Youth on Screen. David Buckingham

dilemma. Before the 1950s, the cinema had been a genuine mass medium: movie-going was typically an intergenerational experience, with whole families attending together. As the decade progressed, this began to unravel. The advent of television was part of the explanation, obviously; but there were also changes in film production and exhibition (the break-up of the studio system and legislation that made it impossible for studios to retain control of local cinema distribution). The industry gradually came to realize that it was targeting an older audience that was no longer going to the movies very much; and it began, albeit belatedly and uncertainly, to focus on the increasingly lucrative and available audience of teenagers and younger adults.

By the late 1950s, Time magazine was estimating that US teenagers had a combined spending power of $10 billion, of which 16 per cent was spent on ‘entertainment’. This duly led to what the film scholar Thomas Doherty calls the ‘juvenilization’ of American movies: the targeting of young people via movies and stars designed specifically to appeal to them. It also led to changes in film exhibition: teenagers were keen on drive-in movies and on double-bills where they could spend a longer time socializing (or necking).⁹ The JD movies were one consequence of this – even if elements of them still appear to be targeted towards an older adult audience. Selling representations of juvenile delinquency as a form of entertainment might well have offered a vicarious (and perhaps quite superficial) sensation of power for younger viewers, who experienced relatively little power in their own everyday lives.

      This situation posed a dilemma for the industry. On the one hand, it was keen to target the teen audience, not least by promising apparently salacious content; yet, on the other, it needed to convince adult authority figures of its own moral legitimacy. Anxieties about juvenile delinquency made for good box office, but they also increased the visibility of those who criticized the industry for its irresponsibility. Placing overt moral messages alongside sensational portrayals of deviancy was thus a risky strategy, but an economically profitable one.

      As we shall see, much of this debate (and of course the movies themselves) spread across to the UK. The industry’s dilemmas here were also quite similar, although they arguably took longer to become apparent. Britain experienced its own home-grown moral panic about the effects of comic books,¹⁰ although there was rather less concern about the harmful influence of the cinema. Nevertheless, the release of Blackboard Jungle in 1956 was apparently greeted with ‘riots’ in some UK cinemas, and (astonishingly) The Wild One was banned by the British Board of Film Censors until 1967. Meanwhile, the affluent teenager took a little longer to appear on this side of the Atlantic, becoming apparent to researchers and social commentators only towards the end of the 1950s. Perhaps for some of these reasons, the British film industry’s response to the ‘problem’ of juvenile delinquency was generally rather more restrained, and perhaps even sedate, although it was by no means less contradictory.

      Screening delinquency

How were these tensions and contradictions manifested in specific films? In this section, I consider the three Hollywood films that effectively initiated the JD cycle: The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause. These are all very well known and have been the subject of extensive critical commentary.¹¹ Rather than offering a detailed analysis, my aim here is merely to contrast the three films in terms of their perspective and how they construct the figure of the ‘delinquent’: this then provides a context for the British films I go on to consider later in the chapter.

      The Wild One, directed by Lásló Benedek and produced by Stanley Kramer, was released in 1953. It stars Marlon Brando (aged twenty-eight at the time of filming) as Johnny Strabler, the leader of a leather-clad motorcycle gang, the Black Rebels. The film is based on a true story about a small California town called Hollister that was apparently terrorized by such a gang – a story that was written up by the journalist Frank Rooney for Harper’s Magazine in 1951. Despite this basis in fact, the opening title is keen to reassure viewers:

       This is a shocking story. It could never take place in most American towns – but it did in this one.

       It is a public challenge not to let it happen again.

      The claim recurs in Johnny’s opening voice-over: ‘It couldn’t happen again in a million years,’ he says. But the voice-over also reveals a little of the outcome of the story: after referring to ‘the whole mess’ and ‘the trouble’ that occurred, he tells us: ‘Mostly I remember the girl. I can’t explain it, a sad chick like that. But something changed in me, she got to me …’

      As this implies, The Wild One, like many JD movies, is ultimately a story of redemption. On one level, Brando’s Johnny is charismatic, cool and sexy. He appears to spend his life (or at least his weekends) travelling aimlessly from place to place with the gang: ‘You just go,’ he says. He is a natural leader whose authority is unquestioned by the other members, and he easily outfights the leader of a rival gang. He speaks in a kind of hip jive talk, and his drawled one-liners are like comic epigrams – most famously in his exchange with a local girl. ‘What are you rebelling against?’ she asks. ‘Whatta you got?’ he replies.

      Johnny’s contempt for authority is clearly part of his appeal. He defines himself as an ‘outlaw’ and refuses to make a deal with the sheriff to leave the town quietly – ‘Nobody tells me what to do.’ The sheriff is represented as weak and ineffectual: the other inhabitants urge him to run the gang out of town, accusing him of being ‘too soft-hearted’. The vigilantes eventually take matters into their own hands and beat Johnny up just as he is about to leave: ‘Someone needed to beat some respect for law and authority into him,’ one of them says. Yet this authoritarian approach ends in disaster when they knock Johnny off his bike, causing the death of an elderly resident.

However, the ultimate judgement on Johnny is delivered by Kathie, the girl he meets in the town bar (and who happens to be the sheriff’s daughter). Despite her conventional appearance, Johnny is attracted to her in preference to the more available biker girls who are pursuing him; but, at least initially, she dismisses him as a ‘fake’. At one point, Johnny apparently rescues Kathie from being assaulted by other members of the gang, but his initial romantic overtures towards her are clumsy and violent. Meanwhile, throughout the movie, he spends a good deal of time clutching a trophy, which the townspeople believe he has won at a motorbike contest, but which is actually stolen: it is a kind of emblem of his lack of authenticity. Towards the end of the movie, the sheriff finally asserts himself, telling Johnny: ‘I don’t get your act at all. And I don’t think you do either. I don’t think you know what you’re trying to do, or how to go about it.’

      In the final scene, Johnny returns to the bar, where he presents Kathie with a gift of the stolen trophy, before driving off. As evidence of Johnny’s redemption, this conclusion isn’t wholly convincing: the sheriff’s authority has already been undermined, the trophy is stolen in the first place, and we don’t see any kind of romantic consummation between Johnny and Kathie. Even so, all these things work to undermine any potential identification with Johnny: he is undeniably cool, but he is also somewhat of a phoney.

      Ultimately, the reasons for Johnny’s ‘delinquency’ are not explained. Brando’s method-acting performance is all about troubled frowns, distant stares and mumbled complaints, but there is little indication of any psychological or sociological causes of his behaviour. The authoritarian response of the townspeople is clearly rejected, but the more ‘soft-hearted’, liberal approach of the sheriff is also less than effective. In the end, it would seem that only romantic love can redeem the likes of Johnny – although this too seems faintly implausible.

      By contrast, Blackboard Jungle (directed by Richard Brooks from the novel by Evan Hunter, and released in 1955) is much more explicitly a ‘social problem’ film. Before the opening credits, over a soundtrack of military drumming, the following message scrolls:

       We, in the United States, are fortunate to have a school system that is a tribute to our communities and to our faith in American youth.