University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Bad boys, reform school girls, and teenage werewolves: the juvenile delinquency film in postwar America

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Bad boys, reform school girls, and teenage werewolves: the juvenile delinquency film in postwar America

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BAD BOYS, REFORM SCHOOL GIRLS, AND TEENAGE WEREWOLVES:
THE JUVENILE DELINQUENCY FILM IN POSTWAR AMERICA

by

Robert J. Ashmore

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfilment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMA AND MEDIA STUDIES)

August 2016

Copyright 2016 Robert J. Ashmore
i

For Mom and Dad, and for Tracy

In Memory of Isao Yoshida and Jim Ashmore

ii

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements iii

Introduction: Hollywood and the Delinquency Panic 1

Chapter One: A Brief History of the Juvenile Delinquency Film 23

Chapter Two: The Teenage Menace: Juvenile Delinquency in Teen Rock
‘n’ Roll and Horror Films 85

Chapter Three: Bad Boys, Good Girls, and Everything In Between:
Gender, Domesticity, and the Female Juvenile Delinquent 148

Chapter Four: From Soldier to Delinquent to Cowboy: Audie Murphy in
Cold War-Era Cinema 213

Conclusion: Delinquency and Youth Culture in the 1960’s 271

Bibliography 289

iii

Acknowledgements

Writing a dissertation is a lot like trying to reform a juvenile delinquent: it requires
tremendous amounts of guidance, patience, and support from one’s teachers, friends, and family.
I have been fortunate enough to have had, at USC, a community of scholars willing and able to
provide the help necessary for me to make good. My first thanks go to my stellar dissertation
committee: Rick Jewell, Drew Casper, and Leo Braudy. Rick shepherded the project from the
beginning, and his guidance was critical to ensuring both the quality of my scholarship and the
efficiency with which I produced it. I am deeply grateful for his generous encouragement and
unflagging belief in my work. Drew, whose unmatched enthusiasm for classic Hollywood has
always been an inspiration, brought a similar enthusiasm to this project, and he helped to keep
me going even at those occasional moments when my own enthusiasm seemed to wane. Leo’s
challenging and insightful perspective was a critical and very welcome aid to my study of the
culture and films of the period, helping me to understand what it really meant to be a teenager in
the 1950s.
Thanks are also due to the other USC professors who have worked with me on this
project. David James contributed his extensive knowledge of rock ‘n’ roll movies, ensuring that
they would become an important part of the dissertation. Stan Huey brought a valuable
psychological perspective which helped to broaden the scope of this project. Thanks also to
professors Larry Gross and Karen Sternheimer, who in addition to offering their own knowledge
and perspectives, pointed me to many valuable resources in the social sciences. I would also like
to thank the administrators, past and present, of the Cinema and Media Studies Department (or,
iv

as some of them knew it, Critical Studies): Bill Whittington, Alicia Cornish, Kim Greene, Jade
Agua, and Christine Acham.
And, of course, my deepest gratitude goes out to my family and friends. Thanks to Mom
and Dad for always encouraging me to pursue my passions, and for all the times they told me
they were proud of what I had accomplished. Because of them, I never had any reason to become
a juvenile delinquent myself. Thanks also to my good friend Alejandro for the moral support,
and for our weekly get-togethers that provided needed relief from the isolation that comes with
writing a dissertation. Finally, thanks to Tracy, my partner and biggest supporter for the past five
years. With the possible exception of myself, no one else suffered more as a result of the
demands and rigors of my studies at USC, yet she was always the first to provide
encouragement, reassurance, and love. I don’t know how I would have done it without her.
1

Introduction: Hollywood and the Delinquency Panic

Overview
The American public has long been fascinated by the figure of the young rebel, and some
of the most enduring symbols of this rebellion have been drawn from the cinema of the years
following the end of World War II. James Dean, star of East of Eden (Warner Bros., 1955) and
Rebel Without a Cause (Warner Bros., 1955), had an image which was made eternally young by
the car crash that claimed his life at the age of 24; that image continues to endure as an icon of
youthful alienation, nonconformity, and transgressive sexuality. Marlon Brando’s Johnny
Strabler from The Wild One (Columbia Pictures, 1953), with his motorcycle, black leather, and
philosophy of hip nihilism, established an iconography of youthful rebellion that has persisted
for generations.
These images, along with many others that appeared during the same period, emerged
from Hollywood’s reaction to a pressing issue that was at the forefront of the public
consciousness during the same time: the apparent threat of juvenile delinquency. Strictly
speaking, juvenile delinquency pertains to illegal activity perpetrated by minors, but the actual
evidence was inconclusive as to whether this kind of activity was really increasing, and to what
extent. Yet the postwar era was fraught with fears of roving teenage gangs, sexually delinquent
minors, and good kids suddenly gone bad. These fears, which far exceeded what was warranted
by hard evidence, were symptomatic of a deeper and more fundamental issue facing postwar
America: the changing nature of youth in what was already a rapidly changing nation.
The film industry was well aware of the delinquency panic and its underlying anxieties,
and it produced a range of films which sought to capitalize on the public’s interests and concerns
2

where its young people were concerned. The industry’s response, however, was constrained by
two very pressing realities. One was the fact that the film industry itself was vulnerable to
criticism on the subject of juvenile delinquency. The cinema had long been under attack for its
supposedly corrupting influence on young people, and by putting delinquents onscreen the
industry opened itself up to accusations of fostering delinquency by glamorizing negative role
models. The other reality was that the film industry itself was undergoing fundamental
transformations during the postwar era. In 1948, the Supreme Court ruled that the major film
studios constituted an illegal vertical monopoly due to the fact that they owned many of the
largest movie theaters, thereby controlling both production and exhibition. Forced to give up one
or the other, the majors opted to divest themselves of their theaters, undercutting their ability to
determine which films would be able to be exhibited to the public. The result was that power
began shifting from the major studios towards independent producers and filmmakers. The
juvenile delinquency films of the postwar era were not the result of any kind of unified master
plan, but instead were the product of a diverse set of creators, all with their own goals and
conditions of production. In particular, a gulf opened between the juvenile delinquency films
produced by the major Hollywood studios and those of a growing number of independent
producers and minor studios which made what came to be known as teen exploitation films, or
“teenpics.” The makers of teenpics recognized the growing value of the youth audience and
sought to attract it with films which often centered on rebellion and delinquency.
To study the juvenile delinquency films produced during the postwar era involves much
more than simply charting the way that teenage criminals were portrayed onscreen. It is also to
study the important changes that were going on at the same time: the changes in the identity and
behavior of, and expectations concerning, the American teenager, as well as the changes that the
3

film industry was simultaneously undergoing. Beneath the depictions of punks, tramps, and rock
‘n’ rollers, the postwar delinquency films speak to some of the deepest social anxieties of the
time. In their use of costuming, language, and music, they speak to middle-class fears of class
instability, and of the supposed threat that working class culture posed to the morality and
behavior of middle-class kids. At the same time, despite the fact that onscreen delinquents were
overwhelmingly white, the films also speak to white adult fears about the breakdown of racial
barriers, particularly in the popularity of rock ‘n’ roll. The films also address changes in gender
expectations at a time when the same women who had taken jobs during World War II were now
expected to return to the home and embrace a suburban cult of domesticity. Furthermore, many
of the films address the relationship of youth to the instability and uncertainty that the nation was
facing as a result of the Cold War, questioning whether teenagers were a boon or a threat.
Finally, the films help to define the shifts in power and transformations in production strategies
that the film industry itself was dealing with at the time, underlining the divisions within the
industry that are revealed by the contrasting responses to this controversial subject.
This project will endeavor to demonstrate how juvenile delinquency films inform the
discourses going on in postwar American society surrounding youth and its place in the changing
world, and how the films are determined by the economic realities of the movie industry at the
time of their production. It will show how the filmmakers attempted to attract their audiences by
drawing on the ongoing discussions concerning delinquency in the popular and scientific realms
and by commenting on the issues underlying the delinquency panic; at the same time, those same
filmmakers worked to allay public concerns about the relationship of movies to delinquency.
Close scrutiny of the films and the conditions of their production will show that they provide an
invaluable addition to our understanding of both postwar youth and the postwar film industry.
4

The following section will consist of a short overview of popular and scientific
discourses surrounding juvenile delinquency and the developing youth culture of the period. This
will be followed by a more detailed explanation of the project’s goals and methodology.

Juvenile Delinquency in Postwar America
Prior to World War II, juvenile delinquency was typically regarded in the public
imagination as a problem confined to the impoverished children of the inner city. Delinquency
was an issue of environment, segregated from the middle class and its children. This conception
of delinquency is seen not only in the films of the pre-war era – which include The Mayor of Hell
(Warner Bros., 1933), Dead End (United Artists, 1937), Boys Town (MGM, 1938), and Angels
with Dirty Faces (Warner Bros., 1938) – but in the sociological literature of the time.
Sociologists Clifford Shaw and Henry D. McKay were among the most important figures in the
study of juvenile delinquency during the first half of the century, publishing multiple books on
the subject and helping to found the delinquency prevention association The Chicago Area
Project. Their 1942 study Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas, which surveyed impoverished
neighborhoods in several large American cities, emphasized the connection between delinquency
and poverty: “The low-income communities near the centers of commerce and heavy industry
had the highest rates [of delinquency], while those in outlying residential communities of higher
economic status were more or less uniformly low.”
1
They attribute this to the fact that those
impoverished groups tend also to be the ones which are most thoroughly excluded from
mainstream American society. They state that “the groups producing the most alleged
delinquents are, in every instance, those most recently segregated into the areas of lower
economic status, as a result of the ongoing processes of American city life.”
2
As a result, the
5

inhabitants of these segregated areas do not internalize the social values and norms of the
mainstream (which is to say, middle class) culture because those values and norms are not
applicable to the actual conditions of their lives.
Fellow sociologist William Foote Whyte makes a similar point in his ethnographic study,
Street Corner Society: The Social Structure of an Italian Slum (1943). In studying the poor
Italian neighborhood that he pseudonymously labeled “Cornerville,” he observes that
“Cornerville’s problem is not lack of organization but failure of its own social organization to
mesh with the structure of the society around it.”
3
Whyte notes that the values and activities
needed to survive and thrive in Cornerville, which generally involve crime and corruption, are
often antithetical to those of the mainstream society. Shaw, McCay, and Whyte agree that the
factors which produce delinquency emerge from the environmental conditions of life in the
delinquent’s community.
During and after World War II, however, the expert view on juvenile delinquency began
to change. During this period, “the academic study of delinquency had shifted away from earlier
structural studies of selected populations (generally immigrant) to more general sociological and
psychological factors.”
4
One example was psychologist Robert M. Lindner’s book Rebel Without
a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath. In studying the determining factors of a
young criminal’s behavior, Lindner emphasizes that psychological traumas in the young man’s
past were more important than the environment in which he was brought up, though he
acknowledges that the conditions of inner-city life are more likely to produce these traumas.
5

