The lives of a young man and woman, an infamous gangster and a group of street kids converge one day in a volatile New York City slum.

A tough street kid attempts to rob a post office and is caught. In order to avoid reform school, he takes a job as a messenger with the post office. He finds that he likes it, and when his brother is released from prison, attempts to help his brother go straight. However, the two of them get mixed up with a local gangster, who has plans to start robbing post office branches and using the messenger and his brother to do it.

Childhood chums Rocky Sullivan and Jerry Connelly grow up on opposite sides of the fence: Rocky matures into a prominent gangster, while Jerry becomes a priest, tending to the needs of his old tenement neighborhood.

A gang of tough street kids decide to go straight and get jobs in order to free draft-age men for the war effort. However, because of their past tangles with the law, they can't find anybody who'll hire them. Finally one of them gets a job at the department store where his sister works, but runs afoul of a store executive who is in league with a ring of hijackers.

The 'Dead End Kids & Little Tough Guys' are working as collectors for a finance company, when they discover the company's illegal activities and try to stop them.

A boxer flees, believing he has committed a murder while he was drunk.

A bunch of waterfront youths pursue the Sea Raiders, a gang of saboteurs.

Dead End Kids epic. The boys want desperately to fly, and get mixed up with crooked crop dusters, whose planes are flying deathtraps.

Steve Bell, Tommy, Pig, Ape, and String are run of town. Steve, while hopping a freight card and trying to avoid the brakeman, is killed. The boys meet Steve's mother, Alice Bell and Tommy is given a job in the storage garage which she owns jointly with Mack Steward. Steve's brother Don Bell is working with some gangsters by tipping them off on valuable merchandise that can be hijacked. Pig, Ape and String overhear Don's plans to use Tommy as the fall guy in the next hijacking.

In the slums, teenager Frankie Warren hangs out with a rowdy gang who one day knock him out in a fight. In court, the boys refuse to reveal who struck the knockout blow, and all are subsequently sentenced to a reformatory, cruelly run by two corrupt guards. New deputy commissioner Mark Braden arrives determined to change things, but despite the help of Frankie's sister, Mark's reform plans -- and Frankie's future -- may be sabotaged from within.

A young man just released from a reformatory moves to a new neighborhood with his sister, intending to start a new life. However, he gets mixed up with the local mob boss and corrupt politicians and soon finds himself being framed for an arson and murder he didn't commit.

The Dead End Kids are out of the slums of New York's East Side and running around the sunny valleys of California looking for a way to make a quick buck. The idea of working never enters their minds until Halop is egged on by Grey to show his capabilities. Before long, he and Hall are working on the ranch of Galli, an elderly Italian woman who treats her workers like human beings instead of animals. Galli's son disappeared as an infant, and Halop tries to convince her that he is that long lost son, thus possibly sharing in her wealth. Galli is such a good person that Halop is soon motivated by respect instead of greed, so he devises a plan to help her when truckers and a labor organization band together to keep her crops from making it to market.