Trivia: The shortest and most pugnacious of the original Dead End Kids, American actor Leo Gorcey was the son of character player Bernard Gorcey. The elder Gorcey encouraged Leo to audition as one of the tough street gang in the 1935 stage production of Sidney Kingsley's Dead End, which Leo did reluctantly; he was content with his apprentice job at his uncle's plumbing shop. When he temporarily lost that position, Leo was cast in a bit role in Dead End, eventually working his way up to the important part of Spit, the gang stool pigeon. Producer Samuel Goldwyn decided to make Dead End into a movie in 1937, further deciding to hire Leo and his fellow "kids" Billy Halop, Huntz Hall, Gabriel Dell, Bernard Punsley and Bobby Jordan for the movie version. The six streetwise hooligans scored an immediate hit with the public, paving the way for several films starring or featuring "The Dead End Kids", the best of which was Angels With Dirty Faces (1938).In 1939, the kids splintered off into subgroups, some of them heading for Universal Studios as the "Little Tough Guys". The following year, Leo Gorcey was signed by bargain-basement Monogram Pictures for a new series of "B" pictures produced by Sam Katzman--"The East Side Kids". Gorcey assumed the leading role of Muggs McGuiness, and by the time the series had run its course after 22 pictures in 1945, he'd been joined by his old Dead End buddies Huntz Hall, Bobby Jordan and Gabe Dell. Determined to get a bigger piece of the financial pie and to have more say over production, Gorcey and Hall teamed with their agent Jan Grippo to reorganize the East Side Kids as the less scruffy but no less trouble-prone "Bowery Boys". In 1946, the first Bowery Boy picture, Live Wires, was released, launching a lucrative series of low-budget features that lasted for 48 installments. Despite the furious pace of production on those two films series, Gorcey also took on outside acting jobs during the first decade or so of his career -- he turned up in supporting roles of varying sizes in a multitude of movies, including the drama Out Of the Fog, the Nancy Drew-style programmer Down in San Diego (both 1941), the musical Born To Sing (1942), the World War II action film Destroyer (1943), and the comedy So This Is New York (1948), the latter the first movie produced by Stanley Kramer (who would use Gorcey in a bit role in his gargantuan comedy It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World some 15 years later). The Bowery Boys personnel fluctuated in size and prominence over the next twelve years, but Leo Gorcey as malaprop-spouting, two-fisted Slip Mahoney and Huntz Hall as lame-brained Sach Jones were clearly the stars. Gorcey stayed with the series until the 1955 death of his father Bernard, who'd been cast in the supporting role of gullible sweet-shop proprietor Louie Dumbrowski in most of the films. Too grief stricken to continue, Leo bowed out of the series with Crashing Las Vegas (1956), leaving Huntz Hall to co-star in the remaining six "Bowery Boys" films with Stanley Clements. Working in films only fitfully over the next 14 years, Leo was content with managing his land holdings. He also missed the chance for some fresh pop-culture immortality on the original cover of the Beatles' 1967 Sergeant Pepper album -- Gorcey and Huntz Hall were originally depicted side-by-side in the cover design, but Gorcey's insistence upon being paid resulted in his image being airbrushed out. By the time of his death in 1969, Leo Gorcey was financially secure thanks to TV residual payments from his 42 "Bowery Boys" features.

Trivia: Juvenile actor Bobby Jordan worked in radio, industrial films and as a child model before making his Broadway bow at age seven. He attended New York's Professional Children's School, making an excellent impression along with several of his classmates in Sidney Kingsley's 1935 play Dead End. This assignment took Jordan to Hollywood, along with fellow "Dead End Kids" Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Billy Halop, Gabriel Dell and Bernard Punsley. Though he most often appeared on screen with his Dead End companions, Jordan occasionally took a meaty solo supporting role, such as "Douglas Fairbanks Rosenbloom" in the 1938 gangster farce A Slight Case of Murder. Jordan went along for the ride when the Dead End Kids became the East Side Kids at Monogram studios in the early 1940s; in these cheap but endearing films, Jordan usually played the character who got into deep trouble, obliging Gorcey, Hall and the rest of the ever-aging "Kids" to bail him out. He left the East Side aggregation for military service in 1943, returning to the fold in 1946, by which time the group had reinvented himself as the Bowery Boys. Unhappy that his career as a leading man had never truly gained any momentum, Jordan left films in the late 1940s, taking on several odd jobs, ranging from bartender to oil-field worker; he re-emerged on screen as Robert Jordan for a bit in the 1956 western This Man is Armed. The rest of Jordan's life was blighted with marital problems, drunkenness, and continual run-ins with the law. Bobby Jordan died of cirrhosis of the liver at age 42.