Nevertheless, he denies that there is an inherent connection between poverty and youth crime,
affirming that psychopathy can occur in any social class.
6

By the early 1950s, social scientists were increasingly speaking to issues applicable to the
middle class in their studies of juvenile delinquency. Renowned psychologist Erik H. Erikson
notes that the conflicting pressures on young people in modern American life may be responsible
for delinquency, and that middle-class children are no less vulnerable to these pressures than
working-class children. He conjectures that middle-class mothers may be guilty of
“standardizing and overadjusting” their male children, instilling the values of conformity at the
same time that the larger society expects those young men to personify “virile individuality.”
6

The conflicting nature of these pressures may cause these confused and frustrated young men to
rebel.
In his 1953 book Seduction of the Innocent, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham placed the
blame for juvenile delinquency squarely on the mass media, which he charged with exposing
children to dangerous influence in the pursuit of profit. He wrote,
Even more than crime, juvenile delinquency reflects the social values current in a society.
Both adults and children absorb these social values in their daily lives, at home, in school,
at work, and also in all the communications imparted as entertainment, instruction or
propaganda through the mass media, from the printed word to television.
7

He claims that children are tremendously susceptible to bad influences; if they witness violence
in the media, they will be driven to commit violence. Juvenile delinquents, then, are those who
were exposed to corrupting influences while growing up, regardless of class status. Indeed,
Wertham’s argument seems calibrated to exploit middle-class anxieties about delinquency
occurring among their own children.
Criminologist Albert K. Cohen writes in his 1955 book Delinquent Boys: The Culture of
the Gang that delinquency is the product of delinquent subcultures. The subculture, he writes,
“takes its norms from the larger culture but turns them upside down. The delinquent’s conduct is
right, by the standards of his subculture, precisely because it is wrong by the norms of the larger
7

culture.”
8
These subcultures form among young people who feel that they cannot succeed via the
norms of the larger (middle-class) culture, and therefore create their own subculture to impose an
alternate set of norms. Cohen notes that delinquent subcultures are more likely to form within
working class communities, but does acknowledge that delinquency can also occur within the
middle class. However, he discusses middle class delinquency in terms that suggest that
delinquency is inherently working class: “many families which are middle-class in economic
terms and live in what are known as middle-class neighborhoods may be decidedly working-
class in terms of the experiences they provide their children.”
9
In essence, he argues, only those
middle-class families who, through some deficiency, resemble the state that working-class
families take on naturally will be at risk for producing delinquents.
The postwar period saw a glut of sociological and psychological opinions regarding the
causes of juvenile delinquency, a development that was undoubtedly motivated by the enormous
public attention that delinquency was receiving at the time. In his definitive study of the postwar
delinquency panic, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the
1950s, James Gilbert demonstrates that delinquency had become a highly contentious issue
during the war, and it became even more prominent in the period after the war’s end. He writes
that delinquency came to the public’s attention circa late 1942, due to “a series of fears and
expectations about the impact of war on children through rapid social disorientation and
change.”
10
These fears were fanned by the sensationalism of public figures, particularly FBI
director J. Edgar Hoover, who blamed delinquency on the “wartime spirit of abandon,” broken
homes, and the decline of the “fundamentals of common decency.”
11
Americans recognized that
the war was bringing about significant social change, and worried about change’s effect on the
traditional systems for controlling their children.
8

The wartime delinquency panic also had an obvious racial component, as evidenced by
the Zoot Suit Riots of 1943. Zoot suits were loose, baggy, shoulder-padded costumes that were
popular with young Mexican-American men, as well as with some African American and
Filipino American youths as well. The ostentatious clothing style “had come to represent the
culture of delinquency” in Los Angeles, and “became a focus for ethnic hatred.”
12
For a week in
June, 1943, military servicemen stationed at nearby bases attacked any nonwhite youth they saw
wearing a zoot suit. As the ostensible defenders of the nation, the servicemen perceived the zoot
suiters as their opposites: unpatriotic delinquents who represented a potential criminal threat. The
Los Angeles press “blamed gangs of zoot-suiters for the attacks,” and the Los Angeles City
Council “passed a resolution declaring the wearing of zoot suits to be a misdemeanor.”
13
In the
Zoot Suit Riots, the delinquency panic found an ethic scapegoat which contrasted poorly with the
“good boys” of the military.
Following a peak in the mid-1940s, concerns regarding delinquency tapered off
somewhat before reaching new heights starting around 1953. As Gilbert points out, Gallup polls
found peaks of concern regarding delinquency in 1945, and again from 1953 to 1958. He also
notes that the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature shows a spike in the number of articles
about juvenile delinquency appearing in mass circulation magazines between 1943 and 1945,
and an even larger spike between 1953 and 1958.
14
Gilbert also notes that government
institutions such as the Children’s Bureau increased the amount of attention paid to delinquency
starting around 1952, and the U.S. Senate began holding hearings on juvenile delinquency in
1953.
The surge in interest concerning delinquency can be attributed to the changes taking
place in American society following World War II, and the visible effects that these changes
9

were having on teenagers. To begin with, teenagers had more money – the result both of the
postwar economic boom that sharply reversed the condition of the Great Depression, and of the
fact that more teenagers were getting jobs. Related to this was the fact that teenagers were
becoming more independent, and in some ways were beginning to act more like adults: “more
drove cars, more married early, more appeared to initiate sexual relations at an early age.” As a
result, “the American family itself now exerted less influence in the cultural formation of
youngsters.”
15

The increasing independence of teenagers led to an increasing realization, on the part of
both adults and the teenagers themselves, that the teen years constituted a separate phase of life
distinct from both childhood and adulthood. Indeed, the term “teenager” first came into use
following the end of World War II. During this time, teenagers began to form their own identity
and, consequently, their own culture. This, in turn, led to the recognition that Americans in the
transition years between childhood and adulthood constituted a demographic that could be sold
and marketed to, to the exclusion of others. According to Jon Savage,
During 1944, Americans began to use the word ‘teenager’ to describe the category of
young people from fourteen to eighteen. From the very start, it was a marketing term
used by advertisers and manufacturers that reflected the newly visible spending power of
adolescents. The fact that, for the first time, youth had become its own target market also
meant that it had become a discreet age group with its own rituals, rights, and demands.
16

Teenagers, in developing their own culture, increasingly moved away from that which
was familiar to their parents. In Gilbert’s words, “teenagers, by erecting barriers of fashion and
custom around adolescence, had walled off a secret and potentially antagonistic area of
American culture.”
17
This in itself might not have been such a concern if not for where the teen
culture choose to take its inspiration. According to Gilbert, “what offended [middle-class
parents] most was the inclusion of values, codes, fashions, and speech usually associated with
10

lower-class behavior.”
18
To these middle class parents, the fashion, speech, and musical tastes of
their children implied a breakdown in traditional class distinctions. This notion received some
official endorsements: a report from the Midcentury White House Conference on Children
stated, “There arises the possibility that the standards of the lowest class can through the children
reach some of the boys and girls of other social groups.”
19
In expressing fears of middle class
delinquency, middle class adults were signaling their worries that their children would begin
acting like working class kids. Furthermore, going hand-in-hand with class anxiety was racial
anxiety. Rock ‘n’ roll was the preferred music of postwar teenagers, the style was predominantly
derived from African American R&B music. Even when performed by white artists, the racial
connotations of the music remained a source of anxiety for white parents.
The prevalent notion seemed to be that working class culture and, by extension,
delinquency could be transferred from child to child like a communicable disease. Gilbert states
that “the predominant metaphor was one of contagion, contamination, and infection.”
20
There
was nothing new about this concept; Jon Savage writes that in the 1900s, “the newly developed
middle-class market was led to think that young urban toughs represented a serious social threat,
that delinquency was contagious and might rub off on their own young.”
21
In the 1950s, teenage
culture seemed like tangible evidence that such a thing was actually happening.
In his 1955 book 1,000,000 Delinquents, Benjamin Fine agrees that “juvenile
delinquency is already creeping from the wrong side of the tracks to the right side.”
22
He argues
that middle class delinquency is underreported due to the efforts of middle class parents, and the
willingness of law enforcement, to shield privileged teens from the law. He argues that middle
class delinquency has less to do with cultural transmission than with the declining conditions of
11

family life in the middle class. He writes that “children left alone, deprived of parental love,
affection and supervision, will form their own peer groups, regardless of slums or of palaces.”
23

Most of Fine’s arguments are echoed by Harrison Salisbury in his book The Shook-Up
Generation (1958). He notes that “much public concern over delinquency stems… from the fact
that patterns of conduct formerly exclusive to poor, working-class or lower-middle-class
youngsters, have spread to the middle-class as a whole and to upper-class youth, as well,” but he
also asserts that “there is reason to believe that there has always been much more anti-social
conduct among children of better families than is generally known, largely because these
families possess the ability to conceal or wipe out the evidence of what their children do.”
24
Still,
he claims that those middle-class homes that are vulnerable to delinquency are those which are,
at heart, the same as working-class homes. Comparing suburbia to the impoverished Red Hook
housing project in New York, Salisbury writes, “Behind an apparent façade of normality many a
suburban home conceals just as broken a home as the Red Hook family from which the father
has long since vanished.”
25
These suburban homes are “psychologically broken” homes in which
sons are “placed at an emotional distance from their father, often seeing little of him, reacting
against domination of family life by the mother by extreme masculine attitudes, violence and
even sadism.”
26

