Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's reward for Oscar-nominated child star Jackie Cooper, who had brought the studio prestige and profit with his films The Champ (1931), The Bowery (1933), and Treasure Island (1934), was to cut the actor loose once he had hit his awkward teenage years. Floating from studio to studio in search of work, Cooper landed at Poverty Row's Monogram Pictures, where he took the lead in Boy of the Streets (1937), the studio's answer to Warner Brothers' socially conscious ghetto drama Dead End (1937). At the time Monogram's most expensive production, Boy of the Streets attends the plight of the children of immigrants crammed together in a New York slum and of progressive efforts to improve their situation. Dead End alumna Marjorie Main costars as Cooper's bone-weary mother (the actress would later inherit Cooper's former costar, Wallace Beery, at Metro) while Island of Lost Souls' "Panther Woman" Kathleen Burke appears as an heiress turned slumlord, and future cowboy actor Bill Elliott (still billed as Gordon Elliott) plays a reform-minded physician. The film's success in 1937 earned Cooper a contract with Monogram, and he and director William Nigh reteamed a few years later for Where Are Your Children? (1943), which focuses on juvenile delinquency among suburban kids during World War II. In both films, Cooper's respite from city life is to join the Navy, which the actor did after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. Cooper saw action in the South Pacific and remained in the Navy Reserve until in 1982, rising to the rank of captain.

By Richard Harland Smith