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Baby Face (1933) Alfred E. Green

The Mayor of Hell (1933)

Of Hollywood’s major studios in the 1930s, Warner Bros. may have been the one studio that almost never made movies commensurate to its size. Seeing a crowded market of glamorous, glittery films from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Paramount, and Fox, Warner Bros. decided not to directly compete, and went for grit. While its biggest competitors thrived on escapism and entertainment, Warner Bros. was more prone to examining contemporary issues. Thus, Warners became the spiritual home of the gangster film and Hollywood’s “social message pictures” during the 1930s.

The “dark studio” had forged a socially conscious identity, and that identity will probably surprise many an unsuspecting viewer of the studio’s pre-Code work. One such example is Archie Mayo’s The Mayor of Hell. The film, which gives James Cagney (1931’s The Public Enemy, 1942’s Yankee Doodle Dandy) top billing even though he doesn’t show up until the second act, is shockingly progressive in its messaging, even if could be more structurally focused.

The Mayor of Hell is a film about the juvenile justice and incarceration systems of the early 1930s. In place is a system of punishment, rather than rehabilitation, that feels too similar to that of the adults. We experience the process first through the eyes of child gang leader Jimmy Smith (Frankie Darro, best known as the voice of Lampwick in 1940’s Pinocchio) and his friends. After a robbery gone violently awry, the NYPD arrest Jimmy and his friends and send them to juvenile court. Despite the clear sympathies from Judge Gilbert (Arthur Byron) towards the boys’ poverty and difficult upbringing, he sentences them all to a boys’ reform school.

Here, “reform school” is less a school, more a euphemism for a children’s prison emphasizing hard labor. Even to the most hardened boys, life at the school is demoralizing and dehumanizing. Violence is rife. The guards and Superintendent/Warden Thompson (Dudley Digges) are unafraid of corporal punishment and lengthy bouts of solitary confinement for rulebreakers. Eventually, the corrupt state governor appoints his friend and gangster, Patsy Gargan (Cagney), to serve as the reform school’s deputy commissioner. Along with nurse Dorothy Griffith (Madge Evans) and against Thompson’s protests, Patsy will implement a system of self-governance among the boys. Yet the reforms to the reform school are fragile – this taste of life as it should be could be fleeting.

Some other notable names among the cast include Allen Jenkins (the voice of Officer Charlie Dibble on Hanna-Barbera’s Top Cat) and Allen Hoskins (Farina in the Our Gang/The Little Rascals short film series).

The Mayor of Hell’s opening half-hour is remarkable in that it gives its child actors a chance to drive the plot. The screenplay by Islin Auster (associate producer on 1939’s Destry Rides Again) and Edward Chodorow (1934’s Madame Du Barry) paints a rough-and-tumble portrait of Jimmy Smith’s gang: they hail from troubled family situations, lower-class upbringings, and ostracized ethnic, racial, and religious groups. Although Jimmy appears to come from a “default” white Protestant background and the film frames the introductory act around him, the diversity of the boys looks and sounds like New York City in the early 1930s.

Individual family situations aside, the Great Depression has deprived all of them of a normal childhood – extorting and robbing adults are the only means in which they might eat that day. Any semblance of childhood among Jimmy and his friends comes from their closeness. Whether this is out of necessity (fending for themselves would be a vulnerable position to be in) or also out of genuine care for each other, their togetherness should be forged on a playground or a schoolhouse, not on unforgiving city streets and alleyways. The boys may not be alright, but they are far from the immoral monsters that some adults make them out to be. Their humanity remains; one really does not have to look too hard to see it.

Though often described as a James Cagney vehicle, Cagney’s appearance a third of the way in marks a strange focal shift. Even if the shift is necessary, it so abruptly tears the focus away from the children that it might make the viewer wonder what is going on with Jimmy and his friends. The imbalance of perspectives after the opening half-hour is unannounced, roughly handled, and disappointing – especially for a film that seemed so committed to the children’s perspective.

However, this is not to impugn Cagney and Madge Evans’ characters and the actors’ performances. As the newly-installed Patsy, Cagney is not entering his new position for genuine reasons. And the script is always ready to remind viewers that Patsy remains an active criminal. Though this is not one of his best performances, Cagney’s early ‘30s smarm and pointed delivery of his lines fit for what this film is trying to achieve. Evans has more pedestrian work, but her character’s faith in the boys – even when her resistance labors against the reform school’s old administration – is apparent. She internalizes the emotion of seeing a boy being subject to cruel and unusual punishment (or the aftermath) with quiet heartbreak.

