ABSTRACT
Any politician who wants to remain in office must proclaim that "the family is the foundation, or the building block of American society." The family is so pervasive a social institution that even in films that seemingly have little or nothing to do with it, the absence, particularly of parents, is often conspicuous. In the American context, the family has played an important role in terms of the acculturation of immigrant populations into the mainstream of the society. The antics of Andy's urban counterparts portrayed in Dead End, while perhaps tame by present-day standards of juvenile misbehavior, presented a marked contrast with family life in Carvel. The family was characterized as a retreat from an urban world of chaos and conflict. While a family-like social structure appears to have predated the city for a great period of time, the emergence of urbanization began to alter its form and relationships.