Trivia: Donald Haines was eight years old when he joined Hal Roach's "Our Gang" troupe in 1929. Haines appeared in Roach shorts until 1931; one of these was The First Seven Years (1930), in which he fought with Jackie Cooper over the affections of Mary Ann Jackson. The adversarial Haines-Cooper screen relationship would extend over a decade, with Donald and Jackie coming to blows (or threatening to do so) in such features as Skippy (1931), A Feller Needs a Friend (1932) and Seventeen (1940). Haines' other roles of note included Jerry Cruncher Jr. in Tale of Two Cities (1935), Alabama in Boys Town (1938) and Men of Boys Town (1940), and Skinny in six of Monogram's East Side Kids films. Donald Haines died while serving in WW II.

Trivia: The youngest son of actor Bernard Gorcey, David Gorcey reached Broadway at the tender age of 14 when he was cast in Sidney Kingsley's Dead End. During the early stages of production, David secured a role in the play for his older brother Leo. It was Leo who subsequently rose to stardom, while the quieter, self-effacing David seemed content to remain a background player. After making his film debut in 1938, David was cast in Universal's "Little Tough Guys" series, an offshoot of Warners' Dead End Kids films, which of course spotlighted brother Leo. When Leo moved to Monogram's East Side Kids David went along in the featured role of Pee-wee. After serving in the military, David rejoined Leo at Monogram, appearing as Chuck in the Bowery Boys series beginning in 1946. Evidently to avoid accusations of nepotism, David adopted his mother's maiden name of Condon for billing purposes. The younger Gorcey outlasted Leo as a Bowery Boy, remaining with the series until its final entry, 1958's In the Money. During this period, he occasionally accepted minor roles at other studios, usually playing a newsboy (most amusingly in 1950's Abbott and Costello in the Foreign Legion). David Gorcey became a minister after retiring from films, devoting his time and energy to anti-drug programs for LA ghetto youths.

Trivia: A longtime character actor/stuntman/leading man/director, Dave O'Brien (born David Barclay) was born in Big Springs, Texas, and entered movies in the early '30s as a stuntman and occasional character actor -- he is probably best remembered by college students of the late '60s and early '70s for his portrayal of the crazed marijuana smoker in the exploitation film Reefer Madness. During the late '30s and early '40s, O'Brien also played the title role in the serial Captain Midnight, and was the responsible adult in the East Side Kids series, but it was as the lead in MGM's Pete Smith Specialty comedy shorts -- which O'Brien also directed, under his real name David Barclay -- that he was best known to '40s moviegoers. The Pete Smith shorts, which were basically comedic looks at human foibles, took full advantage of O'Brien's background in stunt work, and hold up extremely well today. O'Brien still played occasional lead roles, especially in B-pictures such as The Man Who Walks Alone (1946), an unusual comedy with serious overtones about a veteran returning home from World War II, but by the early '50s had moved into supporting parts, such as that of the stage manager in Kiss Me Kate (1953), directed by his fellow Pete Smith alumnus George Sidney. O'Brien later became a writer for Red Skelton on television.

