Cable. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990.

Jowett, Garth S., Ian C. Jarvie, and Kathryn H. Fuller. Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Kidd, Kenneth B. Making American Boys: Boyology and the Feral Tale. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2004.

Kirstein, Lincoln. “James Cagney and the American Hero.” Hound and Horn 5 (April–June 1932): 466–67.

Lesko, Nancy. Act Your Age! A Cultural Construction of Adolescence. New York: Routledge Falmer, 2001.

Mintz, Steven. Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004.

Morey, Anne. “The Figure of the Reformer in American Silent Film.” International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST) Conference, Aberystwyth, Wales. July 2009. Unpublished conference paper.

_____. Hollywood Outsiders: The Adaptation of the Film Industry, 1913–1934. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003.

Munby, Jonathan. Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

Naremore, James. “Actor, Role, Star: James Cagney in Angels with Dirty Faces.” Mosaic 16 (1983): 1–17.

Roddick, Nick. A New Deal in Entertainment: Warner Brothers in the 1930s. London: BFI, 1983.

Schatz, Thomas. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. New York: Pantheon, 1988.

Sklar, Robert. City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Garfield. New York: Pantheon, 1992.

“Town Meeting Day at Freeville.” Charities 10.23 (6 June 1903): 573–75.

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