KING OF THE NEWSBOYS

US, 1938, 65 minutes, Black and white.
Lew Ayres, Helen Mack, Alison Skipworth, Horace Mc Mahon.
Directed by Bernard Vorhaus.

During the 1930s, especially after the impact of the Depression, Hollywood made many films about tough life in the cities, employment and unemployment, the role of gangsters and syndicates, and stories of people trying to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, motivations for success.

This is that kind of film.

Lew Ayres had made an impact in 1930 in All Quiet on the Western Front. He was to appear in films throughout the 30s. However, he was to move to some kind of stardom with the Dr Kildare series at the end of the 1930s and into the 40s when Hollywood shunned him because of his conscientious objection stands during World War II. He did continue his career but mainly as a character actor into the 1960s.

This is a story about the poor areas of New York City, the young man, Jerry, confident in himself, who rides a horse making away for the steam train that moves through the district. He has a girlfriend but she is desperate to move out of the slums, takes up with a racing fixer. There are some obvious clashes in the backgrounds of the families who stay.

Fighting and getting into trouble, Jerry is persuaded by authorities and good advice to take up selling papers. He has a group of gawky friends, including very young Horace Mc Mahon, and persuades them to work with him, generating headlines, persuading the powers that be to employ them, making profits by confronting people in the street, even intimidating them, building up a mini empire.

Which means then that Jerry and the girlfriend will encounter each other, each discovering that the ambitions they had for wealth and position, are not all that they hoped – and, ultimately, not without some gangster clashes, that they will be with each other.