Back to school time rolls around again so I thought I would highlight the first of Universal’s Little Tough Guys serials. I know that technically they were referred to as The Dead End Kids and the Little Tough Guys but as The Dead End Kids were an official title for their Warner films I’ll just refer to them as The Little Tough Guys to avoid confusion (for myself if not for anyone else). After the original team of Billy Halop, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Gabriel Dell, Bobby Jordon and Bernard Punsley had split after being dropped by Warner’s with most going to Universal with Halop it wasn’t long before the team, now making B-programmers was put to work in serials. Junior G-Men (1940) was their first and in my opinion the best of the three they made before the now smaller group completely disbanded in 1943 with Halop going off to fight in the war, Hall and Dell moving over to Monogram and joining back up with Gorcey and Jordan, and Punsley having the gall to quit acting and become a successful doctor (and yes I am being sarcastic about that).
The serial starts out with a group of street toughs Gyp (Huntz Hall), Terry (Gabriel Dell), Lug (Bernard Punsley), and Midge (Roger Daniels) being led in teenage high jinks by their leader Billy Barton (Billy Halop). Terry almost gets run over by a pastry truck but is saved by quick thinking Billy. The pastry truck hits another vehicle and the two drivers start a fight that is quickly broken up by a patrolman.
During the fracas, Billy and his gang take the opportunity to swipe some pies out of the back of the pastry truck. They are spotted by Junior G-Man Harry Trent (Kenneth Howell), who is down in the Bowery for his Uncle Jim Belmont (Phillip Terry), who is a real G-Man. He quickly reports the theft to the patrolman who arrests Billy but soon releases him for lack of evidence, all the pies having been eaten by that time.
Billy is fuming and the next day he and his gang go out to the country and break in to Harry’s Junior G-Men headquarters that he has set up in a building on his father’s estate. A huge fight breaks out, and one of the Junior G-Men calls the cops. A patrol car arrives and the officers plan to take in Billy and his group for starting a riot.
The arrival of Jim Bradford stops this. He had been originally coming over to talk to Harry and his members about doing some work for the FBI in helping them track down a group of Fifth Column subversives known as The Order of the Flaming Torch. He spots a medal belonging to Colonel Barton (Russell Hicks) on the floor. Billy claims it is his and demands it back. Realizing that Billy is Colonel Barton’s missing son, Bradford takes him and his friends to FBI headquarters. Harry goes along too.
Bradford learns that Billy had left the academy where his father put him while he went off to do work for the Government because he didn’t like being bossed around by the staff. He got robbed early on and became a street kid, but had planned to keep looking for his father until he read of him dying in a lab accident so he’s been on his own ever since and likes it that way. Bradford tells Billy that his father, an inventor, was not killed in the lab accident as had been reported in the papers, but was kidnapped by the Torchies (as Billy and the gang soon start calling them) for a new explosive he had invented. Bradford learns that Billy got the medal from a briefcase his father had left him. When Bradford demands to know what else was in the briefcase, Billy buttons up and refuses to talk anymore.
Brand (Cy Kendall) is the leader of the Torchies. He plans to throw the country into anarchy and then take over. To achieve this he has had several key government and financial leaders assassinated. He wants Col. Barton’s new explosive to help him achieve his aim by destroying military and government buildings in a well planned takeover at the right time. Barton is being held on Brand’s well protected estate out in the hills. So far Barton has refused to cooperate. Brand has had a search for Billy in progress for some time to use the teenager as a hold over Barton. Learning that he is currently being held at FBI headquarters, Brand orders his immediate abduction.
Bradford questions Billy for hours but gets nowhere. He decides to have Billy held indefinitely till he comes across. As Billy is being taken downstairs to a cell, Bradford and his assistants are attacked by the Torchies in the corridor. Billy’s gang jumps into the fray. One of the Torchies knocks Billy out and drags him to the elevator. Harry jumps him before the door closes. During the struggle the elevator is left running unattended and drops like a stone to crash in the basement…..
All of the Little Tough Guys serials follow the same pattern, the gang starts out rebellious, not wanting anything to do with normal society and wanting to handle things in their own way. Gradually as the story progresses there is change of heart, the gang start cooperating with the authorities and in the end become a productive part of normal society. It could be viewed as a symbolic representation of moving from childhood to becoming an adult. Another viewpoint could argue that they are forced to give up their individuality and conform to society’s standards.
I view it as little bit of both. In the beginning Halop and his troop are tough and self sufficient, more than able to handle themselves but make little progress against the Torchies on their own. As the serial progresses Halop spends less and less time with the other Tough Guys and more time with Howell where he gets closer to locating his father with each chapter.
