Acting is a tough profession to make a living in and can lead to some bitter disappointments. Billy Halop is a case in point, a child actor who was never really allowed to become a successful adult actor as he got older. Halop came from an acting family, his mother was a dancer and his sister became a well known radio actress. Halop’s early work was in radio, most notably the star of Bobby Benson, a three time a week children’s serial about the adventures of a teenage owner of a ranch near the Mexican border. From there he garnered a leading role in Sidney Kingsley’s hard hitting drama Dead End, on Broadway.
This eventually lead to Halop, along with fellow cast members Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Gabriel Dell, Bobby Jordon and Bernard Punsley traveling to Hollywood to reprise their roles for the film version of Dead End (1937). The group, now dubbed The Dead End Kids, became stars and were featured in hard hitting dramas like Crime School (1938) with Humphrey Bogart, Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) with James Cagney and They Made Me a Criminal (1939) with John Garfield. After Dead End Kids on Dress Parade (1939) Warner’s felt that the fad of delinquent films was fading, plus the group’s antics were causing disruptions around the lot, and The Dead End Kids were dropped from the roster.
A long standing antagonism between Halop and Gorcey over leadership of the group, that ironically mirrored their on screen personas, caused the original team to split up. Gorcey moved over to Monogram and built The East Side Kids with Bobby Jordon. Halop and the rest went to Universal where they were dubbed The Little Tough Guys. With the change in studios the group quickly went from making serious message dramas to B action comedies like You’re Not So Tough (1940), Hit the Road (1941) and Mug Town (1943), where like rival East Side Kids they spent most of their time playing a street gang taking on racketeers.
It was inevitable that they would be featured in some of the studio’s serials. Starting with Junior G-Men (1940), the guys help out the FBI round up a subversive group of fifth columnists who have kidnapped Halop’s invertor father. Next up was Sea Raiders (1941) with the gang taking on a group of foreign saboteurs after a new boat invented by Halop’s older brother (Starting to notice a trend here?). Halop took time out from the group to make Sky Raiders (1941) playing a clean cut kid helping his aviator hero stop a group of foreign spies from stealing the man’s new plane. Halop’s final serial was back with The Little Tough Guys in Junior G-Men of the Air (1942) as he fights Japanese spies who have kidnapped his inventor younger brother for his new plane muffler needed for the attack on Pearl Harbor.
The war ended The Little Tough Guys series, Halop went into the military, Punsley went to college and became a doctor, Hall and Dell went over to Monogram and joined Gorcey’s East Side Kids. After the war Halop was again cast as the leader of a teenage gang in the Gas House Kids (1946) with former Our Gang star Carl “Alfalfa” Switzer. A name change to William Halop did little to garner him more adult roles and his developing drinking problem didn’t help.
In the fifties he worked as an electric dryer salesman while getting small roles on TV shows like The Cisco Kid and Boston Blackie. During the sixties he appeared on Perry Mason, The Andy Griffith Show and Gunsmoke. He also had another career change, taking care of his third wife, who had multiple sclerosis, led him to become a registered nurse. Some of his last acting work was a recurring character on All In the Family.
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