Although Fine and Salisbury both criticize the hypocritical processes by which middle-
class delinquents are shielded by their parents, their discussions both carry the assumption that
delinquency is somehow inherently connected to the working class. When they discuss the
alleged causes of middle-class delinquency, it is in terms of how these particular members of the
middle class are actually behaving like the working class. In doing so, they reinforce the
ingrained assumption that “respectable” kids acquire delinquency from those who are not so
12

respectable, and thereby show that class stigmas surrounding delinquency persist even into the
postwar era of psychology and upbringing.
As should be clear from the preceding overview, the issue of juvenile delinquency was
fraught with controversial implications for a number of other issues concerning the postwar era.
The film industry had to tread extremely carefully in broaching the topic, and it was confronted
with a number of potential questions in doing so. For example, how can a film attempt to gratify
both the teenage and adult perspective when the two groups would have looked at delinquency in
very different ways? How closely can a film align itself with teenagers and their viewpoints and
still get away with it? How should the industry navigate the charged class politics surrounding
delinquency? How can middle class delinquency be depicted if not as the product of working
class “corruption?” How can the industry depict rock ‘n’ roll music at all, given its racial
connotations? This project will endeavor to show how different filmmakers found answers to
questions like these.

Goals and Methodology
This project will attempt to fill a gap that exists in the existing literature on juvenile
delinquency films in the postwar era (which will be defined as roughly 1945-1962). James
Gilbert’s A Cycle of Outrage is often considered the most authoritative study of the postwar
delinquency panic. The author reads the frequently-expressed cultural anxiety surrounding the
alleged epidemic of juvenile crime and misbehavior as a reaction against the growth of mass
culture, particularly the commercialization of youth culture. Hollywood was, naturally, among
the most prominent examples of that mass culture. Gilbert draws heavily from primary sources,
including sociological and psychological tracts, newspaper and magazine articles, speeches, and
13

archival research to demonstrate how the discourse around juvenile delinquency was continually
framed in terms of the mass media and its influence on young people.
Gilbert states that Hollywood simultaneously attracted more condemnation for
“corrupting… the morals of youth” than any other mass culture industry, while also
demonstrating “how controversy could be profitable.”
27
He briefly analyzes the plots of some of
the more prominent examples of Hollywood’s films about juvenile delinquency, such as
Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause, in order to generalize about the films’ strategies
for avoiding controversy through ambivalent representations of the problem. Gilbert refers to
Hollywood somewhat monolithically, without drawing distinctions between studios or
attempting to distinguish between the different types of juvenile delinquency films that appear.
Jon Lewis’ book The Road to Romance and Ruin: Teen Films and Youth Culture focuses
on teen films generally rather than juvenile delinquency films specifically, but he considers
rebellion to be a key aspect of all films that depict teenagers. He argues that “teen films all seem
to focus on a single social concern: the breakdown of traditional forms of authority: patriarchy;
law and order; and institutions like the school, the church, and the family.”
28
Delinquency is just
one aspect of this larger breakdown. Drawing on a number of cultural theorists, Lewis endeavors
to construct a unifying theoretical framework for all teen films; he groups the films thematically,
rather than chronologically, and offers little historical context for the films. His position that
youth films transcend history links to Gilbert’s idea of the “episodic notion,” by which broadly
held ideas, such as “the seduction of the innocent by culture” repeatedly occur in society.
29
Also
like Gilbert, Lewis does not differentiate between the different producers of the films; indeed, he
generally treats teen films as the products of society rather than of individuals employed in the
film industry.
14

Doherty provides a very different perspective to Lewis. His book, Teenagers & Teenpics:
The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s, examines the historical and industrial
specificity of the teen exploitation film, or teenpic, of the 1950s. Doherty charts the rise of
independent producers of low-budget films targeting teenagers, such as Sam Katzman and
American International Pictures, who consciously distinguished their products from the films
being produced by the major Hollywood studios. He notes that the major studios “remained
generally blind to teenage advances,” failing to take advantage of the growing youth market.
30

As a result, these new independents were able to step into the gap. Doherty includes juvenile
delinquency as one of the subjects commonly depicted by teen exploitation producers. Whereas
the major studios produced and marketed juvenile delinquency pictures targeted to parents as
well as their children, the teen exploitation films were targeted primarily at teenagers themselves.
Doherty does not explore these differences in detail, however, as delinquency only accounts for a
small section of his larger study. Instead, Doherty is primarily concerned with what he calls the
“progressive ‘juvenilization’ of film content and the film audience” that occurred between the
Classic era of Hollywood and the contemporary era of the youth-oriented Blockbuster.
31
He
argues that the teen exploitation film provides a critical link in that transformation, as it
represents the first time that the commercial value of the teenage audience was recognized by the
film industry.
Most recently, English professor Leerom Medovoi’s book, Rebels: Youth and the Cold
War Origins of Identity, examines the portrayal of youth in all media during the Cold War
period. He argues that the figure of the youthful rebel emerged during this era because “the
United States as leader of the ‘free world’ required figures who could represent America’s
emancipatory character.”
32
These figures included personalities like James Dean and Elvis
15

Presley, along with the troubled or defiant characters they portrayed onscreen. Although
Medovoi examines literature and music as well, films occupy a significant portion of the work.
He combines close reading of a select handful of films with analysis of popular articles and
sociological writings to demonstrate how rebellion was contained onscreen at the same time that
it was rendered attractive.
Unlike Gilbert, Medovoi does not focus on the specific sociological and psychological
discourses around juvenile delinquency. His work regards delinquency as a subset of teenage
rebellion, without particular attention to the rhetorical use of the term. Also, like many of the
works before it, Rebels does not pay particular attention to different production strategies that
motivated the various films. Medovoi acknowledges that teen films can be divided into major
studio productions and teen exploitation, but does not analyze the effects of these differing
production methods. He examines the rebellious teenager onscreen as responding to the needs of
the culture, rather than to the needs of the film industry.
Another useful work is Jerold Simmons’ article, “Violent Youth: The Censoring and
Public Reception of The Wild One and The Blackboard Jungle.” Simmons examines the
controversies that arose over the release of the two films, the efforts of the Production Code
Administration to mitigate the controversial content in the films and to defend its decisions to
ultimately approve them, and the attempts of foreign censorship organizations such as the British
Board of Film Censors to suppress the films. The article deftly shows how the two films
epitomize the larger industry’s efforts in the postwar era to strike a precarious balance between
attention-grabbing controversial content and the need to make the industry appear to be socially
responsible. However, Simmons’ conclusion is somewhat undercut by a lack of broader
knowledge regarding the delinquency film cycle. He states that the industry was ultimately not
16

deterred by the controversial receptions of these films, stating that Hollywood would be driven to
“the production of additional teenage dramas featuring more and more violence.”
33
This does
not, however, take into account the fact that most of the delinquency films made after 1955 were
the products of teenpic studios rather the majors.
Finally, it is useful to touch on some of the more “popular” works on the subject.
Although Mark Thomas McGee and R.J. Robertson’s The J.D. Films and Alan Betrock’s The I
Was a Teenage Juvenile Delinquent Rock ‘n’ Roll Horror Beach Party Movie Book are generally
more concerned with providing plot summaries than substantive academic analysis, they are
nevertheless the only book-length works to treat the juvenile delinquency film as an important
cultural object in and of itself, rather than as a subset of a larger issue. As such, they are capable
of providing useful insights. Although they rarely cite sources outside of the films themselves,
their examination of the films’ plots allow them to pinpoint certain broad differences between the
studios. For example, whereas the majors attempted to ascribe psychological causality to
delinquent behavior, teen exploitations studios like American International Pictures tended to
ignore psychology.
34
Although their analysis could obviously go much further, these works
suggest the potential value of more in-depth examinations of the juvenile delinquency film.
Although there has been a great deal of useful, valuable writing that has touched on the
postwar juvenile delinquency film, there has not yet been an academic book-length study which
takes the delinquency film itself as its primary subject. Some of the works discussed above offer
detailed analysis of individual delinquency films and film cycles (though they are often limited
to a handful of “canonical” films produced by major studios, such as The Wild One, Blackboard
Jungle, and Rebel Without a Cause). Some of them deal with the popular and sociological
discourses surrounding delinquency in the postwar era. Some of them deal with the seismic
17

transformations that the film industry was undergoing at the time. None of the works, however,
attempt to bring all three elements together. As such, none of them is able to offer a complete,
multifaceted examination of what the postwar juvenile delinquency film was and what outside
factors determined its production and content. This project attempts to provide this by putting the
films in conversation with scholarly research regarding both the popular and social scientific
discourses surrounding delinquency and the economic realities of the film industry. In bringing
the social, cultural, and business issues together with the films themselves, it attempts to account
for how these onscreen rebels – however sensationalized or unrealistic – represent a calculated
response to specific issues on the part of specific filmmakers at a specific moment in time.
The project’s primary focus is on the content of the films themselves. The films represent
the actual expression of Hollywood’s strategy for negotiating the juvenile delinquency panic, and
are the means by which filmmakers communicate with their audiences. Close reading of the
films reveal nuances in the popular appeals the filmmakers offer to the viewer and in the rhetoric
that they employ in justifying themselves. The close readings are put into conversation with the
significant sociological, psychological, and popular writings on juvenile delinquency specifically
and youthful rebellion generally in order to account for how the ideas in these writings were
diffused into the public consciousness through the medium of cinema, as well as to shed light on
Hollywood’s own practices in terms of how the films are positioned in relationship to the
dominant discourses on delinquency. Accounts of the business history of the major studios and
teenpic producers alike are used to reveal the economic motivations for the specific uses of
delinquency that various filmmakers employed.
At this point, an effort should be made to define what is actually constituted by a
“juvenile delinquency film.” As previously stated, juvenile delinquency was and is, strictly
18

