“One is a real city, an urban agglomeration of millions. The other is a mythic city, a dream city, born of that most pervasive of dream media, the movies”(Celluloid Skyline))    

    New York City, a city that has risen, fallen, and changed ceaselessly in the past hundreds of years, still remains the leader and one of the most astonishing places in the world. Right from the beginning, filmmakers have grasped the underlying reason for its inevitable changingness: A dream. A unanimous dream of striving for one's success and living the best of one’s life, rooted in millions of New Yorkers' minds, young and old, rich and poor, good and bad. For this reason, stories of people struggling upwards in different centuries, with different social issues, were made in New York. The interplay between the real New York City and the mythic New York City is this relationship between the city full of obstacles and the ambitious.

     “Dead End”(1937) by William Wyler is a great example of this interrelationship. The film is about an infamous killer, Martin (Humphrey Bogart), who went back to the slums he was raised in to find his mother and his ex-lover. In the middle of this journey, he met a group of wild and impulsive street kids, Drina (Sylvia Sidney), a kind sister to her younger brother who worried that one day her brother Tommy(Billy Halop) would grow into a gangster like Marin, and Dave(Joel McCrea), Martin’s childhood friend who was at that point a frustrated architect. After failing to reconcile with his mom and former lover, Martin planned to kidnap a rich kid to make his trip worthy and at last, died by the hand of Dave. 

    The film was set in the slums of New York below the Queensboro River. Because of the great view of the east river in this location, luxurious apartments were built one street away from the tenements. This kind of environment represents poverty and also the disparity between high class and low class in 1930s New York when the great depression took place. Many New Yorkers lost their jobs at that time and life was like harder than ever. The same goes for the main character Dave. As a trained architect who studied hard for his career, Martin was not able to find a decent job but painting others' walls. The situation of New York tenements and impoverished life also have been captured well in the film’s pictures. For example, the graffiti on the wall and the dirty looking kids walking in the background. More than that, when rich kid Philip is in his apartment, he is always at the top part of the scene, while the dead end kids are at the bottom. When shooting the rich family, the light is always adequate and white in color while grey is cast on the other side of the street. These emphasize the class difference between the two sides of the dead end. Last but not least, in the last gun fighting scene, we can see that residents were cramming into a small street after they heard of the shooting. The narrowness and messiness of the area were shown by shooting the character Spit failed to escape from the police and instead of lying on the packed bystanders. 

    The location of the story, use of angle and the set designed by the filmmaking team project a real New York City in which the poor are having a miserable life. Inside this NYC, a mythic NYC is constructed by the characters’ actions and beliefs. The script of the film is smartly written to illustrate the perseverance of the main character despite the “situation”. First, there is Drina. Living in this place full of undesirability, Drina’s dream was to escape from the tenements, bring together her brother Tommy, who was already the leader of the street kids there. However, such a considerate character no longer thinks of only the others. “Drina will be alright.” “I’ve heard that since I was ten years old.” “I’m tired of hearing it.” Drina then continued with a fantasy she had since she was a kid. She saw a rich good looking man, who has a house in New York and in the country, falling in love with her. Her words show her eagerness to escape from this area and yearn for a better living quality for herself: Moved into the Dead-end since she was little kid, Drina has never given up the thought of leaving.

    Then there is Dave. From his conversation with Drina, we can see that the frustrated architect started off with an idea: To build a decent world where people could live decently and be decent and to tear all the tenements down. Although he seems to forget this dream and only want to get rid of this place because of his inferiority after meeting his lover Kay, Drina reminded him of it and at last, he did not follow Kay to run away with his rewards but stay with Drina and wait for a chance of a sustainable future.

    Dave and Drina are the ones in the mythic New York who have a dream and also the integrity. There are also people who have only the ambition towards money. Martin, using his own words, was living off of the fat of this land. After coming out of the reform school, he killed 8 men and became a famous and rich mobster. He is doomed to lose the love from his own mother for his wrongdoings. At the same time, what he has done gives Martin the pride to mock Dave of his feeling of abjection. The interesting contrast between Martin and Dave describes a New York City that is full of choices. Growing up in the same neighborhood with the same desire of leaving the tenement, Dave could easily turn into Martin if he chooses to give up his morality. All of the characters above have a goal. It is that little difference in people determines the destiny of the ambitious. The plot of Dead End comprehensively illustrated different meanings of dream and success in this city. And in the end, the smile of Dave and Drina give us the answer to the question: which way of struggling upwards is more favorable?