Trivia: Long after British-born actor Herbert Rawlinson had passed from the scene, film fans who'd grown up in the teens and twenties retained vivid memories of his virile good looks and the solid reliability of his characterizations. A stage veteran, Rawlinson entered films in 1911 with the appropriately titled one-reeler The Novice. Within a few years, he was a major star, specializing in fast-paced detective stories and serials. Somehow it seemed logical for the sartorially splendid, every-hair-in-place Rawlinson to jump from motorcar to streetcar and back again in a chapter-play chase sequence -- yet still retain enough poise to romance the willing heroine a reel or so later. Eclipsed by younger action stars in the '20s, the still-buoyant Rawlinson found himself in minor films and -- briefly -- as a two-reel comedy star in Hal Roach's Slipping Wives (where his thunder was stolen by a pair of supporting players named Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy). Too old to recapture his public when sound came in, Rawlinson nevertheless spoke his lines with relaxed conviction, and came in handy for character roles, often playing the "above suspicion" leading citizen who turned out to be behind a city's criminal activities. In 1937, Rawlinson returned to serials in the title role of Blake of Scotland Yard, which, though hampered by a tiny budget and utter lack of background music, was well cast with several reliable silent film veterans. Herbert Rawlinson remained active in films until 1951; he died of lung cancer in 1953, shortly after (unfortunately) being coaxed out of retirement to appear in the Edward D. Wood turkey Jail Bait (1954).

Trivia: Canadian-born general-purpose actor George Pembroke is perhaps best remembered as Dr. Saunders, the leader of the fifth columnists in Bela Lugosi's Black Dragons (1942) and as the police inspector posing as an art connoisseur in the semi-classic Bluebeard (1944). In Hollywood from 1937, Pembroke made serials somewhat of a specialty, appearing in Drums of Fu Manchu (1940), Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), Perils of Nyoka (1942), Captain Midnight (1942), and Daredevils of the West (1943). He later became a frequent guest star on television's The Lone Ranger and Gene Autry.

Trivia: American actor Dennis Moore made his first stage appearance with a Texas stock company in 1932. If his official bio is to be believed, Moore was 18 at the time, casting some doubt over his claim of having been a commercial pilot before inaugurating his acting career. Whatever the case, it is a matter of record that Moore entered films in 1936 when he was discovered by a Columbia Pictures talent scout. Two years later, he made the first of his many Westerns at Republic Pictures. In his earliest sagebrush appearances, he was a bit player, stunt man, or villain; in 1940, he attained his first cowboy leading role in The Man From Tascosa, though he would continue to take bad-guy parts (notably as a serial killer in the East Side Kids' 1941 feature Spooks Run Wild) even after his good-guy debut. In 1943, Moore joined Ray "Crash" Corrigan and Max Terhune as a member of the Range Busters in the Monogram Western series of the same name. Until his retirement from films in 1957, Moore alternated between Westerns and such serials as The Purple Monster Strikes (1945). Dennis Moore owns the distinction of starring in the last serial ever made by Republic, King of the Carnival (1956), and the last serial ever made in Hollywood, Columbia's Blazing the Overland Trail (1956).

Trivia: One of the busiest directors in the field of low-budget action fare, Canadian-born Robert F. Hill is especially remembered for his contributions to serials. A one-time screen villain and a member of the Edison stock company, Hill later switched to Universal, where he was made a director. Although high-strung and nervous, the gangly Hill possessed the most important qualification for success at Carl Laemmle's San Fernando film factory: an ability to finish a project on time and under budget. By 1925, Hill assumed that he had earned a raise but "Uncle Carl" thought otherwise and the disappointed director bolted to join independent producer C.W. Patton. Their joint venture, the Western serial Idaho (1925), proved a disappointment, however, and despite Laemmle's very vocal doubts, Hill returned to Universal. There was an aborted (and frankly bizarre) attempt to produce Universal films in Japan, after which Hill returned to the serial and Western grind for good. He remained with Universal until 1940 when a new regime at the studio practically forced him to retire. The prolific Hill returned instead to Poverty Row, where he became an actor for hire and wrote screenplays under the name Rock Hawkey. A true screen veteran, Robert F. Hill retired in the mid-'50s.

Trivia: Veteran American character actor Forrest Taylor is reputed to have launched his film career in 1915. His screen roles in both the silent and sound era seldom had any consistency of size; he was apt to show up in a meaty character part one week, a seconds-lasting bit part the next. With his banker's moustache and brusque attitude, Taylor was most often cast as a businessman or a lawyer, sometimes on the shadier side of the law. Throughout his 40 year film career, Taylor was perhaps most active in westerns, appearing in such programmers as Headin' For the Rio Grande and Painted Trail. From 1952 through 1954, Forrest Taylor costarred as Grandpa Fisher on the religious TV series This is the Life.