speaking, a term specifically applied to crimes committed by minors. Yet the delinquency panic
went far beyond that narrow definition; the fear over juvenile crime was a manifestation of fear
of teen culture generally. To a postwar adult, “delinquency” could mean anything from robbery
and murder to listening to rock ‘n’ roll music and talking back to authority figures. Given how
unstable the term was during the period, this project will not attempt to create a conclusive
definition for “juvenile delinquency.” Instead, a juvenile delinquency film will be defined as one
whose subject matter was obviously contrived to exploit the ongoing discourse regarding
juvenile delinquency. The definition encompasses films which depict teenagers as “out of
control” and out of step with the demands of “respectable” adult society, or which feature parents
who accuse their children of such things, without the teenagers necessarily being shown
committing crimes.
It should also be noted that not all juvenile delinquents are necessarily minors. For
instance, Marlon Brando was 29 when his film The Wild One was released – too old to legally be
classified as a juvenile delinquent. Nevertheless, the rebellious behavior exhibited by the bikers
in the film is conflated with their youth, and their conflict with the adults of the town of
Wrightsville was symbolic of a generation gap. Furthermore, Brando’s style in the film – both in
terms of costuming and attitude – was highly influential on the young people who saw him in the
theaters. Films like The Wild One, even if their characters were not depicted as minors, were
clearly meant to evoke the larger anxiety that fueled the concern over delinquency, and it would
be a mistake to omit them from this project.
Furthermore, even though juvenile delinquency films have a familiar iconography –
motorcycles, hot rods, switchblades, rock ‘n’ roll music, hipster slang – the subject was highly
versatile and made its way into a variety of film genres. This includes not only expected genres,
19

such as the crime thriller, social problem film, courtroom drama, and family melodrama, but
unexpected ones, such as the horror film and the Western. Films like The Kid from Texas
(Universal, 1950) and The True Story of Jesse James (20
th
Century Fox, 1957) might lack the
familiar delinquency iconography, but it’s clear that they were also drawing upon the popular
and scientific discourses that surrounded the delinquency panic. Furthermore, the distance of
these genres from the ostensible “reality” of juvenile delinquency allowed these films to
sometimes broach topics that the more obvious delinquency films did not. As such, these films
must also be included in this project.
The first chapter follows a different format from the subsequent chapters. It presents a
historical overview of Hollywood’s production of juvenile delinquency films and of the
economic imperatives that motivated their production. For the sake of providing a historical
foundation, the chapter begins with the spurt of delinquency films that appeared during the Great
Depression before continuing into the postwar era. It contrasts the postwar delinquency films
produced by the major studios with those of the teenpic producers, and shows how the
relationship between the two parallels in turn the relationship between the major studios and the
exploitation film industry of the prewar era. This is meant to illuminate the various needs and
rationales that led to the creation of a diverse body of delinquency films, as well as providing
context for the more detailed film analysis in the following chapters.
The three remaining chapters each examine a set of films which represent a particular
aspect of the delinquency panic. Chapter two examines the adult fear over teen culture and the
teens’ own response to this panic. The chapter foregrounds rock ‘n’ roll music, the adult reaction
to it, and the use of rock music in films produced both by the major studios and by the teenpic
independents. The films’ use, or disavowal, of the race and class connotations are also discussed
20

and related to the larger concern over delinquency: frequently, that which was seen as
threatening was that which was influenced by what were considered to be African American
and/or working class styles. Rock ‘n’ roll films generally attempted to split the difference
between teen and adult perspectives, justifying the teenage love of rock while also reassuring
parents by distancing the music from its negative connotations. The chapter ends by analyzing
horror films, which exist at the opposite end of the spectrum: they exaggerate adult fears of
teenagers to such an extent that those fears themselves become an object of ridicule.
Chapter three deals with the relationship between the delinquency panic and the cult of
domesticity that was taking hold during the period. Fears that postwar American society was
becoming too feminized led to a certain degree of valorization of the male delinquent at the same
time he was being regarded as a dangerous threat to the stability of the home. On the other hand,
the female delinquent was characterized as entirely negative: her rejection of domesticity
represented a danger to social stability itself. The chapter examines the differences in how male
and female delinquency were conceptualized, and in how those differences were expressed
onscreen.
Chapter four discusses the impact of the Cold War on the delinquency panic. Many adults
of the period worried about the delinquent-riddled younger generation’s fitness to defend
America from its military and ideological enemies, contributing to the hysterical reactions to
signs that contemporary youth was turning away from adult society. The chapter focuses on the
figure of Audie Murphy, the young man who became the most decorated soldier of the World
War II. Murphy would later take up a career in film acting, and his early films deal with the fear
surrounding juvenile delinquency, though many of them displace these fears onto a Wild West
setting. The chapter examines how these films address the question of youth’s fitness to fight in
21

the Cold War, and shows how they question the dividing line between the soldier and the
delinquent.
The conclusion looks forward into the 1960s to examine the changes that took place in
how the film industry depicted rebellious youth onscreen. It discusses why the postwar
conception of delinquency died out and how the cinema responded. The teenage audience, seen
as something strange and threatening throughout the postwar era, was now becoming
increasingly mainstream. The postwar era represents an important transitionary period in
America popular culture, and the juvenile delinquency film was an important and revealing part
of the change.

1
Clifford R. Shaw and Henry McKay, Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1942), 3.

2
Ibid., 52.

3
William Whyte, Street Corner Society: The Structure of a Slum (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1943),
273.

4
James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950’s (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986), 57.

5
Robert Lindner, Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath (New York: Grune &
Stratton, 1944), 12.

6
Eric H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1950), 254.

7
Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent (New York: Rinehart & Company Inc., 1953), 149.

8
Albert K. Cohen, Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang (New York: The Free Press, 1955), 28.

9
Ibid., 159.

10
Gilbert, 25.

11
Quoted in Gilbert, 28.

12
Ibid., 30.

13
Ibid., 31.

14
Ibid., 64.

15
Ibid., 17.
22

16
Jon Savage, Teenage: The Creation of Youth Culture, (New York: Viking, 2007), vi.

17
Gilbert, 15.

18
Ibid., 79.

19
Quoted in Gilbert, 18.

20
Ibid., 75.

21
Savage, 93.

22
Benjamin Fine, 1,000,000 Delinquents, (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1955), 28.

23
Ibid., 99.

24
Harrison Salisbury, The Shook-Up Generation (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1958), 107.

25
Ibid., 116.

26
Ibid., 117.

27
Gilbert, 162.

28
Jon Lewis, The Road to Romance and Ruin: Teen Films and Youth Culture (Routledge: New York, 1992), 3.

29
Gilbert, 4.

30
Thomas Doherty, Teenagers & Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Boston: Unwin
Hyman, 1988), 61.

31
Ibid., 3.

32
Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 1.

33
Jerold Simmons, “Violent Youth: The Censoring and Public Reception of The Wild One and The Blackboard
Jungle.” Film History 20.3. (2008): 390.

34
Mark Thomas McGee and R.J. Robertson, The J.D. Films: Juvenile Delinquency in the Movies (Jefferson:
McFarland & Company, Inc., 1982), 59.
23

Chapter One: A Brief History of the Juvenile Delinquency Film

Introduction: Juvenile Delinquency and Film History
Given the persistent anxieties that occur in American society where its young people are
concerned, it should be no surprise that juvenile delinquents have a long history onscreen. The
cinematic story of the young boy or girl who rejects the society of their parents in favor of a
world of transgression, crime, and oftentimes violence has recurred many times over the decades.
And as with any other topic taken up by the American film industry, the representation of this
story has depended on two important factors. One was American society itself, which dictated
which particular aspects of adolescence were of concern to people at any given time, and which
laid out which discourses were desirable, and acceptable, for the films to take up. The other,
interrelated factor was the shape of the filmmaking industry, which determined the processes by
which the films were funded, produced, and marketed, and which had to consider how its
treatment of juvenile delinquency onscreen reflected on the place of movies themselves within
American culture.
Given their longevity, the history of juvenile delinquency films can be paralleled not only
with changes in American society regarding the perception of young people and the problem of
controlling their behavior, but with transformations in the business of filmmaking in the United
States. Indeed, the seismic transformation that the Hollywood studio system underwent around
the middle of the twentieth century had significant repercussions for how troubled adolescents
were depicted onscreen. Thus, an understanding of juvenile delinquency films requires not only
social context, but an understanding of how the film business in America changed over time.
New production methods, combined with shifting audience demographics, resulted in major
24

differences between the delinquency films produced before and after World War II. Furthermore,
there was also significant variance among the different delinquency films being produced in any
specific historical moment; not only did the individual Hollywood studios often take distinct
approaches to representing the subject, but juvenile delinquency also epitomizes – perhaps more
so than any other type of subject matter – the differences and similarities between the major
Hollywood studios and the producers of so-called exploitation films.
This chapter will examine the history of the juvenile delinquency film in American
cinema from the early 1930s to the end of the 1950s. It will contextualize the films produced
during this period in terms of economic and business-related developments in the film industry,
demonstrating how onscreen delinquency adapted to these transformations at the same time it
was adapting to social change. This history will show that delinquency films did not offer a
single, consistent, coherent viewpoint on the issue, but were instead subject to the dynamic,
diverse, and frequently-changing demands of a film industry that was itself dynamic, diverse,
and frequently-changing. It will also show how different filmmakers, at different historical
moments, worked to exploit the controversy around juvenile delinquency while simultaneously
disavowing responsibility for causing the problem in the first place. Juvenile delinquency as a
subject matter always presented both enticements and potential pitfalls to filmmakers, and these
pitfalls were negotiated in a number of different ways throughout the decades. Furthermore, by
grounding the delinquency film in its historical determinations, this chapter will provide context
for the more detailed examinations of individual films later in the project.
This chapter will divide the delinquency films produced during this period into four
distinct units. The first is those of pre-World War II Hollywood, in which anxieties surrounding
the effects of the Great Depression combined with ongoing production trends to create an
25

unprecedented explosion of delinquency-themed cinema. These films sought to posit solutions to
the social problem of delinquency, and were often influenced by contemporary moral pressures
being exerted on Hollywood. These film will be contrasted with those of the classical
exploitation industry: a group of low-budget film producers who defined their product as the
material that the Hollywood studios refused to deal with. These films dealt with delinquency in
terms of illicit subjects like drug abuse and premarital sex, though they are also replete with
didactic moralizing.
The third unit is the films of post-WWII Hollywood, which grew out of the
transformations that American society underwent following the war, including the development
of a distinct teenage culture. These films reflected dramatic shifts in the popular discourse
surrounding juvenile delinquency, as well as Cold War-era concerns about cinematic subject
matter. Finally, coinciding with the decline of classical exploitation during the 1950s was the rise
of the teenpic: produced by low-budget independents working on the margins of the studio
system, teenpics were aimed squarely at teenage audiences, to the exclusion of their parents.
These films frequently dealt with delinquency as their subject matter, with both differences from
and parallels with the major studios. As this chapter will show, the changes and the constants
which are seen between the different iterations of the delinquency film reveal a great deal about
social attitudes towards delinquency, as well as about Hollywood business practices where
potentially controversial material is concerned. The story of juvenile delinquency onscreen
during these years is, in many ways, reflective of the story of American cinema and of the
changes it underwent during the same period.

