East Side Kids

Director: Robert Hill Robert Hill

Overview

Police detective Pat O'Day (Leon Ames) involves himself with a gang of slum kids led by Dutch Kuhn (Hally Chester) and Danny Dolan (Harris Berger). He tries to keep them from getting into trouble and to help out Danny, whose brother, Knuckles Dolan (Dave "Tex" O'Brien), is about to be executed for a murder allegedly committed as part of his involvement in a counterfeiting ring. O'Day knows Knuckles, having tried to keep him on the right side of the law, and knows that he couldn't have done the shooting, regardless of the circumstantial evidence, because Knuckles resolutely refused to carry a gun -- the real killer is the gang leader, Mileaway (Dennis Moore), a smooth-talker who earned his nickname through his knack for always being "a mile away" whenever a crime is committed by his gang. O'Day not only wants to catch Mileaway, but tries to keep the teenagers from falling in with the hood. When the detective starts to get too close, Mileaway sets him up for a brutality charge using crooked shop owner Schmidt, and gets O'Day busted back to uniformed patrolman.

Product Details

Release Date:	11/22/2016
UPC:	0889290242600
Original Release:	1940
Source:	Film Detective
Language:	English
Time:	1:02:00
Sales rank:	54,105

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Joyce Bryant	Molly Dolan
Leon Ames	Pat O'Day
Dennis Moore	Milton 'Mileway' Harris
Vince Barnett	Whisper
Dave O'Brien	Knuckles Dolan
Richard Adams	Schmidt
Maxine Leslie	May
Sam Edwards	Pete,Algernon Wilkes
Robert Fiske	Cornwall
James Farley	Capt. Moran
Alden Chase	Joe,Joe
Fred Hoose	Mr. Wilkes
Eric Burtis	Eric
Eddie Brian	Mike
Frank Yaconelli	Tony
Hally Chester	The East Side Kid, Buster
Harris Berger	The East Side Kid, Danny Dolan
Frankie Burke	The East Side Kid, Skinny
Donald Haines	The East Side Kid, Pee Wee
David Durand	The East Side Kid
East Side Kids	Actor

Technical Credits

Robert Hill	Director
Sam Katzman	Producer

Editorial Reviews

A B-movie directed with all the briskness that the genre demanded, East Side Kids was vastly entertaining and diverting, a low-budget successor to such well-intentioned major studio dramas as Dead End and Angels With Dirty Faces. East Side Kids is also a very dark film, however, when compared with the East Side Kids series of movies that followed it -- this was the only movie in the series (and essentially wasn't part of the series, but spawned it) in which a member of the gang is killed. Producer Sam Katzman recognized that he'd struck gold with the movie, but did some retooling of the concept. He signed up the available principal members of the original Dead End Kids (all except for Billy Halop and Bernard Punsley) rather than the secondary players such as Hally Chester who'd starred in East Side Kids, and put together a less realistic but more memorable and charismatic, as well as more humorous, gang led by Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall. Dave "Tex" O'Brien, seen here as unjustly convicted felon Knuckles Dolan, was kept and shown as the reformed, upright mentor to the group in the first few movies that followed, but the role of his brother Danny was recast with Bobby Jordan. The character of Algernon Wilkes, introduced here as the only well-spoken, serious student among the gang, was also kept but also altered slightly, so that he was a teenager from a wealthy background in future installments. Katzman maintained the Lower East Side New York setting and made it even more vivid, despite the low budgets involved, and the result of all of his work, and the contributions of several writers and directors who became very important down the road including Phil Karlson and Carl Foreman, was one of the longest-running film series in the history of movies, so successful that it spawned an even longer-running successor series, The Bowery Boys.

All Movie Guide - Bruce Eder