Best movies like Wild Boys of the Road

The role of African Americans in the recovery years of the Great Depression is the subject of this informational short, which offers an idealized depiction of life in a segregated society. The highlight, by far, is rare footage of Orson Welles’s “Voodoo Macbeth,” produced in 1935 for the New York Negro Unit of the WPA’s Federal Theatre Project.

Three brothers - Marshall, Marty and Mark dream of becoming naturalists and portraying animal life of America. One summer their dream comes true, they travel through America, filming alligators, bears and moose.

America is in the depths of the Great Depression. Families drift apart when faraway jobs beckon. A courageous young girl confronts overwhelming odds when she embarks on a cross-country search for her father. During her odyssey, she forms a close bond with two diverse traveling companions: a magnificent, protective wolf, and a hardened drifter.

Penny helps her idealistic architect father get his dream of a slum clearance project; The little miss dances with Corporal Jones.

Chick Hewes is released from prison and finds work as an accountant. Two years later, Chick's crooked friend, Benny LaMarr, to whom he is indebted for past kindnesses, steals a diamond necklace from the home safe of the district attorney. When the district attorney threatens to accuse the police of inefficiency in crime fighting, Garvey, who is campaigning for the office of police commissioner, promises to catch the thief in twenty-four hours.

An African-American man working at a slaughterhouse in the Watts area of Los Angeles leads a dissatisfied and listless existence.

Based on the Depression-era bildungsroman memoir of writer A. E. Hotchner, the film follows the story of a boy struggling to survive on his own in a hotel in St. Louis after his mother is committed to a sanatorium with tuberculosis. His father, a German immigrant and traveling salesman working for the Hamilton Watch Company, is off on long trips from which the boy cannot be certain he will return.

The Great Depression hits home for nine year old Kit Kittredge when her dad loses his business and leaves to find work. Oscar nominee Abigail Breslin stars as Kit, leading a splendid cast in the first ever "American Girl" theatrical movie. In order to keep their home, Kit and her mother must take in boarders - paying house - guests who turn out to be full of fascinating stories. When mother's lockbox containing all their money is stolen, Kit's new hobo friend Will is the prime suspect. Kit refuses to believe that Will would steal, and her efforts to sniff out the real story get her and friends into big trouble. The police say the robbery was an inside job, committed by someone they know. So if it wasn't Will, then who did it.

After the birth of his first child, Roberto, a young Mexican man, slips across the border into the United States. Seeking work to support his family back home, he finds that working hard is not enough.

Danny Stein, a high school senior at the bottom of the social food chain, needs a prom date. As a cause of anxiety for Danny, Bart Beeber, the nerdiest guy in school, has already found a date. At the same time, Danny's divorced parents are both looking for relationships again.

Head railroad man Dan is as ugly as he is honorable. When he spots a drifter who'd hopped a freight held up by a landslide, Dan offers the man a job; then he finds the man was a railroader, too, and takes him under his wing. Engaged to Mary, Dan doesn't notice the growing attraction between his protégé and his intended but focuses instead on running the railroad.

In the Deep South, a serial-killing preacher hunts two young children who know the whereabouts of a stash of money.

With the coming of summer, three high school buddies--Kenny Leeds, Mike Decker, and Tommy Kingsley--anticipate their initiation into the pleasures of manhood. But Kenny is separated from his friends and sent to stay with his grandparents in Buffalo while his father, a widowed salesman, leaves on a business trip with his secretary-fiancée. Bored and alone in a strange city, Kenny writes his two friends letters about his adventures at "Rosie's," a fictitious brothel across the Canadian border in Niagara Falls. His lie quickly backfires.

Strange noises from the apartment next door wake up Tommy, and one morning his mattress has been dragged to the shared wall. Soon he must confront his father's disturbing behaviour while battling an unseen force raging next door.

The Tramp struggles to live in modern industrial society with the help of a young homeless woman.

