Youth on Screen. David Buckingham
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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 behaviour come to be defined as ‘delinquent’ in the first place. In the case of youth, there is a particular issue of status offences: that is, types of behaviour that are defined as criminal when committed by young people, yet are not seen in this way when adults commit them. There is a history of such youth-related crimes – often of a very minor kind – being ‘legislated into existence’ in this way; and alternative sentencing and punishment regimes for juveniles – such as reform schools – are then designed to treat the problem. In other words, public debate, and then the legal system, effectively criminalizes particular kinds of youth behaviour.
The label ‘juvenile delinquent’ really entered into public debate only in the post-war period, when it came to be defined as a specific, and somewhat new, social problem. Nevertheless, public anxiety about the problem of delinquency was oddly out of step with the apparent incidence of youth crime. There were waves of concern immediately after the Second World War and then again in the mid-1950s (1953–8). Public debate on the issue began to fade away in the late 1950s, although statistics (however unreliable) do not suggest that youth crime had fallen at this time: in effect, what had disappeared, or at least declined, was the particular way of formulating the ‘problem’ – in other words, the label of ‘juvenile delinquency’.5
Nevertheless, there were some underlying social changes in the period, for which ‘juvenile delinquency’ became a kind of shorthand. Changes in family life during the war – men fighting and women working – led to concerns about a breakdown in family communication and socialization. As in the conclusion of Altman’s Delinquents, many commentators emphasized traditional notions of family and community as a means of preventing impending social collapse. Meanwhile, the 1950s was a period of increasing affluence and greater youth autonomy: the social and generational changes that eventually erupted in the 1960s were already beginning to appear. In this context, ‘delinquency’ became a coded term for much broader shifts in young people’s behaviour. Part of the concern here was provoked by the gradual integration of distinct racial groups (the black rhythm and blues group in the preface to Altman’s film is not coincidental) and by fears about middle-class white Americans being somehow corrupted by their increasing access to ‘lower-class’ fashions and styles of behaviour, not least through the institution of the high school. Such changes, it was feared, would turn young people into premature adults.
The uneven response to juvenile delinquency may simply have reflected the fact that public opinion was slow to catch up with these changes.6 However, there were also numerous intermediaries and commentators who took it upon themselves to define and explain the phenomenon: journalists, campaigners and lobby groups, ambitious politicians, philanthropic foundations, academics, social workers and law-enforcement agencies all had different motivations for talking up the problem of juvenile delinquency. Numerous explanations of the apparent epidemic of delinquency were proffered at the time; and these different ways of framing the problem also inevitably implied particular solutions to it. Where sociologists tended to emphasize the breakdown of mechanisms of social control (especially among immigrant groups) or the role of social class and poverty, psychologists were more inclined to consider the precarious nature of the modern family or the difficulties of social adjustment during adolescence. However, as the debate evolved, much of the concern came to focus specifically on the influence of the media and mass culture.
Delinquency and the movies
The psychologist Frederic Wertham’s enormously influential book The Seduction of the Innocent, published in 1954, drew attention to the effects of comic books, and especially so-called horror comics, on young people’s behaviour. It led to public campaigns in which children were encouraged to incinerate their comic book collections, as well as to new regulatory codes within the industry.7 Meanwhile, the ambitious senator Estes Kefauver initiated and led a Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, whose hearings lasted for several years between 1953 and the end of the decade (although it continued for many years thereafter). Here, again, comic books came under scrutiny, but the movies were an increasing focus of concern.
The movie industry responded in several ways. Its formal submissions to Kefauver’s Senate investigations were keen to play down the influence of movies – and, in this respect, it was supported by many academics, as well as professional experts such as social workers. Like many participants in these debates, Kefauver was wary of the charge of censorship during a period in which the power of Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee was starting to wane.
However, the industry was quite ready to censor itself, or at least to strengthen its regulatory codes. All the Hollywood films I consider below – as well as a great many others – were subject to detailed scrutiny by the industry’s Production Code Administration. For example, the original script for The Wild One was rejected on the grounds that it might encourage gang violence: the producers reduced the explicit violence and strengthened the pro-social message by playing up the redemption of the central character.8 Likewise, the script of Blackboard Jungle was adapted to reduce elements of sex, violence and profanity, although this did not enable it to escape criticism (and bans in some cities) once it was released. Other strategies of this kind included extensive ‘health warnings’ in the opening titles, although these were rarely as elaborate as those in Altman’s The Delinquents. In other instances, the ‘voices of authority’ within the film – such as the sheriff in The Wild One – were strengthened and moral ambiguity or complexity was eliminated. Even so, critics within and beyond the industry were not altogether convinced of the effectiveness of such strategies: concerns continued to be expressed about the dangers of young viewers ‘identifying’ with the delinquent characters, however painful their ultimate come-uppance or however convincing their ultimate