26

“Enemies of Society:” Delinquency in Pre-World War II Hollywood
Although misbehaving adolescents made occasional appearances in films during the
silent era, it was in the 1930s that juvenile delinquency emerged as a major theme in motion
pictures. This is, in large part, due to the work of a single studio: Warner Bros. Throughout the
decade, Warner Bros. established a reputation for dealing with controversial, “ripped-from-the-
headlines” social problems in their films, such as organized crime and institutional corruption.
Tino Balio attributes this tendency not so much to social concern on the part of the Warners, but
to the fact that the studio had been hit particularly hard by the Great Depression. Warner Bros.
lacked the large stable of highly-paid A-list movie stars possessed by other majors like MGM,
which could boast of having “more stars than there are in heaven,” and needed a relatively
inexpensive way of generating public interest. “What better way to keep costs down,” asks Balio,
“than to produce fast-paced topicals based on stories plucked out of the day’s news?”
1

As such, juvenile delinquency became one of the topical subjects that Warner Bros. chose
to examine. Like many of the other topics selected by the studio, the selection was partially
inspired by the depression itself. The dominant sociological opinions of the period stated that
delinquency was the product of poverty, particularly among those, such as immigrants, who had
not yet assimilated into the American working class. Sociologists Clifford Shaw and Henry D.
McCay, in their study of juvenile delinquency in Chicago, write that “the groups producing the
most alleged delinquents are, in every instance, those most recently segregated into the areas of
lower economic status, as a result of the ongoing processes of American city life.”
2
Due to the
Great Depression, however, poverty was on the rise, raising the possibility that more young
people were at risk for delinquency.
27

This concern provides the premise for Warner Bros.’ 1933 film Wild Boys of the Road.
Modeled on newspaper accounts of adolescents forced by poverty to leave home and become
hobos, Wild Boys follows Eddie Smith (Frankie Darrow) and his friends as they set off in search
of work and shelter. It’s notable that, unlike most other cinematic delinquents in the 1930s, Eddie
is not the product of a slum. Eddie grew up in a comfortable middle-class household, but when
his father is laid off due to the Depression, Eddie begins to see himself as a burden on his family.
After making several selfless sacrifices, including selling his beloved car, Eddie finally decides
to leave home to look for work. The delinquents in this film, many of whom are downwardly
mobile middle-classers like Eddie, are not really “bad,” but are forced by their circumstances to
become petty criminals. They are branded “enemies of society” for their actions, but the film
depicts society, in the form of adults, as the true villains. Adults are seen harassing and beating
the kids when they attempt to ride freight trains or set up a homeless colony, sexually assaulting
a young girl, and using the kids as patsies for their own illegal activities. In the end, though, a
benevolent judge saves the day, offering to find Eddie a job and confidently predicting the end of
the Depression, which will allow Eddie to return home. The film ends by reaffirming the
viewer’s faith in authority figures, but its entire runtime is devoted to reassuring them that there
was never any reason to doubt its children in the first place.
Another factor in Warner Bros.’ interest in delinquency was in the subject’s connection to
the gangster film. In the early 1930s, the studio produced a highly lucrative cycle of gangster
pictures which included Little Caesar (1931) and The Public Enemy (1931). Gangsters and
juvenile delinquents were frequently linked in 1930s films, with gangsters portrayed as grown-up
delinquents who represented a possible future for wayward adolescents. One notable example of
this connection is The Mayor of Hell (1933). Released four months prior to Wild Boys of the
28

Road, Mayor stars James Cagney, a frequent actor in Warner Bros. gangster films, as racketeer
and gangster Patsy Gargan, who is given a cushy job as deputy commissioner of a reform school
as a political reward. The young hoodlums who inhabit the school, in contrast to Wild Boys, are
all products of impoverished upbringings, and this is pointed to as the reason for their
delinquency. In one early scene, a group of boys are sentenced to the reform school for robbing a
candy store. Each boy is interviewed by the judge along with a parent; in each case, the parent is
shown to be either abusive, neglectful, or otherwise unable, due to their poverty, to provide a
positive home life for their son. The film suggests that class status is the primary reason for
delinquency, but it also blames institutional reasons as well. The mother of one boy, Jimmy
(Frankie Darro again), begs the judge not to send her son to reform school, claiming that her
older son was sent there and emerged as a murderer. The judge ignores her pleas and sentences
him anyway.
As deputy commissioner, Gargan sees firsthand the factors that hardened Jimmy’s
brother. The warden gives the boys inferior food and comforts, and he employs cruel
punishments to keep them in line. The plight of these working-class boys had fallen beneath the
notice of previous supervisors. Gargan, however, empathizes with the boys because they remind
him of his own childhood; he resolves to take over administration of the school himself, not only
improving conditions but entrusting the boys with responsibility for their own conduct. The
respect of an authority figure seemed to be all the boys needed, as they immediately form a
functional society within the school. In spite of its differing class politics, Mayor resembles Wild
Boys in arguing that abuses of adult authority are responsible for the defiant behavior of
wayward youths, and that kindness and understanding are all that are needed to begin to repair
the problem of delinquency. Nevertheless, Gargan’s status as a gangster allows his patriarchal
29

authority to be colored by rebellious nonconformity with the larger society. The film’s implicit
message seems to be that, if it takes a gangster to solve juvenile delinquency, then the country’s
institutional response to the issue has significant problems.
During the same period in which Wild Boys and Mayor were released, Hollywood was
facing a significant challenge on moralistic grounds. On one front, religious leaders, led by well-
coordinated Catholic organizations, attacked the industry for what they perceived as a general
lack of morality. At the same time, sociologists, educators, and other intellectuals expressed
concern about the cinema’s ability to influence the behavior of young people, and about whether
that influence was being exerted in the wrong direction. In 1935, Henry James Forman published
his book Our Movie Made Children, which purported to summarize the findings of the Payne
Fund Studies; these studies had attempted to scrutinize the effect of the cinema on young minds.
Forman’s book, in fact, was a polemical attack on the film industry, laying blame for juvenile
delinquency largely at the feet of the Hollywood producers. He declared that “the road to
delinquency, in a few words, is heavily dotted with movie addicts, and obviously, it needs no
crusaders or preachers or reformers to come to this conclusion.”
3
Forman argues that, whereas
adults have the mental capacity to overcome negative influences in their media, children do not,
and adults therefore have the responsibility to control the influences their children are exposed
to: “So far as concerns adults, they are their own masters to choose as they wish. Children,
however, are another matter. They deserve to be imbued with the best ideals that civilization
affords.”
4

One year prior to the publication of Forman’s book, The Motion Picture Producers and
Distributors of America (MPPDA) had established the Production Code Administration (PCA)
under Joseph Breen to enforce the Motion Picture Production Code. The Code had been in place
30

since 1930, but was largely ignored by the studios until the formation of the PCA in 1934. The
decision to actually enforce the code, and to require all films released in Hollywood to be
approved by the PCA, was a response to the many criticisms being leveled against the industry
during the early 1930s. Yet the PCA represented less of a capitulation on the studios’ part than
an active attempt to redefine the industry’s image in the public eye. The studios had long
attempted, through the MPPDA, to cultivate an image of social responsibility. The Production
Code features a section which discusses the movies’ “special moral obligations,” which exist on
the grounds that “motion pictures attract all classes of people in small communities as well as
large cities” and that “the mobility, popularity, accessibility, emotional appeal, vividness,
straightforward presentation of fact in the film make for more intimate contact with a larger
audience and for greater emotional appeal.”
5
The decision to actively enforce the Code signaled
that the studios were serious about these “special moral obligations.”
These obligations were particularly strong where children were concerned. As early as
1922, the year he became president of the MPPDA, Will Hays made a statement which seems to
predict Forman’s book more than a decade later: that the film industry has a responsibility to
protect “that sacred thing, the mind of a child… that clean, virgin thing, that unmarked slate,”
and that it should show “the same responsibility, the same care about the impressions made upon
it, that the best clergyman or the most inspired teacher would have.”
6
The PCA attempted to
demonstrate that Hollywood had no intention of warping the minds of impressionable children,
but instead intended to employ its influence in concord with positive, traditional authority.
Robert Sklar writes that, while the Hollywood film industry initially positioned itself in
opposition to the dominant American culture, the film moguls “gave up their adversary stance
because they suddenly found greater opportunities for profit and prestige in supporting
31

traditional American culture, in themselves becoming its guardians.”
7
Like most business
decisions made in Hollywood, the choice to embrace the Production Code was motivated by
economics: it simply made more sense to embrace the conservative mainstream than to resist it.
Moreover, the actual effects of enforcing the Code did not fundamentally change how
Hollywood made movies. Thomas Doherty argues that the PCA “merely codified a set of
narrative and thematic requirements that most commercial moviemakers observed anyway.”
8

