Movie Quote of the Day (The Bowery Boys’ ‘Slip’ Mahoney, With One of Many Contributions to the English Language)

Terence Aloysius “Slip” Mahoney [played by Leo Gorcey] [hanging by his fingernails off the edge of a high New York building, with sidekick “Sach” Jones]: “This is what I call a serious dillemania.”— Bowery to Bagdad (1954), story by Elwood Ullman and Edward Bernds, directed by Edward Bernds

As a child nearly 60 years ago, I seldom missed a chance to see on Saturdays on local station Channel 5 a seemingly inexhaustible set of serials produced over 20 years, featuring the kind of young New York roughnecks my family had left behind in our movie to New Jersey.

This Thursday, as part of its “Summer Under the Stars” festival, TCM will devote 24 hours of its schedule to Leo Gorcey (1913-1969), the center of the group of actors who, whether known as the Dead End Kids, the East Side Kids, or, as I came to know them, the Bowery Boys, appeared in 69 movies.

The Dead End Kids took their name from the stage and film in which they first featured as supporting players, Sidney Kingsley’s drama Dead End. The playwright furnished them with material about as funny as a heart attack.

From A list dramas at Warner Brothers, the Dead End Kids morphed into B-list comedies cranked out under the Poverty Row studio Monogram Pictures (later, Allied Artists Pictures Corp.) umbrella. No matter what the nature of the material, though, audiences were always wondering what the increasingly aging “youngsters” in these flicks would be up to next.

Whenever I watched these slapstick adventures that started in Louie Dumbrowski’s soda shop before radiating out to who knows what in interchangeable, forgettable plots (featuring boxers, gangsters, ghosts—even, as in Bowery to Bagdad, a genie), I chuckled at the stratagems the gang would use to get out of their latest mess—“Routine…,” followed by a number, as if it came from a playbook.

Channel surfing several months ago, however, when I came upon this late entry in the series, I was reminded of how inventively Gorcey’s ringleader, Slip Mahoney, could fracture the English language. Evidently, the actor took special care in crafting these malapropisms.

Offscreen, and especially after the death of his father Bernard (who played Louie) in 1955, Gorcey’s life was anything but funny: married five times, dead in 1969 at age 51 from liver failure –a consequence of years of heavy drinking.