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William Wyler’s Dead End made its screen debut on Aug. 27, 1937. The film adaptation of Sidney Kingsley’s Broadway play starred Sylvia Sidney and Joel McCrea, and featured Humphrey Bogart in third billing. But the movie was stolen from them all by a gang of upstart juvenile delinquents, who nicked audience attention like a fancy watch mugged off a clueless rich brat.

Billy Halop, Huntz Hall, Gabe Dell, Bobby Jordan, Bernard Punsly, and Leo Gorcey were the original teen menaces who terrorized theatergoers when the play opened on Oct. 28, 1935. Directed by the playwright, Dead End ran for 684 performances, and is still the longest-running play in the Belasco Theater’s history. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt saw it three times.

Nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture, Dead End isn’t the greatest gangster movie of all time. It followed the classic era of the genre; it was produced by Samuel Goldwyn for MGM studios,...

When I first walked out of The Many Saints of Newark, my initial reaction was to call it a B-movie. What I didn’t say at the time, however, was how much I love B-movies. While I saw the flaws in the film and couldn’t wholly endorse it to cinemagoers spoiled by the perfection of The Godfather, Goodfellas, and New Jack City, I can wholeheartedly recommend it to people like me. Those who appreciate the low-budget gangster movies sometimes because of their warts. A majority of fans of The Sopranos will have the same reaction: Meh, The Many Saints of Newark could have been better. So when’s it playing next? I plan to see it again, more than once, on the big screen.

In one of the film’s quieter moments, the Soprano family is gathered around a TV set, watching the classic Key Largo (1948). The specific scene...

Ken Kercheval, the actor who played oil tycoon Cliff Barnes on CBS’ long-running primetime soap opera “Dallas,” has died at 83.

Kercheval died Sunday night, but the family is not sharing any more details at this time, a person with knowledge of the situation confirmed to TheWrap. The Daily Clintonian, the local newspaper of Kercheval’s hometown of Clinton, Indiana, reported that he passed away Sunday evening.

He was in his hometown of Clinton, Indiana at the time of his death. A private burial will be held for family and friends, his talent agent, Jeff Fisher, told TheWrap.

Kercheval was one of only two cast members to appear on “Dallas” for its entire run, in a total of 342 episodes from 1978 to 1991. The other was Larry Hagman, who played his character Cliff’s archnemesis J.R. Ewing. Kercheval also directed a few episodes of the original series, before returning to play Cliff...

On Monday, March 18, Dgf hosted a Salon at the Lambs Club where they presented actress Judith Light and playwright Tony Kushner with the Dgf Madge Evans amp Sidney Kingsley Awards. Former Dgf Fellow, Oliver Houser, was also presented with the inaugural Dgf Stephen Schwartz Award. The evening featured performances by Michael R. Jackson, James Jackson Jr., Sean Patrick Cameron, and Oliver Houser, and remarks by Jordan Roth, Jon Robin Baitz, and Stephen Schwartz.

Actress Lydia Clarke Heston, who was married to late Oscar winner Charlton Heston for 64 years, died Monday. She was 95.

Clarke Heston was known for her roles in Sidney Kingsley’s Detective Story on Broadway, which opened in 1949; her first feature, Atomic City, opposite Gene Barry; and The Greatest Show on Earth, which premiered in 1952 and also starred her husband.

Hailing from Wisconsin, Clarke Heston met Charlton in an acting class at Northwestern University. They married in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1944, before he went overseas to serve in World War II.

In the mid-50s, the mother of two left acting...

During the Great Depression a number of rich New Yorkers gentrified parts of the East River, displacing several slums in the name of a waterway vista in their high-rises. Sidney Kingsley’s original 1935 play of Dead End mashed the actual dead end community of Manhattan’s East 53rd Street with the luxury River House of East 52nd to bring to light the human tensions in advanced capitalism. After a private street exit closes (likely due to the sort of construction that comes with neighborhood renovation), the dressy rich must walk through immigrant-heavy back streets when traveling. With the distance between these communities closing, internal aggravation among the play’s riverside ruffians, the Dead End Kids (later bought by Samuel Goldwyn and eventually renamed the Bowery Boys), turns into physical violence.It’s material that could be ripe for Marxist interpretation, but Kingsley’s play acts as more noblesse oblige social concern more than flip-the-system call-to-action.