The studios, cognizant of the fact that excessive controversy would be dangerous to its business
model, already self-censored to some degree. Thus, the enforcement of the Code had mixed
results on the industry, with some aspects of moviemaking changed and other unaffected.
One notable change was that the gangster protagonist disappeared from American screens
for a few years after the PCA was established. Gangsters had often been pointed to as a
particularly dangerous influence, and their relegation to supporting roles as unsympathetic
villains in films like G Men (Warner Bros., 1935) signaled that the industry was making a real
effort to eliminate potential negative influences on children’s behavior. Not coincidentally, the
figure of the juvenile delinquent stopped appearing in Hollywood films during roughly the same
period.
9
Although delinquents were ostensibly removed from movies in order to prevent them
from being a potential negative influence, this move also seems to imply that Hollywood’s
response to being accused of fostering juvenile delinquency was to pretend that the problem
didn’t exist.
Delinquency, however, would return to Hollywood film in 1937. Dead End’s conditions
of production differed from those of the earlier delinquency films in two significant ways. One
was that it was based on a successful Broadway play, which made the film a safer bet than one
based on an original property. The other was that it was not produced by Warner Bros., or by any
32

of the other major studios: it was produced independently by Samuel Goldwyn and distributed by
United Artists. As an independent, Goldwyn was still bound by the production code, but because
he did not have a studio brand to protect he could feel confident in taking greater risks with his
subject matter.
Dead End presents significant similarities and differences with previous delinquency
films like The Mayor of Hell. Delinquency is once again depicted as the result of environment:
no explanation for the central delinquent gang’s petty crimes is offered beyond the fact that they
grew up in poverty. The film also features a gangster character who himself grew up in the same
conditions, but unlike Patsy Gargan his identification with the boys is not depicted as a
motivation for positive regeneration. “Baby Face” Martin (Humphrey Bogart) instead represents
a dark potential future for the film’s delinquents. Although Martin is a successful criminal, he is
a pathetic figure in the film: having returned to his old neighborhood for a visit, he is rejected as
a monster by both his mother and his former girlfriend, and at the end of the film he is shot to
death during a bungled kidnapping attempt. The hero of the film is another resident of the slum,
Dave Connell (Joel McCrea), who strives to make money legitimately and who attempts to
shield the boys from Martin’s influence.
The film presents a clear dichotomy between good and evil. In the end, Martin is
destroyed and Connell succeeds in convincing the leader of the delinquent gang to turn himself
in for a previous case of attempted robbery and assault. The film symbolically resolves the moral
conflict over the boys’ futures, but solving the problem symbolically allows the film to sidestep a
deeper discussion of juvenile delinquency. Indeed, the film is arguably less concerned with
social criticism than it is with creating gritty images of slum life. Janet Staiger argues that the
film was acclaimed by critics and audiences not for “confronting norms” or for offering “any
33

solution to the poverty it portrayed,” but because the boys themselves were “viewed as unusually
realistic images among the ‘harmless entertainment’ usually offered by Hollywood.”
10
Dead End
offered a method by which Hollywood could deal with delinquency onscreen while evading
deeper questions about the causes of delinquency and, by extension, the studios’ possible
culpability for them.
Following the success of Dead End, juvenile delinquency began to reappear in
Hollywood movies. These films “reinforced the belief that juvenile delinquents were spawns of
the slums, nurtured into a life of crime by hardcore adult delinquents.”
11
Whereas Wild Boys of
the Road suggested that even middle-class kids could become delinquents if deprived of
monetary comforts, post-Code Hollywood chose to “restrict these problems to the inner city.”
12

These films suggested that only a lifetime in poverty and exposure to the negative influences that
are specific to the slum were sufficient to turn children into juvenile delinquents. Though never
stated out loud, the implication of this formula seems clear: in view of the terrible conditions of
everyday life in the slums, what sense did it make to blame juvenile delinquency on something
as trivial as a movie?
The six boys who played the delinquent gang in Dead End were quickly signed to
contracts by Warner Bros.; christened “The Dead End Kids,” they appeared in six films for the
studio over the next two years. Their first Warner Bros. film, Crime School (1938), was a virtual
remake of The Mayor of Hell, though with some important differences. In a scene taken almost
verbatim from Mayor, the boys are called before a judge alongside their parents, who show
themselves to be unable to properly care for their children due to their poverty. The boys are
sentenced to reform school, where they are immediately abused and mistreated. Once again, the
inmates are saved by a benevolent interloper, but this time it is not a gangster: the
34

superintendent, Mark Braden (Humphrey Bogart) is just an official who is trying to do his job.
As such, Braden’s takeover of the school lacks the subversive edge of Patsy Gargan’s. According
to Jerome Christensen, the film imagines “a penal system in which reform is possible, not
through heroic efforts but through the exertion of bureaucrats who perform their duties
responsibly.” By doing so, the film does not have to imagine “a world where the slums are
cleaned up or where reform schools are unnecessary.”
13
Despite following Mayor’s plot closely,
Crime School suggests much more faith in American institutions and traditional authority, as is
reflective of the post-Code delinquency film generally.
The Dead Ends Kids’ next film, Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), borrows some of its plot
points from Dead End, though with some notable differences. Once again, two adults who had
themselves grown up in poverty symbolize two contrasting paths for the young delinquents:
Father Jerry Connelly (Pat O’Brien) is a priest who works with wayward young boys, while his
childhood friend William “Rocky” Sullivan (James Cagney) is a gangster who befriends the
Dead End Kids. Sullivan is a cross between Patsy Gargan and “Pretty Boy” Nelson: he’s a
ruthless criminal, yet he’s also sympathetic and genuinely seems to care about the boys. When
Connelly warns Sullivan about the latter’s negative influence on the kids and refers to it as “a
kind of hero worship,” the claim seems to parallel real-life charges that the cinema provides
negative role models for children – particularly in the form of gangsters, who were just
beginning to reappear as onscreen protagonists around this time. Thus, the film’s climax deals
with the question of how to destroy Sullivan’s influence on the kids. With Sullivan awaiting
execution for murder, Connelly convinces him to act like a coward, thereby violating his own
code of masculinity in the boys’ eyes. In doing so, the film self-reflexively points to the film’s
35

industry’s own efforts to transform its own image by eliminating negative influences on
children.
14

The same year that Warner Bros. released Angels, rival studio MGM released a juvenile
delinquency film of their own. Boys Town starred Spencer Tracy as crusading real-life priest
Father Flanagan, who founds the titular reform school as a place where wayward boys can form
their own self-governed society and improve their conduct by learning responsibility and self-
reliance. Mickey Rooney plays Whitey Marsh, a seemingly irredeemable delinquent whose
criminal brother represents his dark potential future. Unlike Dead End and Angels, though, the
criminal element has almost no screen time; instead, the film focuses primarily on Flanagan’s
rehabilitation efforts. Christensen notes that this represents a deliberate attempt by MGM to
distinguish its film from those of Warner Bros., noting that materials that MGM provided to
exhibitors contrasts Boys Town with the “kids’ crime school” pictures of rival studios; the
material claims that Boys Town is “not a crime school nor a place where vicious juvenile
delinquents are confined. . . . Boys Town is a story of moral, physical and spiritual juvenile
regeneration.”
15
By emphasizing the “regeneration” angle, MGM was clearly making the
argument that its product was more respectable, and less sensational, than Warner’s.
Nevertheless, Boys Town does no more than the Dead End Kids films did to probe the
causes of delinquency. Christensen writes that “the social conditions for juvenile delinquency are
characterized negatively, indeed, almost entirely by a single negative: the absence of parents.”
16

Flanagan’s boys, each of whom comes from an impoverished background, lack the family
structure that, the film argues, is essential for boys to grow up properly. This formulation has
additional resonance in light of Mickey Rooney’s casting. Rooney had already established
himself in the role of Andy Hardy – a character that he would play 15 times between 1937 and
36

1946. Thomas Schatz wrote of the Hardy series that, in seeking to satisfy the public’s “longing
for the naïve innocence of small-town life, the stories celebrated home and family and, especially
once Rooney’s character took hold, the myriad rites of male adolescent passage.”
17
Andy Hardy
epitomizes the way that, in contrast to the working-class juvenile delinquents, the children of the
middle class were idealized in Hollywood. Because Andy has a loving family, a strong-but-fair
father figure, and a wholesome community, he never has to deal with a problem worse than a
complicated love life. When Whitey Marsh is provided with these same things by Flanagan and
the Boys Town community, he transforms by the end of the film into another Andy Hardy,
proving Flanagan’s dictum that “there’s no such thing as a bad boy.”
Interest in juvenile delinquency onscreen, at least in terms of it being a pressing social
issue, began to taper off by the end of the 1930s. The Dead End Kids continued appearing in
films, but as the title of their fifth Warner Bros. film, The Angels Wash Their Faces (1939),
suggests, they had begun to move away from the gritty realism of their earlier features. The
group later moved to Monogram and were rechristened The East Side Kids and, later, The
Bowery Boys, remaining active until 1958, though with changing lineups. It didn’t take long,
though, for their films to lose their seriousness: by 1943’s Ghosts on the Loose (Monogram),
they had gone from committing petty crimes to survive in their brutal neighborhoods, to
thwarting Nazi secret agents who were disguising themselves as poltergeists. With American
attention focused on World War II, after all, there was little demand for films examining the
country’s social problems. Nevertheless, the anxieties spawned by the war and its aftermath
would give birth to a new, and even more controversial, cycle of juvenile delinquency pictures
within a few years.

