ill), but they also suffer from a succession of bad luck – as Gwen’s rather aimless narrative clearly shows. Gwen has to be punished (she is sentenced to fifteen years), but Lyla appears to be saved. Such young people will come round, it seems, if they are treated with care, understanding and tolerance.
Even so, the element of moral warning isn’t entirely effective, not least because Gwen’s motivations – why she wants what she appears to want – remain rather obscure. We understand why she escapes from home, but the narrative logic of what happens after that seems rather arbitrary. She takes to drink (although not much of this is actually shown, presumably for fear of encouraging emulation), and she hooks up with a series of inappropriate or criminal older men (although there is little indication of any sexual dimension to this). Even the ‘good’ men – Red, a married man who refuses to take advantage of her when given the opportunity, and to some extent the nightclub owner Max – both meet a sticky end. Everything seems to happen at some distance, and we have very little sense of Gwen’s own perspective on events. While the overt message might be that such young people need ‘understanding’, the film itself gives us very little help in doing so.
Boys in Brown (1949) was another Gainsborough picture, directed by Montgomery Tully. The boys of the title are young delinquents who meet at a borstal (a reform school for under-eighteens) – although they are hardly boys. Richard Attenborough (who plays the lead character Jackie Knowles) was twenty-six at the time of filming, while his co-stars Dirk Bogarde (Alfie) and Jimmy Hanley (Bill) were twenty-eight and thirty-one respectively: they look especially stylish in the borstal uniform of heavy-duty brown woollen shorts.
On one level, Boys in Brown is a ‘prison break’ adventure movie, although it also has a strong element of social documentary. The borstal is run by a sympathetic governor, played by Jack Warner, who went on to star in the long-running BBC TV series Dixon of Dock Green (1955–76). In this role, too, Warner is a kind of embodiment of British post-war social consensus: while somewhat prone to moralizing, he is dependable, paternal and wholly benevolent. The early scenes in the borstal include documentary-style footage (presumably shot with amateur actors or inmates) showing how the institution works. The governor is a liberal defender of the borstal system – it is all about ‘making good’, and moulding the boys into ‘decent citizens’, rather than punishment – and he complains about the prejudice against ex-borstal boys once they return to society.
However, the main focus of the narrative is on Jackie and his cohorts. Although initially reluctant, he is manipulated by Alfie and Bill to become involved in an escape plan. Jackie is assigned to steal a suit from one of the officers, but he is interrupted and manages to escape after hitting the officer over the head with a table lamp and fracturing his skull. The boys get away, but they are quickly recaptured and face a possible murder charge. They give the governor conflicting confessions, but eventually the officer recovers. Meanwhile, as in The Wild One and Blackboard Jungle, romantic love provides an additional motivation. Jackie mistakenly believes that his girlfriend Kitty has taken up with Bill, and this causes him, in despair, to go along with the escape plot. At the end of the film, Kitty appears, and the governor bends the rules in order to allow her to be briefly reunited with Jackie and give him something to look forward to on his release.
Like Blackboard Jungle, Boys in Brown establishes a clear distinction between the ‘good delinquent’, who is capable of redemption, and the ‘bad’ ones, who are not. Jackie is led astray by other, more hardened criminal types at the start of the film, which is why he ends up in borstal; and, while there, he is easily manipulated, particularly by the predatory Alfie (played with a vaguely camp, demonic quality by Bogarde). Alfie fixes the lottery among the group so that Jackie (rather than he) has to steal the officer’s suit, and he eventually tricks him into confessing; but, when they are all given the opportunity to recant and apologize, only Jackie and Bill do so. We are invited to conclude that Jackie is weak and gullible and somewhat out of his depth, but not basically evil or beyond saving. Meanwhile, Bill struggles to make it in the outside world because of the prejudice he encounters when his background is revealed; but he too is essentially good. By contrast, Alfie and the other escapees are seen as beyond redemption. As the governor concludes (a little sententiously) in the closing scene, his job is not just to separate the wheat from the chaff but to understand why the chaff got the way that it did.
The film does not go far in attempting to answer this question, but (as in Rebel) it is clear that parents are to some extent to blame. We learn that Alfie was beaten by his father and that Bill was an illegitimate child who was given up for adoption: when the governor finds his real mother, she refuses to have anything to do with him. However benevolent the welfare system may be, it appears there is only so much it can do to address the causes of delinquency.
A very different solution is offered by my third film here, Cosh Boy, directed by Lewis Gilbert and released in 1953. Also named The Tough Guy and The Slasher, it was among the first British films to receive the new X certificate, meaning it could be shown only to adult audiences. This may partly have been a response to the controversy surrounding the real-life case of Derek Bentley, a nineteen-year-old who had been hanged for the murder of a police officer earlier that year. Unlike the other films considered here, it also seems to have required a prefatory health warning of the kind familiar from the US films I have described:
By itself, the ‘cosh’ is a cowardly implement of contemporary evil; in association with ‘boy’, it marks a post-war tragedy – the juvenile delinquent.
‘Cosh Boy’ portrays starkly the development of a young criminal, an enemy of society at sixteen.
Our Judges and Magistrates, and the Police, whose stern duty it is to resolve the problem, agree that its origins lie mainly in the lack of parental control and early discipline.
The problem exists – and we cannot escape it by closing our eyes. This film is presented in the hope that it will contribute to stamping out this social evil.
This gives some insight into the film’s analysis of the causes of delinquency and its recommendations for treatment. While Boys in Brown and Good Time Girl show ‘good’ young people being led astray, the hero of Cosh Boy is brutal and violent, with no redeeming qualities. And while the other films are keen to offer a benevolent version of adult authority, Cosh Boy is much less sympathetic and much more authoritarian in its response.
The film’s central character is Roy Walsh (played by James Kenney), the leader of a small gang who are seen mugging women in the opening scenes. Roy becomes infatuated with Rene (played by a young Joan Collins), the sister of one of the gang members. Although she rejects him at first, Roy eventually forces her to submit. When she informs him that he has made her pregnant and urges him to marry her, he refuses to have any more to do with her: she subsequently tries to kill herself and loses the baby. Meanwhile, Roy’s mother, Elsie (who is a single parent), is getting involved with a Canadian named Bob, who urges her to marry him so he can take Roy ‘in hand’ before it’s too late. Bob works as an assistant manager at a dance hall, which becomes a target for the gang: in a bungled robbery, while a wrestling match is going on at the hall, they shoot and injure another member of staff. Later that evening, Bob arrives and learns what has happened. He decides to give Roy a thrashing before the police appear, in the belief that, if the judge hears about this, his sentence might be lighter, which would be easier for his mother to cope with. The police arrive just as Bob is brandishing his belt: he tells them he is the boy’s stepfather, as ‘his mother and I were married this morning’. Seeing the belt in his hand, the police officer smiles, and suggests to his colleague that they go and arrest the other gang member first and come back for Roy later. Bob begins thrashing Roy; and, in the final shot, we see the police walk away down the street as we hear Roy crying and howling in pain.
The film’s analysis of the ‘social
