The Open Road: Wild Boys of the Road (35mm)

About this event

Opens November 16, 2026

“Police Alarmed at Increase of Wild Boys of the Road: Seek Solution to Problem of Homeless Waifs”

Faced with the realization that their middle-class folks do not have enough money to feed them, buddies Tommy and Edie decide that the best course to alleviate that burden is to do what an estimated 250,000 other American teens did during the height of the Great Depression: live on the road and criss-cross the country on freight trains. Riding the rails from city to city through the Midwest to the east coast, the pair have their newfound sense of freedom challenged as they face the desperation, poverty and exploitation lost orphans experience in the slums. Despite the ever present railway detectives, the wild boys find solidarity amongst each other and turn a hobo camp into a mini society. In many respects the archetypal filmmaker of the pre-Code era, “Wild Bill” Wellmann’s features in the early ‘30s packed a gritty punch of hard edged social realism, an unflinching look at the traumas of the era.

35mm print courtesy of the Library of Congress