37

“Youthful Desires:” Delinquency in Classical Exploitation Cinema
At the same time that the juvenile delinquent was appearing in Hollywood film, there was
another film business turning out movies with a very different take on the delinquent. The
exploitation film industry was made up of a small number of independent film producers whose
output was completely separate from the Hollywood studios. They existed principally to fill a
gap in what the studios were offering at the time: illicit material that was forbidden or, at least,
frowned upon. The exploiters had their own set of norms and conventions, which were designed
to differentiate themselves from Hollywood while still mitigating the controversy inspired by
their subject matter, and these norms and conventions were what dictated the industry’s take on
delinquency.
Economic incentive to push the boundaries of taste and acceptability has always existed
in the cinema. Eric Schaefer notes that Damaged Goods, a cautionary tale about venereal disease
that was released in 1914, represents perhaps the earliest example of what is now considered to
be an exploitation film.
18
More such films quickly followed from filmmakers who were willing
to shed the label of respectability in order to service interests that were not satisfied by larger and
more upright producers. The exploitation film industry finally crystallized into what Schaefer
calls its “classical” era in response to the formation of the Hollywood studio system, which
codified standards of filmmaking in America and thereby provided a definition for what was
considered “mainstream.” This was furthered by the drafting of the Production Code in 1930 and
its enforcement by the PCA in 1934, providing more incentive for exploiters to push their
transgressive subject matter. Schaefer writes that “exploitation films literally exploited this state
of affairs by making pictures on almost all the topics forbidden by those mechanisms.”
19
Felicia
Feaster and Bret Wood add that the Production Code “defined the parameters of exploitation’s
38

most prolific decades and allowed exploitation to flourish as an alternative to its strictures.”
20
As
Hollywood ceded certain territory as being too controversial, exploitation was more than willing
to pick it up.
Schaefer locates five business practices that define the classical exploitation film:
First, their primary subject was a ‘forbidden’ topic… Second, classical exploitation films
were made cheaply, with extremely low production values, by small independent
firms…. Third, exploitation films were distributed independently…. Fourth, the films
were generally exhibited in theaters not affiliated with the majors…. Finally, in
comparison to the mainstream motion picture industry, relatively few prints of an
exploitation film were in release at any given time.
21

These practices resulted in cheap, unprofessional-looking films that could only be found in small
theaters; ones that could only exhibit films from the major studios that were late in their
commercial runs. As Feaster and Wood observe, exploitation films were “a rung or two below
the economic and respectability levels” of even “the so-called Poverty Row producers,” whose
sets and equipment were often leased by the exploiters after hours.
22
This strategy had its
advantages, though: low production values meant the films were inexpensive to make. In the
absence of stars and craftsmanship, their producers trusted the subject matter alone to draw in
audiences. Furthermore, exhibiting in small theaters meant that the majors did not have the
leverage to pressure the theaters to reject these films. In the 1930s, the major studios controlled
the biggest exhibitors, enabling them to put down any competition with their own big-budget
projects by restricting access to the best movie houses. Exploitation films, however, were cheap
enough and attractive enough to turn a profit even when playing only in small-time theaters.
The exploitation business model was bound to inspire ill feelings on the part of the
Hollywood studios. Richard B. Jewell wrote that the major studios “deplored these films” on the
grounds that they “played by a different set of censorship rules” and because “these shabby,
amateurish, often incoherent movies were regularly mistaken for their own product,” thereby
39

cheapening the studios’ highly-cultivated standards.
23
Because exploitation films existed so far
outside the Hollywood system, though, the major studios had no power to police them. Yet the
exploitation industry did provide benefits to Hollywood, as criticizing exploitation gave the
major studios a way to enhance their own standing as moral arbiters in a way that did not
compromise their own films. Schaefer writes that “the Hays Office and other elements in the
organized industry presented exploitation films as the antithesis of their product, in part to
deflect attention from mainstream movies that otherwise might have attracted negative
criticism.” Furthermore, attacking exploitation “served to present the MPPDA as an active
organization committed to keeping all American screens ‘clean.’”
24
Exploitation provided a foil
for the major studios which made them look moral and responsible by comparison.
Despite its transgressive status, the exploitation industry knew that it was bound to
encounter difficulties if it simply presented forbidden subject matter for its own sake. Schaefer
writes: “Occupying this liminal space – controversial without being strictly illegal, but far from
conventional – exploitation required explanation and justification.”
25
Typically, exploitation
films attempted to mitigate potential controversy by taking up the pretense of education. Alan
Betrock explains a common example of this strategy as follows:
Most producers prefaced their films with a serious statement, which offered the opinion
that such-and-such vice or problem really existed, and that his film was produced to
educate the public, and finally ending with the hope that this motion picture would aid in
stamping out the problem at hand. With this preface firmly in place, and often receiving
prime exposure in advertisements for the film, the picture could then go onto show all
kinds of scenes of vice and degradation, because ultimately it was all for the public
good.
26

Eric Schaefer states that the strategy of the “prefatory statement about the social or moral ill the
film claimed to combat” was known as the “square-up,” which served the larger exploitation
strategy of positioning “the audience, like the characters, as requiring education.”
27
Thus,
40

exploitation films presented themselves as being more than just a cheap thrill: they were, they
claimed, important aids in educating the uninformed populace about the serious problems that
faced themselves and their communities.
Appropriately, the worst sin that is possible for a character in the classical exploitation
film is being uninformed – especially in matters that concern one’s children. One area in which
exploitation’s delinquency films differed from Hollywood’s was the fact that the former had to
be “spiced up” with additional transgressive subject matter. This additional subject matter
generally fell into one of two categories: sexual delinquency (typically centering on adolescent
girls who become pregnant or contract a venereal disease due to immoral behavior) or drug
addiction (in which previously upstanding young men and women are corrupted into a life of
crime and degradation after smoking their first joint). Schaefer observes that these films
frequently contain the archetypal figures of the “Bad Parents.” He explains: “Bad Parents are
those who, through unreasonable modesty or self-centeredness, have failed to tell their children
about sex [or drugs], leaving them prey to the Corrupters of the world. Bad Parents are equated
with the forces of ignorance in society.”
28

One example of Bad Parents appears in the exploitation film The Road to Ruin. The film
was released as a silent picture in 1928 and remade as a talkie in 1934; the two versions share
identical plots and even the same lead actress (Helen Foster), though her character’s name
changes for some reason. Foster’s character is a respectable girl whose preoccupied parents are
guilty of “failing to give their daughter proper sex instruction and not reining in her youthful
desires.”
29
In a notable contrast with Hollywood delinquency pictures, the protagonist and her
family are depicted as middle-class, and remain middle-class for the duration of the film.
Exploitation films are not interested in sociological theories regarding the relation of delinquency
41

with poverty, nor are they interested in deflecting delinquency away from “respectable” white
middle-class families. In the world of exploitation films, delinquency is caused simply by lack of
education: the very thing that exploitation films purport to offer.
It is also notable that The Road to Ruin, like many exploitation films about delinquency,
centers on a female delinquent. Girls were almost entirely absent from Hollywood films about
delinquency during the same period; one notable exception being Wild Boys of the Road, in
which girls are seen joining the wayward young males by masquerading as boys. This difference
speaks to the greater controversy inherent in representing female delinquents onscreen,
particularly given that the delinquency of the young women in exploitation is almost always
represented as sex delinquency. The prevalence of female delinquents in exploitation speaks less
to an engagement with the problems of young woman than to a recognition of these characters’
salacious potential, and of the fact that it was a topic considered off limits by Hollywood.
Foster’s character in The Road to Ruin (Sally in the 1928 version; Ann in the 1934
version) is drawn into illicit sexual behavior due to her parents’ negligence. It begins with her
getting drunk and having sex with her boyfriend; naturally, this leads to her becoming the
mistress of a wealthy older man and attending sex parties at his house. After a police raid on one
of these parties, she is branded a “sex delinquent” by the juvenile court. Sally/Ann winds up
pregnant and dies as a result of a botched abortion. In the final scene, her parents beg their dying
daughter for forgiveness for having “failed you so utterly.” For this family, wisdom came too
late. As such, The Road to Ruin epitomizes exploitation’s strategy of appealing to young people
and adults alike by offering both thrills and instruction.
Drug-addicted delinquents were another common theme in exploitation. The famous cult
film Reefer Madness (1936) was also exhibited under the title of Tell Your Children; it offers a
42

cautionary tale about a gang of drug pushers and the three high school students that they get
addicted to marijuana. The students’ plight is blamed on the fact that their parents did not, in
fact, “tell their children.” Inevitably, all of the major characters die, go insane, or are incarcerated
for crimes committed under the influence of the drug. In Dwain Esper’s Marihuana, released the
same year, a group of white middle-class adolescents at a party have their harmless cigarettes
replaced with reefers by unscrupulous drug dealers. Ignorant of the dangers of the “giggle weed,”
their conduct becomes increasingly debauched until a girl drowns while skinny-dipping. Another
girl, who is totally ignored by her parents, has sex with her boyfriend while under the drug’s
influence and becomes pregnant; one thing leads to another and she ends up becoming an
underworld drug kingpin and baby-kidnapper.
Films about drug-addicted delinquents remained strong going into the postwar era. Drug
pictures like The Thrill That Kills (~1940s) were sold with tag lines like, “This picture is a lesson
for every teen-ager – and a warning for every parent!”
30
According to Schaefer, “Lack of
cohesion of the postwar nuclear family was often cited as a leading cause of drug use among
young people.”
31
In attempting to accommodate shifting social attitudes regarding the nuclear
family, the exploitation films come to mirror the mainstream delinquency films that would
follow, such as Rebel Without a Cause (Warner Bros., 1955), in which family troubles drive the
youthful Jim Stark to alcohol and alienation. The exploitation films, however, exaggerate the
effects of drugs to portray teenagers who have moved completely outside the bounds of civilized
behavior.
Indeed, the fact that the drug films present themselves as cautionary tales not only allow
them to establish an educational pretense, but also to knowingly eschew strict adherence to
reality. As such, the films were able to separate themselves from the “realistic” portraits of
43

delinquency that the major studios were releasing, which blamed environmental and
psychological factors for delinquency. Positioning themselves this way allowed the films to offer
easier answers (just keep the kids off drugs) and to permit the viewers a greater degree of
cognitive dissonance (the delinquents in this film are only that way because of drugs, not because
of any deeper social problems). This offered audiences a more pleasurable and self-affirming
way of reading the films. As Schaefer puts it, “The films were titillating shockers for adults and
parents who, while maintaining their moral indignation, could vicariously experience the
youthful abandon and abrogation of responsibility said to result from drug use.”
32
Paradoxically,
drugs allow the films to claim to be socially responsible, while at the same time distancing
themselves from the reality of the social problems believed to contribute to delinquency.
By the close of the 1950s, however, the classical exploitation film as it had previously
existed was coming to an end. The cause was transformations in the studio system that rendered
the old styles of exploitation obsolete. Specifically, the postwar era saw the major studios
become more amenable to controversial and graphic subject matter. Schaefer writes, “By the late
1950s, the lines that had once divided exploitation film’s subject matter from releases of the
majors were far less distinct.”
33
At the same time, a new group of minor studios were discovering
new strategies for making low-budget films profitable.

