Wild Boys of the Road, Wellman's seventh directorial release of 1933, is the only well-known title in the set, and is the source of the quote at the top of this review. It's the Killer App of Depression-Era social outrage and every bit the unforgettable experience promised in its trailer. Hundreds of thousands of American youths are being cast out onto the roads, leaving behind families that cannot feed them.

Young teens Eddie Smith and Tommy Gordon (Frankie Darro and Edwin Phillips) are best friends suffering cash-flow problems that get them ejected from a school dance. Tommy's mother has been drawing food from the Community Chest for a month, and Eddie comes home to find that his father has lost his job. The bank soon threatens to take their home. Eddie sells his nearly worthless wreck of a car (he throws an anchor out to serve as a parking brake), gives the money to his father, and with Tommy catches a freight train in hopes of finding work. They join hordes of boys forced into the same life. They meet Sally (Dorothy Coonan), a girl passing as a boy who's going to an aunt in Chicago. The aunt (Minna Gombell) turns out to be running a brothel and the kids barely escape a police raid.

Things get more desperate back on the railroad, where they're beaten and terrorized by railroad deputies. One young girl is raped by a railroad brakeman (Ward Bond, boo-hiss). That's when an old hobo asks the kids why they're running: ten or so railroad bulls can't do much against an army. The boys band together to fight back, and establish a squatters camp in a town until the cops bring out firemen with high-pressure water hoses. Eddie, Tom and Grace finally make it to the city, only to run afoul of crooks eager to trick naïve country hicks into committing crimes.

Wild Boys of the Road is perhaps the strongest scream of protest to come out of Hollywood in the Depression years. While other studios concentrated on escapist romances with exotic movie stars, Warners made a film where ordinary kids must leave their families, battle the authorities and risk their lives. Wellman stages a traumatic scene where a boy is run over by train; the frantic Eddie is apprehended by New York cops in front of a movie screen playing Footlight Parade.

The cast provides earnest, somewhat sentimentalized performances. The picture of Tom and Eddie's hometown is a grim version of an Andy Hardy movie -- the boys must steal gasoline to drive their girlfriends home, and Eddie's dad (Grant Mitchell) takes on a grim stare when he realizes that his chances of supporting his family are next to none. Sterling Holloway is effective as one of the kids on the run. Wellman concentrates on shots of kids hopping freight cars and performing risky moving-train stunts.

For the freckled, spirited Sally, Wellman cast Dorothy Coonan, a Busby Berkeley showgirl who wouldn't date him until his previous divorce (from this third wife) was final. They soon married, had seven children and stayed together until Wellman's death 41 years later.

With the enforcement of the Production Code, major studios ceased distributing Pre-Codes with politically "dangerous" content like Wild Boys of the Road, leaving the playing field to apolitical pictures that for the most part endorsed the status quo. In the few cases where controversial material was even considered, even Warner Bros. pictures tended toward caution. The general reputation of Pre-Code films doesn't account for the fact that Code effectively ended the studios' ability to make any film with a serious adult theme.