This is best demonstrated in Chapters 2 and 3 where Halop and Hall managed to sneak into and back out of the Torchies headquarters but are unable to say where it is due to being locked in the back of a panel truck each time (a particularly frustrating series of events due to the convoluted set of circumstances contrived to manage it). Then later in Chapter 11 Halop is able to locate the headquarters thanks to Howell taking him up in his father’s personal airplane so that he can recognize the buildings he had seen behind the electrified wall that surrounds the mansion.
A part of me is sad to see the inevitable and necessary transformation. There is something to be admired about the character’s original image of a self made man, more than willing to stand alone against impossible odds, asking for no help and expecting none while following his own personal code of honor (sort of a teenage Phillip Marlowe). As he becomes more of a team player, he seems to become softer, less able or willing to handle problems without asking for help.
A personal bias I have about the Tough Guy serials is the insertion of an adult figure that has to do the actual taking down of the bad guys. Constantly the gang and the Junior G-Men do the actual investigative work but then need to be saved from peril by Terry’s G-Man character. Much more satisfying would have been if the teenagers were able to take down the villains, like Frank Merriwell, Tailspin Tommy and Jack Armstrong did in their serials.
Another complaint is the tendency for the Tough Guys serials to take a few chapters to actually get going. The plot will always stop dead so that the gang can indulge in some comedy antics like harassing street peddlers and wisecracking with each other while trying to make time with pretty girls who won’t give them the time of day. Junior G-Men isn’t as bad as the next two in this regard (Junior G-Men of the Air (1942) is the worst offender, taking almost four chapters before it actually gets the villains actively involved, keeping them in the background early on) but it does get tiresome to have everybody drop what they are doing and indulge in comedy shtick. On the plus side the early chapters also show an interesting subplot where the antagonism between Halop’s and Howell’s friends is developed and believably resolved over several chapters with both groups coming to like and even respect each other.
The acting is all pretty good. Halop is at the top of his game, effortlessly demonstrating his character’s conflicting emotions, his antagonism toward Howell and Terry obviously a cover for his pain and confusion over the assumed abandonment by his father. His transformation from angry street punk to helpful do gooder is subtly and effectively handled.
Howell doesn’t fair as well due to his character’s static personality. He is the youthful idealist throughout, not even shading his character a little in the beginning when he is at odds with Halop, preferring to maintain a likeable helpfulness toward the other, which is a little hard to buy when Halop and his gang jump him and smack the taste out of his mouth in Chapter Two. Howell does invest the part with a lot of energy and enthusiasm, helping to offset the rather colorlessness of the character.
Out of the rest of the Tough Guys, Hall is the only one to truly stand out, being Halop’s right hand man for the first half of the serial. They make a good team with Hall’s wisecracks helping to break the tension during tense situations. And he is truly funny as when Terry revives him after a car accident with a whiff of ammonia in Chapter Four. Hall coughs and complains that the stuff smells horrible, then quickly asks for another shot. Hall was always a welcome sight on the screen and it is disappointing that he gets pushed aside from the main action in the last half of the film.
Dell and Punsley have little to do. Dell handles himself well in a few fights and has an amusing scene in Chapter Six where he almost blows up the Junior G-Men lab while exploring some chemicals set aside for an experiment and decides to keeps his hands in his pockets there after. Punsley has few scenes and even fewer lines, mainly standing in the back of the group looking like he has no idea what’s going on but more than willing to go along with everybody else. From the reading I’ve done about the original Dead End Kids, Punsley was rather indifferent to the profession, preferring to take the money and concentrate on his studies rather than have a serious career in the profession, so he probably didn’t mind just getting paid to stand around and let the others handle any emoting required.
Just about everybody is blown off the screen by Cy Kendall as the terrorist leader. Smooth and cultured, he rarely raises his voice even when issuing threats against Hicks, Halop. He has this sinister smirk he uses to good effect when detailing some horrific plan of sabotage or assassination, coming off as a combination of equal parts sophistication and cold blooded brutality, projecting an aura of menace that is shiver inducing, all the while never stirring from behind his desk. Kendall makes the Torchies seem like an organization that really could subvert and take over the country. Without his strong villainous presence the serial wouldn’t work as a whole.
This serial was the start of a theme in Universal serials through the forties, where even after the Little Tough Guys left, productions like The Adventures of the Flying Cadets (1943) and The Master Key (1945) would utilize characters and plot lines that featured street kids as heroes. If the studio hadn’t stop serial production in 1946, who knows, they may have brought together another set of teenagers to star in a series of serials, sort of a cliffhanging version of The Bowery Boys. But they didn’t, so we will never know what might have been.
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