Successful movie director John L. Sullivan, convinced he won't be able to film his ambitious masterpiece until he has suffered, dons a hobo disguise and sets off on a journey, aiming to "know trouble" first-hand. When all he finds is a train ride back to Hollywood and a beautiful blonde companion, he redoubles his efforts, managing to land himself in more trouble than he bargained for when he loses his memory and ends up a prisoner on a chain gang.

A middle aged carpenter, who requires state welfare after injuring himself, is joined by a single mother in a similar scenario.

A 10-year-old child prodigy cartographer secretly leaves his family's ranch in Montana where he lives with his cowboy father and scientist mother and travels across the country on board a freight train to receive an award at the Smithsonian Institute.

The oldest son of a loving and strong family of black sharecroppers comes of age in the Depression-era South after his father is imprisoned for stealing food.

Orphan prodigy singer runs away from her oppressive aunt and tricks a rural couple into adopting her.

An unemployed man turns to crime when he gets his girlfriend pregnant.

A 17-year-old girl runs away from her east coast home, going west to Los Angeles to meet her biological father. She has learned from letters her mother kept that he was tragically separated from her before the girl's birth. On the road, she is protected and befriended by an independent-minded young drifter who helps her on her journey.

Maisie becomes attached to a dirt-poor farmer and his family as they try to make ends meet joining hundreds of others digging for gold in a previously panned-out ghost town.

All set to graduate from high school , Andy Hardy flunks his English exam -- in spite of the fact that Aunt Milly is his teacher, and that the Judge has gone to all the trouble of getting him his very own private secretary.

The Millionaire Kid is young Tommy Neville whose wealthy parents, Thomas and Gloria Neville are preparing to fight it out in divorce court.Tommy runs away from home. The private detective assigned to watch him tells Mrs. Neville he has been kidnapped. She immediately suspects her husband. Meanwhile, Tommy is selling newspapers in another city. He is attacked by a bully, and is rescued by gangster Terry Mallon and his daughter Kitty. Unaware of his identity, they take him to their beach home. Reporter Breezy Benson is sent to interview Mrs. Neville about the divorce, and is fired when she won't talk to him. He meets Kitty at the beach and is intrigued by her. He meets her father, who is curious but not suspicious as news of the alleged kidnapping has not been reported.

Moe, Rose and Lee Baumler are members of an upper class family who find the world completely changed when they lose everything in the stock market crash of 1929. Lee, a college-age young man, who now faces no possibility of entering college, decides to go on the road to see what is happening to the rest of the country.

It's Christmas Eve, early 1930s on Walton's Mountain. As the family prepares for the holiday, they anxiously await Pa's return home from his job in the city some 50 miles away. He is late, and Ma and the grandparents hear on the radio a report of a bus accident that worries them. Oldest son John-Boy must step up to help grandfather cut down a Christmas tree, and upon learning the concern about Daddy sets out to find him.

Booky does everything she can to make an enjoyable Christmas, for her family, during the depression as her father is out of work.

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.

Spanky and Porky try to figure out a way to get their mother a winter coat for Christmas after she buys them a Blue Comet electric train.

When Mark 'High Gear' Sherrod (Murray) looses his nerve, the race car driver takes a job driving a taxi, but when he befriends a cute reporter and the young handicapped son of a deceased driver, he attempts to return to the track.

Fate brings a job at Boulder Dam and romance with a saloon singer into the life of a young man on the run.

Social drama of Depression-era homeless children who turn to crime and are sentenced by a judge to a rehabilitation "labor camp".

A story of the great-depression era about women hobos, tramps, job-seekers, fugitives and runaways running from or toward something as they hitch-hiked their way across the United States, dodging the police, do-gooders, lustful men and pursuing-husbands in a bad mood. One of them is a killer, another is a girl hitch-hiking to her wedding in order to afford a wedding gown, and there is also the Governor's daughter who crusades on their behalf, while hitch-hiking along with them.

A former Imperial Russian general and cousin of the Czar ends up in Hollywood as an extra in a movie directed by a former revolutionary.