One reason I love Infoeditor's weekend movie posts is to discover the YouTube channels from which they come. In this case I found the very cool channel:

The Video Cellar
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBhskwCpv4Df8-xC8_wGxzA

There is tons of old-time stuff here, and it is very nicely organized into playlists. Here is the playlists page:

Created playlists
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheVideoCellar/playlists

One list that caught my eye was the list called "East Side Kids/Bowery Boys/Dead End Kids"
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0Vnsg6OVjqQUhiv8I9U0-R1HGqg58J0l

I remember these films fondly from childhood, watching them in the 50s on our new TV. Those were the days when local channels, needing way more content than they could create, turned to Hollywood movies of the previous decades (30s and 40s) and we 3 brothers devoured them hungrily. As kids, we liked watching any movies with kids, such as The Dead End Kids, East Side Kids, and later The Bowery Boys.

Here's a random choice I am watching today:

BOYS OF THE CITY (1940) The East Side Kids - Leo Gorcey - Bobby Jordan

http://youtu.be/_jmQouf3D_4?list=PL0Vnsg6OVjqQUhiv8I9U0-R1HGqg58J0l

The rest of the list can be accessed by clicking the upper left list icon.

It all started with a New York play called "Dead End" in 1937.

"When Samuel Goldwyn turned the play "Dead End" into a 1937 film, he recruited the original tough-talking kids from the play (Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Bobby Jordan, Gabriel Dell, Billy Halop, and Bernard Punsly) to repeat their roles in the film. This led to the making of six other films starring The Dead End Kids. The most successful of these features were Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart, and They Made Me a Criminal (1939), starring John Garfield. Universal offered a competing series, under the Little Tough Guys brand name, featuring most of the same kids."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Side_Kids#History