Youth on Screen. David Buckingham
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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 evil’ of juvenile delinquency and its recommendations for the solution are unequivocal. Roy’s father is absent (possibly killed during the war), and his mother is indulgent and unwilling to control him. Roy is a brutal thug and a liar, but he is also a coward who bullies other people to commit violent acts on his behalf. He exerts power partly through sexual violence. He treats his mother like dirt, palming off stolen goods as a present for her birthday (which he has forgotten about). He aggressively forces himself on Rene and immediately abandons her when she becomes pregnant. Roy is thoroughly unattractive, but he is also vain and is constantly seen combing his hair. He is also jealous of Bob’s relationship with his mother, which gives him a further motivation to carry out the robbery at the dance hall. When Bob finally steps up to deal with him, the message is very clear: Roy’s grandmother says that they need ‘a man in the house’, and when Bob marries Elsie she proclaims him as ‘the boss’. The sense of barely suppressed violence escalates through the scenes of the wrestling match, and, in the final scene, the taller Bob physically overpowers Roy: ‘Now we’ll see who’s boss in the house,’ he says. The police, far from the benevolent authority figures of Boys in Brown, clearly condone Bob’s doing what they cannot: ‘The trouble’s all over,’ they say as they leave.
While some form of punishment is eventually meted out in Blackboard Jungle and even in Boys in Brown, Cosh Boy offers a much more disciplinarian and brutal response to delinquency. The film works very hard to preclude the possibility that viewers might ‘identify’ with Roy, although that isn’t to say it might not happen: there are some echoes of James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson here, but Roy is much less charismatic and appealing. Ultimately, the film offers no possibility of redemption or of any more liberal response to the problem. Like the antisocial hero of its title, Cosh Boy is nasty, brutish and short.
Violent Playground
The final film I want to consider here was made a few years later and deserves a little closer attention. Violent Playground, directed by Basil Dearden and produced by Michael Relph, was released by Rank in 1958. It was the first of a series of ‘social problem’ films made by Relph and Dearden around this time, which include Sapphire (1959), about race relations, and Victim (1961), about homosexuality. These films were seen by their producers as an attempt to fulfil the ‘social and educative responsibilities of film’: a group of forty boys on probation was taken to see Violent Playground to give them ‘a lesson on the futility of juvenile delinquency’.19 Despite such liberal intentions, these films have often been criticized for their allegedly staid and conservative approach to social issues – although, at least in this case, I would argue that the film is rather more ambivalent and contradictory than this would imply.
The film’s central character is a detective, the appropriately named Jack Truman, played by Stanley Baker. At the start of the film, Truman has been investigating the activities of an arsonist known as ‘the Firefly’, but he is reluctantly reassigned to the Juvenile Liaison division – which provokes a good deal of ribbing from his colleagues. Truman follows up a story about seven-year-old twins, who have been caught swindling and stealing from local shopkeepers, and soon encounters their older sister Cathie Murphy (played by Anne Heywood) and their brother Johnnie (David McCallum). The children’s parents are absent, and Cathie is their main carer, although Johnnie is the leader of a street gang which controls the neighbourhood. Despite her initial resistance, Truman successfully encourages Cathie to send the children to a local youth club, and he gradually becomes romantically interested in her. However, the ongoing investigations into the Firefly come to focus on Johnnie. When Johnnie is refused entry to a smart hotel – and is mocked by the gang – he decides to target it. When the police arrive, there is a sequence of chases across the city, in which Johnnie runs over and kills Alexander, a Chinese laundry worker who has been following his orders and carrying out the arson attacks. The film culminates in an extended final sequence where Johnnie holds a classroom full of children hostage with a machine-gun, using them as human shields: he apparently shoots one dead, although the child later recovers. Through Cathie’s intervention, the children are eventually freed, and Johnnie is taken away by the police to face manslaughter charges.
Violent Playground combines aspects of police procedural and action drama with elements of documentary realism. The film is set in Liverpool – although none of the characters speaks with an authentic Liverpool accent (the Murphys are Irish). Nevertheless, it does make striking use of real locations, not least the densely populated working-class council estate (a public housing project called Gerard Gardens) where the Murphy family lives. The street scenes show the continuing ravages of Second World War bombs, with groups of children running wild across urban wastelands. As with Boys in Brown, the film has a didactic element: it was apparently based on an experimental juvenile liaison scheme run in the city, and it both explains and demonstrates (for instance in the youth club scenes) how the system operates. The key concern is that younger children (such as the Murphy twins) will gradually work up from petty crimes such as shoplifting to more serious crimes (such as those committed by their brother). The aim of juvenile liaison, Truman is told, is to catch such children before they commit their second crime. According to a statistic shown on the film’s original opening titles, 92 per cent of young people reached by Juvenile Liaison Officers did not subsequently reoffend.
The film offers several potential explanations of the causes of delinquency. On one level, there is an implicit recognition that it is more likely to occur in conditions of poverty, although this is not directly addressed. More explicit is the fact that both the children’s parents are absent: the father, we are told, is a stoker, while the mother seems to have absconded to London and possibly remarried. At one point, Johnnie complains to Truman that there are no jobs for people like him, offering a further sociological explanation. Shortly afterwards, however, Truman follows him to their flat, where members of the gang are dancing to records – and specifically to the rock-and-roll tune that plays over the film’s opening and closing credits. The lyrics emphasize the connection between rock music and violence: ‘I’m gonna play rough, rough, rough – I’m gonna get tough, tough, tough’. Johnnie throws himself into the dancing with wild abandonment, although his repeated looks towards the uncomfortable Truman also reflect a kind of homoerotic exhibitionism. Meanwhile, the twins look on, trapped behind a chair placed on a table, which resembles a kind of cage. Eventually, the group surrounds Truman, still twitching along to the music like a group of hypnotized zombies. The scene dramatizes contemporary anxieties about the harmful influence of pop culture to a level of almost comic absurdity; and this association is reinforced later in the film, when Johnnie is given the machine-gun, carried by one of the gang members in a guitar case.
Ultimately, however, the main source of Johnnie’s delinquency lies elsewhere. The local