Patsy initially takes up the ideas of the incarcerated boys governing themselves as part of his attraction to Evans’ Nurse Dorothy. Dorothy, inspired by juvenile and adult justice reforms in other states, is the one responsible for the progressive ideas: democratic self-governance, a miniature capitalist economy dependent on the boys’ labor, self-policing without adult guards, and a peer justice system with rights to a peer attorney and peer jury (all adjudicated by a peer judge). Perhaps, among her readings, she came across examples like the real-life Boys Town, Nebraska (The Mayor of Hell is the acidic foil to 1938’s Boys Town, which has similar themes). Before Patsy’s hiring, her entreaties for more humane treatment of the boys fall on silent ears – Superintendent Thompson only adheres to coercion, beatings, and threats. To see the adults help the children set up their system is gratifying and strikingly modern, however fragile the boys and the helpful adults will learn that system to be. In contemporary America, there remain numerous states that would be aghast at any proposal to gift incarcerated children the amount of freedom seen in The Mayor of Hell.

A year before The Mayor of Hell made its theatrical bow, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) – also a Warner Bros. production – caused a national sensation. That film criticized the American penal system as it depicted the inhumane conditions of men in a chain gang in an unnamed Southern state. Its ending, with perhaps the most heartbreaking final line in cinematic history, personalized its arguments against an entire carceral system. Though we should not be too hyperbolic about how films can inspire sociopolitical change, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang is one of those rare exceptions. The film generated widespread outrage among viewers, and it was indirectly responsible for criminal justice reforms in the American South, as it related to chain gangs.

Unlike its fellow Warner Bros. production the year prior, The Mayor of Hell does pull some of its punches. Mayo’s film does not identify the juvenile justice system, as it existed then, as barbaric. Instead, any brutality within the system is the responsibility of individual actors behaving with impunity – namely, Thompson and the guards loyal to his beliefs. The paternal presence of Judge Gilbert verbally asserts the film’s beliefs that the juvenile justice system, as it exists, is necessary to address parental incompetence (the actor who plays Allen Hoskins’ father, Fred “Snowflake” Toones, plays a bumbling father in a racist scene that delegitimizes black fathers) and neglect. The Mayor of Hell never pushes back against Judge Gilbert’s well-meaning, but reductive thesis.

Elsewhere, the idea that even a criminal like Cagney’s character can induce positive change seems like prescribing pixie dust: that one well-meaning individual in a position of power, no matter how he came into that position, can ensure lasting change. While I will credit The Mayor of Hell for the ethnic, racial, and religious diversity of the boys, the film is tellingly silent about why these certain groups – and not others – might be more prone to criminality and why they are institutionally disadvantaged.

My objections to The Mayor of Hell’s institutional punch-pulling notwithstanding, the film’s final moments are befitting its pre-Code status. For those who have not seen The Mayor of Hell, the film’s falling action does not end in any way that you will expect. That moment is violent punctuation – a reminder that the boys’ gains and, more broadly, the very system that the United States professes will make for a more perfect union, can be obliterated by someone who can only speak the language of domination and humiliation.

The Mayor of Hell, against a budget of $229,000 (about $5.6 million in 2026’s USD), came at a modest cost for the studio (even then) and did well among audiences. The executives and producers at Warner Bros. must have truly adored the material, as the studio remade The Mayor of Hell twice: as Crime School (1938, with Humphrey Bogart in the Cagney role) and Hell’s Kitchen (1939, with Ronald Reagan). Two remakes of the same film in the span of a year? Even in our remake-heavy 2020s, that seems like overkill!

Unlike I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, there are no factual or even apocryphal accounts of The Mayor of Hell of having inspired sociopolitical change. After the outrage of Chain Gang, I would not blame the studio for wanting to avoid such hot controversy so soon after raising such a ruckus. For what it is, The Mayor of Hell depicts a unique aspect of life in Depression-era America. Although its proposed remedies might be too mild (even now), it is clear that director Archie Mayo, the cast, and crew of this film are treating the material with the utmost respect. As the film reminds us: the children (and even the adults) behind the high fences and barbed wire have much to learn yet, and may still grow from their mistakes.

My rating: 7.5/10

^ Based on my personal imdb rating. My interpretation of that ratings system can be found in the “Ratings system” page on my blog. Half-points are always rounded down.

From PRC comes STRANGLER OF THE SWAMP (1946), an American remake of the 1936 German horror film FAHRMANN MARIA!

Both films are written and directed by Frank Wisbar, but how does 10 years, a new country, and a post-war environment affect the anti-Nazi story?

STRANGLER OF THE SWAMP stars Rosemary LaPlanche, Robert Barrat, and Blake Edwards.