2 Troubling Teenagers: How Movies Constructed the Juvenile Delinquent
The story you are about to see is about violence and immorality – teenage violence and immorality. Children trapped in the half-world between adolescence and maturity, their struggle to understand, their need to be understood.
Perhaps in this rapid progression into the material world, man has forgotten the spiritual values which are the moral fibre of a great nation: decency, respect, fair play. Perhaps he has forgotten to teach these values to his own. He has forgotten to teach his children their responsibility before God and society.
The answer may lie in the story of the delinquents, in their violent attempt to find a place in society. This film is a cry to a busy world, a protest, a reminder to those who must set the example.
These portentous words are intoned over the opening titles of Robert Altman’s first film, The Delinquents, shot in 1955 but not released until 1957. They are preceded by a pre-credit sequence, which begins with the black rhythm and blues singer Julia Lee entertaining the entirely white clientele of a bar. When a group of young people enter and attempt to buy drinks, they are told to leave because they are under age. After a tense confrontation, they eventually depart, smashing the window behind them, and the credits begin.
The trailer for The Delinquents strikes a rather different tone. Over scenes of violence, sex, drinking, vandalism and jive dancing, it promises to show ‘the screen’s most shocking portrait of the babyfaces who have just taken their first stumbling steps down Sin Street USA.’ ‘Here,’ the trailer continues, ‘is a picture that dares to put on film the ravaged lives in the adolescent jungles of America today …’ Likewise, the publicity posters screamed: ‘The hoods of tomorrow! The gun molls of the future! The kids who live today as if there’s no tomorrow!’
The film was shot in suburban Kansas City, Altman’s home town, and its central character is Scotty, a rather clean-cut middle-class young man. When his girlfriend’s parents forbid the couple to be together (for reasons that are not fully explained), they resort to deceiving them, with the help of the nefarious group introduced in the opening scene. Scotty’s rapid descent into crime seems partly accidental and partly a result of the evil intentions of the group: he is forced to drink a bottle of whiskey and then left to take the blame for the killing of a gas station attendant, assaulted with a pump nozzle during a bungled robbery. Scotty is essentially a victim of bad luck rather than the product of a poor social environment – although what motivates the ‘delinquents’ who lead him astray remains quite unclear.
Nevertheless, the film’s conclusion is unequivocal about the need to deal with the problem:
Violence and immorality like this must be controlled and channelled. Citizens everywhere must work against delinquency, just as they work against cancer, cerebral palsy, or any other crippling disease. For delinquency is a disease. But the remedies are available: patience, compassion, understanding, and respect for parental and civil authority. By working with your church group, with the youth organization in your town, by paying close attention to the needs of your children, you can help prevent the recurrence of regrettable events like the ones you have just witnessed. You can help to beat this disease before it cripples our children, before it cripples society.
From what we know of Altman’s subsequent career, as a kind of anti-establishment auteur (his films include MASH, The Long Goodbye and Nashville), it is tempting to read these inflated words as a kind of parody. For, like most juvenile delinquent films of the period, The Delinquents is a movie that wants to have its cake and eat it. Despite the claims of its marketing campaign, it is hardly salacious; but it does nevertheless provide the forbidden pleasure of witnessing violence, immorality and other such ‘regrettable events’ – albeit framed by assertions about the film’s moral and social purpose.
Such disclaimers and moral warnings to concerned older citizens (the ‘you’ of the last quotation) were almost de rigueur in such films, at least in the mid-1950s when they first appeared. Like many of the films and TV shows I will consider in this book, these films seem to have a dual address: they are targeted both towards young people and towards adults – and, in this case, towards adult authority figures as well as adult viewers in general. As such, they tend to offer contradictory messages. And, as we shall see, these contradictions reflected the film industry’s attempt to deal with the conflicting economic and social demands that were being placed upon it at the time.
The JD films, as they have come to be known, were a movie ‘cycle’ of the kind that was characteristic of Hollywood in its heyday. (Perhaps the most obvious precursors, in terms of both theme and approach, were the gangster films of the early 1930s.) Successful breakthrough films spawned countless imitators, often with remarkably similar titles, seeking to cash in on box-office success. Inevitably, it’s hard to draw a line around them: studies of such films tend to blur the boundaries with other Hollywood cycles such as rock-and-roll movies or films about beats or other counter-cultural groups.1 Yet not all films featuring youth crime, or even ‘delinquent’ or antisocial behaviour (such as drug-taking or violence), are necessarily ‘juvenile delinquent’ films. Hollywood was making movies about youth crime throughout the 1920s and 1930s – the appearances of the future president Ronald Reagan as a caring social worker in the Dead End Kids series are particularly notable in this respect; and of course there have been countless films on the topic over the past fifty years. What distinguishes the JD films of the 1950s – and is apparent in the quotations from Altman’s film – is the explicit framing of such behaviour as a social problem that requires both explanations and remedial actions to prevent it.
In this chapter, I look fairly briefly at the three breakthrough films that effectively initiated the JD cycle in the United States – The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause – and subsequently at a group of British films that have not been so widely discussed. I’ll look at three films from the end of the 1940s and early 1950s, and then in more detail at Violent Playground, a British film released in 1958. These British films offered some distinctively different perspectives on the issue of delinquency – albeit ones that were equally riven by tensions and contradictions.
Constructing delinquency
The wave of concern that was both reflected and constructed in the JD films of the 1950s was by no means new. The history of anxiety about youthful misbehaviour dates back many centuries.2 The idea that the younger generation is out of control is often taken as evidence for much broader claims about cultural or moral decline. As I noted in chapter 1, the early twentieth century psychologists who defined – and effectively invented – ‘adolescence’ as a unique life-stage clearly saw it as a period of fragility, vulnerability and risk. With the advent of modernity, young people increasingly came to be seen as both troubled and troubling.3
Yet what remains striking – and in need of explanation – is that these waves of concern often seem to bear little relationship to the actual incidence of youth crime. The ‘facts’ on youth crime are very difficult to establish because the evidence is so unreliable. Official crime statistics – as well as other data such as victim surveys and self-report studies – vary significantly depending upon which kinds of behaviour are perceived as crimes and which measures are used (for example, whether crimes are reported, or recorded, or result in arrests and convictions), as well as how these figures are interpreted.4
For contemporary criminologists, the issue here is more to do with labelling – that is, how it is that some kinds of
