At heart -- and you will not need to probe deep to find that body part -- this account of the hardships and humiliations of growing up poor in St. Louis during the Great Depression is conventional, unadventurous, conservatively "well-made," a period piece of fussy and impeccable production, with an almost acrophobically uplifting ending -- in fact a whole series of upward lifts that finish at skyscraper specifications. The episodic narrative spends a lot of time making the rounds of odd and interesting characters (the menacing, matchstick-chewing bellhop, the Dead End Kid who knows the ropes, the epileptic girl down the hall, the bibulous white-suited gent straight across it, et al.), moving in an ever-widening orbit, desultorily staking out its territory, before finally settling into something more sustained and compelling, when the resourceful and resilient little hero is left entirely to his own devices, having been abandoned by the rest of his family (a younger brother farmed out to relatives, a sickly mother confined to the sanitarium, a father taken out of town on business), and has to hole up in his hotel room to forestall eviction. Ultimately, and as a measure of its directness and simplicity, the movie lives or dies on the likability of its thirteen-year-old star, Jesse Bradford. He, with the air of a bluffer who fully expects to get called on it, and more likely sooner than later, keeps it warmly alive. Based on the autobiographical novel by A.E. Hotchner; directed by Steven Soderbergh. (1993) — Duncan Shepherd
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