The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

89. 1937 - Dead End

Dead End 1937
United Artists

Honourable Mentions: Angel, La Grande Illusion, You Only Live Once

Most noteworthy today for a supporting turn from a pre-breakout Humphrey Bogart, William Wyler's Dead End is a proto gangster drama rooted in the zeitgeist of the Great Depression and the jarring polarity of New York City's economic composition. It's a film where the extremes of the Depression are rendered in close proximity, compacted together in a story of generational struggle and violence, with Bogey playing the role of a vicious gangster rejected by the community he once called home.

More than just a showcase of the persona that catapulted Bogart to Hollywood stardom, Dead End also exemplifies the technical brilliance of one of the greatest directors of Hollywood's Golden Age. Wyler's legacy would be cemented with his valuable wartime works and with post-war epics like The Big Country and Ben-Hur, but Dead End illustrates his versatile strengths in full clarity.

 
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WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.