One of the five Dead End Kids and, for years, the one standing slightly to the side of the gang. The work Dell valued came later, after he went back to New York to learn a job he had fallen into as a boy.
Fi1m perspective
In Dead End (1937) Gabriel Dell is T. B., one of five boys who came across from the Broadway production with the parts still in their mouths. Gregg Toland looks down at them from the terrace of the rich block as they splash in the river and up at them from the pavement when they crowd the doorman, and they play as a single loud creature, all elbows and slang. We liked them and we were never once afraid of them. The story wants us to see Bogart's Martin in these kids twenty years early; what we saw was five talented boys showing off for a camera, and the menace stayed with Bogart, who cannot be in every scene.
That was the problem with the whole cycle, and Dell lived with it longer than most. He was Pasty in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) opposite Cagney, T. B. again in They Made Me a Criminal (1939) with John Garfield, and then a fixture of the East Side Kids and Bowery Boys pictures until 1950. Even inside the gang he stood a little outside it, cast as the reporter, the cop or the reformed gangster rather than one of the core members, the boy who seemed to have wandered in from a different film. He said himself that the Bowery Boys films got worse one after another, and he was not being modest.
What he did next is the interesting part, and most of it happened where a camera could not see. He left the series for Broadway, worked a nightclub act with Huntz Hall, and put in three years at the Actors Studio. His own account is the best line in his story: "Suddenly it hit me that I was a primitive, an actor by accident. I decided to go back to New York to study with Lee Strasberg." A boy who had been handed a part in 1935 went back to find out what acting was, and by his own reckoning the answer arrived in 1964, as Sidney Brustein in The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window, the stage lead he regarded as a turning point.
The screen kept only pieces of that man. He was a regular on The Steve Allen Show and turned up in guest parts for decades, among them Chester in The Fugitive, where he does the work and we did not especially notice him, which in a series built around David Janssen's tired hero is not a complaint. Framed (1975), in which he plays a hit man, is the later film most often mentioned as his strongest character work, and it is the one to look for if you want to see what the studying bought.
The oddity of Dell is that the work most people will ever see of him is the work he thought least of. Watch Dead End for Toland's street and for Bogart, and then watch T. B. again knowing that one of those boys in the water would spend the next thirty years trying to become an actor on purpose.
Biography
Gabriel Dell (born Gabriel Marcel Dell Vecchio) was an American actor. Born in New York City on 8 October 1919, he began his career as one of the original Dead End Kids in the 1935 Broadway play Dead End and its 1937 film adaptation. He appeared in further films with the group under names including the East Side Kids and the Bowery Boys, as well as other features such as Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and Earthquake (1974).
Dell worked extensively in television during the 1960s and 1970s, with guest roles including Chester in The Fugitive (1963), Arvel in I Dream of Jeannie (1965), and appearances in Mannix, McCloud, Sanford and Son and Barney Miller. He also performed on Broadway in productions such as The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (1964). He died of leukaemia in North Hollywood, California, on 3 July 1988, aged 68.
