Youth on Screen. David Buckingham
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film proceeds, essentially derive from the tension between his parents. His father is seen as emasculated, and, in a later scene, he is famously wearing a frilly domestic apron – ‘You thought I was mom?’ he asks, as if we didn’t quite get the point. According to Jim, his mother and grandmother ‘make mush out of him’, and the father doesn’t have the ‘guts’ to stand up to them. Meanwhile, Judy (played by Natalie Wood) is the victim of her father’s confusing signals: he calls her ‘a dirty tramp’ for wearing slightly sexy clothes and still wants her to be his ‘little girl’, yet he rejects her (and indeed hits her) when she seeks affection from him. Plato (Sal Mineo) is possibly the most disturbed of the three: his parents have divorced after years of fighting, and, although he is supposed to live with his mother, she is rarely present. He responds to his abandonment by torturing and killing animals; and there are indications – which attracted the attention of the censors – that he might be gay (he has a picture of Alan Ladd in his locker at school!).
Delinquency, in this quasi-Freudian account, is essentially a consequence of the dysfunction of the family – and, more specifically, of the parents. Jim, Judy and Plato all struggle to communicate with their parents: Jim repeatedly screams at them in anguish, ‘You’re tearing me apart!’ and ‘You’re not listening to me!’; Judy wanders off alone at night, apparently because she is ‘seeking attention’; while Plato claims that ‘Nobody can help me.’ While Plato has received psychiatric help from a ‘head shrinker’, Jim’s parents have had to move house several times when he has got into trouble at school. All of them, it would seem, are fundamentally in need of love, although in Jim’s case he also needs to find a certain masculine strength – the quality his father is so sorely lacking. He repeatedly urges his father to ‘stand up for me’ and to give him a ‘direct answer’ to his questions, but he fails to do so until the very end.
The three characters eventually come together to form a kind of surrogate family. Jim and Judy apparently discover that they love each other within 24 hours of first meeting, while Plato clearly wants to adopt both of them as his surrogate parents. In the closing scenes, Jim clothes Plato in his iconic red jacket, and shortly afterwards Jim’s father (having discovered the need to be ‘strong’) puts his own jacket around his son. To some extent, Jim and Judy are integrated back into the normal, middle-class family; but they leave together, without their parents, and there is no reassuring voice of adult authority to reassert order at the very end of the film. As the critic James Gilbert argues, it is as if the ending, in which the adults suddenly recognize their own failings, is too contrived to be plausible.14
On top of this vaguely psychoanalytic explanation of delinquency, there are occasional signs of a more fashionable, existentialist view. Judy in particular is fond of cool, nihilistic remarks: when Jim asks her where she lives, she says ‘who lives?’, and later in the movie she describes herself as ‘just numb’. When Jim asks his rival Buzz about the reasons for the ‘chickie run’ – ‘Why do we do this?’ – Buzz responds with a Brando-esque ‘You gotta do something, don’t you?’ A key scene takes place during a school visit to a planetarium, where the students are told about the potentially imminent destruction of the universe and learn that humans are essentially alone – a theme that is reasserted in the closing scenes, which are acted out in the now empty planetarium.
Rebel Without a Cause does have several points of similarity with the other two films I’ve considered here. As in The Wild One, it is romantic love that brings about Jim’s redemption, although here it also leads to the reassertion of the family – a family in which Jim has learned to be a real man, unlike his father. As in Blackboard Jungle, there is also a benevolent, liberal authority figure, in the form of a police officer named (surely not coincidentally, like the director) Ray. Here, again, we find the ‘good delinquent’ who is capable of redemption, as opposed to the ‘bad delinquent’ who must be punished, or in this case simply killed off (as is the case both with Plato, who is too damaged to survive, and with Buzz, who seems to have very few redeeming qualities to prevent him from plunging over the cliff).
Nevertheless, the basic perspective of the film is quite different. Aside from Ray, the adults in the film are all represented in very negative terms – as in some way failing to live up to their responsibilities in respect of their children. Even Ray is absent at a crucial time when Jim comes looking for him towards the end of the film. The focus is very definitely on the three young characters. We see the world from their point of view, and in several respects they are glamorized.
Each of these films was massively successful at the box office, and each spawned a legion of imitations, as well as some more considered representations of delinquency, in the years that followed. Merely the titles reflect the element of ‘exploitation’: controversial topics were filmed on a low budget, accompanied by sensational promotion targeted specifically at the teenage audience. Teenage Crime Wave, Teenage Thunder, Teenage Rebel and Teenage Doll all appeared within a year or two of the films I have discussed here, and they were swiftly followed by Teenagers from Outer Space, Dragstrip Riot, Juvenile Jungle, Riot in Juvenile Prison, Live Fast – Die Young, The Rebel Breed, The Cool and the Crazy, High School Confidential, High School Hellcats, Hotrod Rumble, Hotrod Girl, Untamed Youth, Young and Wild, and many, many more before the decade was out.15 Rather than following this road, however, I would like to take a sideways step to look at a selection of British films that sought to address the same kinds of issues.
Debating juvenile delinquency: the UK
Perhaps surprisingly, the cinematic debate about juvenile delinquency seems to have begun earlier in the UK than in the United States. Here, too, it’s possible to identify many films from the 1930s and 1940s where young people are shown committing crime, although their youth rarely becomes an issue in itself. Perhaps the most celebrated of these precursors is John Boulting’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s 1938 novel Brighton Rock (released in 1947), starring the young Richard Attenborough. Yet, even here, the youthful status of Attenborough’s psychopathic Pinkie is barely addressed; and, generically, the film owes more to the gangster movies of the 1930s – as was apparent from its US title, Young Scarface – than to the ‘social problem’ films of the 1950s. By contrast, in this section I want to consider three British films from the late 1940s and early 1950s that explicitly address youth crime as a problem of youth and engage in different ways with the wider debate about the causes and treatment of juvenile delinquency.
As in the United States, concerns about youth crime in Britain have a very long history. The anxiety about increasing juvenile delinquency in the post-war period can be traced back to earlier concerns about ‘hooligans’ and specific youth gangs such as the ‘scuttlers’ and ‘peaky blinders’ of the late nineteenth century.16 As in the USA, there was little reliable evidence that rates of youth crime had actually risen, but the issue nevertheless attracted growing public attention. It was frequently argued that juvenile delinquency was a consequence of the disruption of the war years (in shades of Blackboard Jungle) and of the influence of (particularly American) mass culture. More broadly, there were growing proportions of young people in the population at the time with increasing amounts of disposable income – although the figure of the teenage working-class consumer did not really appear on the social radar until the very end of the decade.17
Explanations of juvenile delinquency in post-war Britain also invoked a range of psychological and sociological arguments, while responses to the problem veered between reformist and authoritarian. Yet the issue also invoked much broader concerns about social change, about morality and about the national culture – and about the media as a particular agent or index of change. These debates were a focus of concern for social researchers – most notably in a Mass Observation study by H. D. Wilcock, published in 1949 – but they were also apparent, both implicitly and explicitly, in several films of the period.18
The earliest of these films is a Gainsborough Studios production, Good Time Girl, directed by David MacDonald and released in 1948. The film is also somewhat unusual in its focus on a female ‘delinquent’.