THE DOG STAR

The deadend kid, in a current portrait, this tells of Blackie Pride, fifteen as he runs away from a County Farm School to Atlanta after the suicide of his friend, Whitey. In his adulation and emulation of Whitey, Blackie buys himself a black shirt (in mourning), is secretive in his search for cheap and easy sensations, solitary in his activities from which he excludes his old friends, Dusty and Hatchet. He has an affair with Mabel, whose husband has left her, but is soon disgusted with her coarseness, her submissiveness; he informs on Dusty and Hatchet, in an attempt to raise ten dollars, and he fails; and at the close he makes a final show of contempt and power in the suicide which is derivative, imitative... The distortion of a delinquent who alternates between conceit and self-pity, who is driven towards self-destruction in a final gesture of indifference, this has certain graphic, genuine values, but is not for entertainment.