★★★★☆ Much like Tony Stark, Marvel Studios have been tinkering with Iron Man for over five years now, striving to upgrade and improve upon the previous model. In some ways, the success rate of the franchise mirrors Stark's own cinematic journey. The first Iron Man (2008) was an unexpected hit, delighting cinemagoers whilst sowing the seeds for Marvel's 'Phase One'. Iron Man 2 (2010) saw both protag and film succumb to expectation, whilst Avengers Assemble (2012) took the character's popularity to new heights. Enter Shane Black's Iron Man 3 (2013) - a fun, action-packed superhero yarn that's arguably Marvel's best solo instalment to date.

Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is struggling to adapt to life after the game-changing events of Joss Whedon's Avengers Assemble. Unable to sleep and prone to anxiety attacks, his increasingly alarming behaviour is beginning to concern his best pal Rhodey (Don Cheadle) and taint his relationship with girlfriend Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). However,...

The Dramatists Guild Fund has announced this year's Madge Evans and Sidney Kingsley Award to actress Linda Lavin and playwright Lynn Nottage. The awards will be presented by Dramatists Guild Fund Board Member Terrence McNally on Monday, February 25, 2013 at an intimate salon with award-winning composer Charles Strouse. The event will also include remarks by Jeffrey Lyons, godson of Sidney Kingsley, and will be held at the home of lyricist and playwright Gretchen Cryer.

Sidney Lumet was an impassioned director who received more than 50 Oscar nominations for films including 12 Angry Men and Dog Day Afternoon

Sidney Lumet, who died yesterday at the age of 86, was one of the most significant film directors of his time, a man dedicated to the cinema as an art form and to the pursuit of truth and social justice as a dramatic theme.

He was born in Philadelphia and raised in New York, the son of parents who worked in the Yiddish theatre. He was shaped by his experiences as a child performer and the depression, becoming known for his sympathetic handling of actors, his understanding of people in crisis, his liberal principles and his feeling for the city that was the setting for so much of his work.

Lumet made his Broadway debut at the age of 11 in 1935 in Sidney Kingsley's Dead End, a social-problem play about...

Hollywood fashion critic Mr. Blackwell has died at the age of 86.

The inventor of the famed Worst Dressed List passed away on Sunday after suffering complications from an intestinal infection, according to his publicist Harlan Boll.

His death comes more than two months after he collapsed at his Los Angeles home in August and fell into a coma. He regained consciousness a few days later and was put on antibiotics to treat an unspecified illness.

The star - real name Richard Sylvan Seltzer - began his career as an actor in the 1930s and appeared in the original 1935 Broadway production of Sidney Kingsley's Dead End.

He spent some time as a Hollywood agent before discovering his eye for fashion and becoming a designer in the 1950s.

His moniker Mr. Blackwell came about when his clothing line was launched in the late 1950s, and he went on to make a name for himself by styling clients including former First Lady Nancy Reagan in his House of Blackwell creations.

The brand folded in the 1980s and Blackwell turned his hand to being a TV and radio personality before becoming a fashion journalist. He produced articles for America's The Globe tabloid and had various articles featured in newspapers and lifestyle magazines across the country.

But it was his Worst Dressed List that he became most noted for, and his scathing reviews have been published every year since its inception in 1960.

In his latter years, Blackwell suffered from ill health and was diagnosed with Bell's palsy in 2001.

He is survived by his longterm partner Robert Spencer.

When Lee Strasberg directed the Group Theatre's premiere of Sidney Kingsley's "Crisis" (better known as "Men in White"), he took the cast to a hospital to talk to doctors and nurses and rehearsed the operating-room choreography more than 100 times in three months. The actors practiced their operating-room moves on their own every morning in pantomime, and those playing doctors kept stethoscopes in their pockets.

Today's TV doctors and nurses are even more rigorous: They have to know lots of procedures and terminology -- and make the fake look real for the camera. It's not just an acting challenge; it may also change your mindset about the medical profession.

On the set, medical advisers are always present, and on some shows real nurses work as extras. Actors also get training after they're hired. For example, when Yvette Freeman was cast as a nurse on "ER," she shadowed some nurses at a Los Angeles hospital. They taught her how to use the various machines and do basic things like wrap bandages and put on surgical gloves quickly. "In real life you have time, but on TV you have to do it in seconds," Freeman says.