Wallace Fox was a prolific film director, having made eighty-four films in the space of only twenty-six years (1927–1953). Fox directed a wide range of B-movies, as this volume explores, but one of his most distinctive achievements was the East Side Kids (ESK) series, which I believe is a more complex accomplishment than is sometimes acknowledged. It depicts Fox’s representation of the boys of the bowery as somewhat charming depictions of juvenile delinquents and their daily encounters with the community, the police (who are dominant across the ESK series in maintaining social and cultural order) and, of course, their interactions with one another, which lead to interconnected, symbiotic narratives of social critique and entertainment value. As I. C. Jarvie argues, “The cinema is both a social and an aesthetic occasion, and these two aspects are intertwined since its social character may (affect) art; and its artistic effects may (affect) society.” Hence the essential bond between social structure(s) and aesthetic effects in creative film, especially cinema that explicitly examines popular culture as its subject matter. Entertainment is clearly a dominant purpose of these films, yet not all of them derive from an exact generic formula and, I would suggest, there are a range of social issues woven into the fabric of the films. Is social and legal reconciliation at film’s end a goal or an inevitable by-product in the adjudication of these comedies? I do not believe that there is a simple assessment at hand, but I do think that there are strategic social purposes in play in these fine films. What holds the films together, individually and collectively, is the systematic integration of bathos and pathos as alternating, pulsating forces of energy that nourish narratives and serve as integral principles informing the ESK enterprise.

ESK was one of many films series to come out of Poverty Row, all of which worked with tiny budgets and very short shooting schedules, sometimes less than a week from beginning to end. It should be no surprise that plots are relatively simple with little explicit nuance. My goal is to briefly explore four ESK films: Bowery Blitzkrieg (1941, hereafter BB), Let’s Get Tough! (1942, hereafter LGT), Smart Alecks (1942, hereafter SA), and ‘Neath Brooklyn Bridge (1942, hereafter NBB).