Wild Boys of the Road

Director: William A. Wellman

1933 / 68min / 35mm

Perhaps no other film to emerge from the depths of the Great Depression captured the essentials of the era—the queasy feeling of plummeting social status, the touching sense of solidarity in fresh adversity, the danger of desperation—as Wellman’s Wild Boys of the Road, starring Frankie Darro and Edwin Phillips as two Midwestern high schoolers who, seeing their families suddenly skint, decide to relieve their folks of the financial burden of raising them and ride the rails toward an uncertain destiny.

“By the time Eddie breaks down and cries, ‘I’m sick of being hungry and cold! I’m sick of freight trains!’ both the romantic notion of the train and the idle fantasies of boyhood have been demolished. Suffering is everywhere and there’s no one to blame for it. Though this was a Pre-Code film, its intended ending was still too bleak for producer Jack Warner. If the new ending feels off, it’s a credit to the mounting sense of desperation Wellman built with the rest of the film, where there are no easy answers.” —Series curator Genevieve Yue

Distributor: Hollywood Film Company

35mm print courtesy of and preserved by the Library of Congress

Part of Trains: Long Distance Passages