Youth on Screen. David Buckingham
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acclaim from the local people. According to the priest, Johnnie now feels compelled to re-create the scenes of his former glory – and thereby recall a status that he cannot otherwise attain. As this implies, the primary explanation for delinquency, in Johnnie’s case at least, is psychological rather than sociological – a matter of individual pathology rather than social environment. This is reinforced by the ways in which he is framed: we first see him only in a back view, and there are several instances (not least in the dancing sequence) where he is lit and filmed (from low or titled angles) in almost expressionistic ways more characteristic of film noir. This is carried through into the final scenes in the school, where the style seems to abandon any pretence at documentary realism and approaches that of a psycho-killer movie. Yet, while Johnnie is undoubtedly charismatic, he is also shown to be weak (as when he is mocked by the gang for being refused entry to the hotel), and his desperation ultimately borders on a kind of personal psychosis: as with Cosh Boy, the film works hard to resist any potential identification.
To some extent, Violent Playground seems to endorse a liberal approach to the problem of delinquency, although there are certainly limits to this. At the start, Truman favours ‘walloping’ (beating) miscreants, but he is quickly brought round to a less disciplinarian approach. Both Cathie and Johnnie initially resist his do-gooding overtures. She comments sarcastically ‘You’re going to put all this right, with your psychology and your big talk’; although, when the twins do attend the youth club, she seems impressed by their enthusiasm. There is a sense that Johnnie likewise might be capable of redemption. In one scene, he returns to the athletics club where he was formerly a star runner, although he is too out of condition to win the race.
Johnnie’s running coach here is also the head teacher of the twins’ school, a genial Welshman with the (not coincidental) name of ‘Heaven’ Evans. In earlier scenes, Heaven is portrayed as a powerful defender of his students’ interests: he scolds one of his teachers for boring them and warns Truman against ‘fighting a war against my children’. All children are basically good, he assures Truman: they are not ‘delinquents’. The priest also resists the intervention of the police and their claim that they ‘know better how to look after children’: he supports Cathie and defends Johnnie, with whom he appears to be making progress just before the net closes in on the Firefly. Even so, as the narrative proceeds, Johnnie evades or rejects these more liberal approaches; and, when the priest tries to intervene in the final siege, Johnnie pushes him off a ladder.
At the same time, there are also contrary voices. In one key scene, Truman tells his police colleagues that Johnnie is ‘potentially a good boy’, but his views are contested by the chief inspector. ‘Everyone’s potentially a good boy,’ he says. ‘Haven’t we had enough of those crazy mixed-up kids who go around bullying, ganging up on people, beating up old ladies?’ Truman protests, but the chief inspector continues: ‘I’m a policeman. I’ve got respect for the law. I know it isn’t fashionable. But let’s spare a thought for the old lady. For you and yours. If these children want to try living outside the law, they can pay the price if they’re caught. I’m tired of the tough guy fever.’ He claims that the juvenile liaison approach won’t make any difference to such young people – ‘They’re like lepers, only they don’t warn you with a bell.’ Truman resists this, claiming that what will make the difference is ‘what always has – a lot of mum and a little bit of dad’. This is clearly framed as a debate: yet, while Truman is the sympathetic hero of the film, the chief inspector is shot in close-up at the front of the frame, appearing to privilege his perspective.
The debate is cut short at this point, but it returns implicitly at the very end of the film. The police initially attempt to resolve the situation by force, but this proves impossible. Cathie agrees to go into the school to rescue the children on the basis that two ambulances will be sent – one for the injured child and one (we assume) for Johnnie. However, the priest tells Truman that he has to ‘do his duty’. When the siege is ended, Cathie is furious to find that there is only one ambulance: Johnnie is sent away in the police wagon, not as a sick individual in need of help but as a criminal. While the child whom he apparently shot is revealed to be suffering from ‘shock’, and while he will face only manslaughter charges for killing Alexander, it’s clear that he must be punished. As Truman concludes, ‘You can feel too sorry for Johnnie.’ In one of the closing scenes, Cathie seems to endorse his approach: there is a hint that there might be some romantic future for them, but ultimately (like Mary Magdalene) she kisses his hand and then crosses the street to where the priest is waiting in the church.
The critic John Hill reads these scenes as evidence of the film’s endorsement of conservative, even authoritarian solutions to the ‘problem’ of juvenile delinquency.20 In my view, it is rather more ambivalent. The film begins and ends not with Johnnie but with the twins. In the closing scenes, after the other children are collected from the school by their mothers, the (parentless) twins sit waiting on the stairs. Truman takes their hands and, together with Heaven, arranges to feed and look after them. Johnnie has to be punished, but the twins can be educated and thereby saved from a life of crime. There is no redemption for Johnnie, but the solution may lie in the next generation: if they can learn that the likes of Johnnie are not to be seen as role models, there is hope that the problem may be overcome. In the very last scene, we see Truman take the hand of a young black or mixed-race child whom he has prevented from stealing from a market stall. While far from radical, these conclusions imply a liberal, reformist approach rather than a purely disciplinarian one, and certainly nothing of the Cosh Boy variety. As Tony Blair himself might have put it, the film calls for us to be tough on crime but also tough on the causes of crime – an approach whose effectiveness certainly remains open to debate …
Conclusion
By the end of the 1950s, the juvenile delinquency film had largely run its course. Obviously, there have been countless films since that time which portray young people involved in antisocial behaviour or criminal acts of various kinds. From Easy Rider (1969), through The Outsiders (1983) and Kids (1995), and on to American Honey (2016), it’s easy to think of examples. But it makes little sense to think of these as JD films. ‘Juvenile delinquency’ represented a particular way of framing the apparent ‘problem’ of youth crime that was especially characteristic of the 1950s. Within a fairly short period, it had become almost a cliché.
Indeed, shortly afterwards, the whole debate about juvenile delinquency was famously parodied in the 1961 film of West Side Story (directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins). In the song ‘Gee, Officer Krupke’, members of the Jets gang satirize the various explanations of delinquency and many of the solutions proposed by the justice system, psychologists and social workers. Are delinquents ‘sociologically sick’ or just ‘psychologically disturbed’? Are they ‘depraved on account they are deprived’? Is juvenile delinquency a ‘social disease’? And does it need to be treated by psychoanalysts or by the police? On one level, West Side Story might be seen as another film about juvenile delinquency; yet the most significant social problem it brings into focus is not so much about youth (or intergenerational conflict) as about race (in the ethnic rivalry between the two gangs). And, of course, like its original text Romeo and Juliet, it is primarily a love story, for which social tensions and divisions serve primarily as narrative obstacles to romantic fulfilment.
Both in the USA and in the UK, the JD films were a key part of the wider social debate about juvenile delinquency. They helped to construct and frame the problem in particular ways and to debate potential explanations and solutions for it. Yet, in doing so, they were also compromised, both by the movie industry’s attempts to reach the teenage audience, which would be vital for its future survival, and by its need to protect itself from public criticism. The industry actively courted controversy, not least because controversy is always good for box office; yet it also sought to reassure adult audiences of its responsibility and respectability. It is these tensions that account for the contradictions within and between the films I have discussed.
Yet, in parallel with these movies, film-makers on both sides of the Atlantic were also offering a rather different set of representations of youth – representations in which youth were