Bogart & the Bowery Boys in COLOR!

Today's post affords a rare glimpse of those relentlessly black & white Bowery Boys in color! With the exception of those oddest of film oddities of the 1960's, SECOND FIDDLE TO A STEEL GUITAR (1965) and THE PHYNX (1969), this is your only chance to catch LEO GORCEY and HUNTZ HALL together in color -- and as relative youths at the beginning of their Warner Bros. tenures yet! Here LEO & HUNTZ make a brief cameo appearance in a Warners color short subject that was lensed concurrent with the filming of CRIME SCHOOL in 1938. Along with fellow Dead-Enders BILLY HALOP and BOBBY JORDAN, they can be briefly glimpsed slurping soup and terrorizing the patrons of the studio commissary with their less-than-genteel manners. Luckily for the waitresses in attendance, HUMPHREY BOGART is on hand to keep them in line!

Of particular historical interest here is the fact that the studio hadn't yet finalized the gang's billing as the "Dead End" Kids (after all, why give free publicity to the rival Goldwyn production?). Instead, Warners initially decided to label them the "Crime School" Kids, and thereby associate them with one of their own films. This was their game plan right up until ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES; by the time that film went into post-production, the monicker "Dead End Kid" had entered the nation's lexicon, and resistance proved futile.