“No Dead End Kid:” Delinquency in Post-World War II Hollywood
The previously-mentioned willingness of the major Hollywood studios to tackle more
controversial and graphic subject matter came about as the result of significant changes to the
industry as a whole. Thomas Schatz writes that “after a decade of growth and consolidation in
the 1930s, there was an equally significant diffusion of power and resources during the 1940s.”
34

44

There were two reasons for this: the end of vertical integration and the shrinking of the movie
audience. During the 1930s, the studios’ power came from the fact that, at least as far as the Big
Five (Paramount, MGM, Fox, Warner Bros., and RKO) were concerned, they controlled the
production, distribution, and exhibition of all their pictures. In the 1948 United States vs.
Paramount Pictures case before the Supreme Court, this arrangement was ruled an illegal
vertical monopoly. In 1949, Circuit Judge Augustus N. Hand declared that the studios would
have to divest themselves of their exhibition wings.
35
As such, the studios no longer had
guaranteed exhibition of their films.
This erosion of the studios’ powers cost them some of the leverage they had previously
used to keep their producers, directors, and performers in line. Many of these personnel began to
produce their own films independently, following a model that was now making more economic
sense. By 1960, said Schatz, the major studios “were primarily financing and distribution
companies for pictures that were ‘packaged’ by agents or independent producers – or worse yet,
by the stars and directors who had once been at the studios’ beck and call.”
36
The independents
were now able to choose their own projects without having to get prior approval from the
executives, meaning that they had greater freedom to follow their own interests in exploring a
larger range of subjects. The risk-averse studio heads had lost much of their ability to dictate the
industry’s approach to controversial topics.
At the same time the studios were losing their grip on the industry, the industry as a
whole was losing a large segment of its audience. This shrinkage can be attributed to changing
demographic patterns, as more middle-class adults moved to the suburbs after the war, and the
rise of competing leisure activities, especially television. The affluent were now more spread out,
diffusing the potential audiences for the movie palaces; moreover, the ability to watch television
45

from the comfort of one’s own home meant that fewer people were willing to make the trip.
According to Schatz, “With ‘suburban migration’ and the ‘baby boom’ came commercial
television and other shifts in patterns of media consumption, as moviegoing ceased to be a ritual
necessity for most Americans.”
37

The rise of the independent producer and the fall in movie attendance combined with
changes in the culture to erode Hollywood’s censorship standards. As Peter Lev states, “With the
number of North American movie spectators consistently dropping, studios and independent
producers were under pressure to find new, more sensational subjects and thus revive audience
interest.”
38
The end of vertical integration itself also weakened censorship standards: according
to Schatz, “theater divestiture would make the Code seal – and the Code itself – essentially
meaningless.”
39
“Meaningless” is perhaps an exaggeration, as abiding by the Code remained an
important way to demonstrate that filmmakers had the public’s best interests at heart. Still, the
studios had lost the ability to actively enforce the Code at the level of exhibition.
Moreover, these changes meant that PCA itself had reason to become more lenient. As
Jon Lewis has pointed out, “the PCA was also a subsidiary of the MPAA. That organization’s
primary objective was to support industry profitability.”
40
Thus, the PCA only had incentive to
police the industry as long as it was in the industry’s best interest. In the postwar era, with the
need to restore audience interest in movies outweighing the need to stave off controversy, the
PCA had good reason to loosen its restrictions. Indeed, when Joseph Breen’s tenure as head of
the PCA ended in 1954, he was replaced with the more permissive Geoffrey Shurlock. Robert
Sklar describes Shurlock as taking “the iconoclastic view that the code should not stand in the
way of scenes depicting real human behavior on the screen, if they were not gross or offensive to
46

audiences.”
41
Under Shurlock, Hollywood filmmakers could get away with more controversial
behavior onscreen, as long as that behavior was sufficiently realistic.
Taken together, these factors contributed to an industry that was willing to take more
risks on controversial subject matter, such as juvenile delinquency. At the same time, though,
other developments in American society required that the studios proceed with caution. With
public attention shifting from World War II to the Cold War in the late 1940s, the powers-that-be
were scrutinizing the nation’s purveyors of culture for possible subversive influences. Schatz
writes,
Various conservative institutions, from religious organizations like the Catholic Legion
of Decency and the Protestant Motion Picture Council to the state and local censorship
boards and even the U.S. Congress, sought to rein in Hollywood’s postwar ‘liberal’
inclinations by regulating subject matter.”
42

In 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities conducted hearings on Communism
in Hollywood. Afterwards, several personnel were unofficially blacklisted from working in the
industry. MPAA head “Eric Johnston argued… that ‘We’ll have no more films that show the
seamy side of American life,’ while the same year William Wyler suggested that in the ‘current
climate’ he would no longer be allowed to make The Best Years of Our Lives.”
43
Wyler’s film
had been criticized as subversive, in Drew Casper’s words, “because of its delineation of a
postwar America rife with problems.”
44

The Cold War environment meant that social criticism was now a particularly risky
subject for Hollywood cinema. This would continue well into the 1950s. Peter Lev notes that,
while the PCA ostensibly did not cover issues of politics, “the anticommunism of the 1950s was
so pervasive that the wall between moral and political regulation largely disappeared.”
45
Thus, at
the same time that Hollywood was gaining more freedom in terms of the morality of the content
in its movies, it was also facing greater restrictions than ever before on political commentary. As
47

such, filmmakers had to tread carefully, keeping any political messages or implications in their
films sufficiently oblique.
Around the same time, psychiatry and psychology had begun to appear more frequently
in films, due to rising interest in the subject among the populace. Some commentators felt that
this new interest was, in part, an attempt on the studios’ part to abdicate political responsibility
by ascribing problems in society to psychological, rather than social, causes. “To blacklisted
writer Walter Bernstein, psychology was in, social criticism was out.”
46
Peter Biskind offers his
own reading of Hollywood’s use of psychology: “If you were unhappy, it was because you were
neurotic or psychotic, not because society was unjust.”
47
However much truth there was to these
readings, psychology soon became a common subject in Hollywood films dealing with
potentially controversial subjects.
Few subjects in the postwar era were as potentially controversial as juvenile delinquency.
This was due not merely to the fact that delinquency itself was a subject of particular controversy
during this period, but to the fact that the film industry, as in the 1930s, was still being
scrutinized for its effects on youth. Moreover, it was now more difficult for movies to confine
their representations of delinquency to impoverished inner-city communities. The rise of teenage
culture, and with it the proliferation of clothing and musical styles that had previously been
associated exclusively with the working class and with African Americans, led many adults to
claim that delinquency was spreading to the white middle class. To them, the movies were one of
the likely transmitters of delinquent behavior. At the same time, the controversy surrounding the
subject offered the enticement of lucrative financial rewards for films that broached the topic.
Hollywood did attempt to capitalize on the delinquency subject, but its initial efforts were rather
tentative and quite disparate in how they approached the issue.
48

For most of the World War II years, onscreen delinquency had largely been confined to
the comedic and mostly harmless mischief of the East Side Kids and, later, the Bowery Boys.
Serious attempts to examine delinquency as a social problem did begin to reappear near the end
of the war, spurred by warning given by FBI head J. Edgar Hoover regarding “the effects of war-
induced social change.”
48
One example was RKO’s Youth Runs Wild (1944), made by producer
Val Lewton’s famous B-unit, which attempted to connect delinquent behavior to the stresses of
wartime. Richard B. Jewell writes that “the film pointed a guilty finger at the parents for failing
to provide necessary love and guidance to their offspring. But this central notion became
muddled in a scattershot of other sociological issues raised by the film.”
49
Indeed, the film, in
trying to incorporate a variety of discourses regarding the cause and treatment of delinquency,
comes off as uncertain about its message. For example, it suggests that delinquency is partly the
result of adolescents trying to grow up too quickly, as epitomized by the romantic relationship
between the young couple Frank and Sarah, which causes Frank to neglect his studies and turn to
crime to make money to pay for dates. When his family pressures the couple to break up,
however, it just makes the problem worse: Frank becomes even more problematic, and Sarah
ends up working in a burlesque house. Interestingly, the film seems to resemble 1930s
exploitation more than it does 1930s Hollywood in its depiction of middle-class delinquency
brought on by neglectful parents, though with considerably toned-down content. This, combined
with the film’s confused sociological messages, suggests that Hollywood filmmakers were
uncertain about how to approach the issue in an effective, yet safe, way.
The end of the war saw another lull in the production of serious films about delinquency,
until the release in 1949 of three notable delinquency films: Knock on Any Door (Columbia),
City Across the River (Universal), and Bad Boy (Allied Artists). The three films are notable not
49

only for the significant differences between them in their approaches to the delinquency subject,
but for the similarities which signal a clear break with the delinquency films of the 1930s.
Directed by Nicholas Ray, Knock on Any Door stars Humphrey Bogart as Andrew Morton, a
tough-but-compassionate lawyer who attempts to defend delinquent criminal Nick Romano
(John Derek) from a murder charge. City Across the River was based on Irving Shulman’s novel
The Amboy Dukes, and it follows a delinquent gang whose petty crimes and vandalism
eventually escalate into the accidental murder of a teacher. Bad Boy stars World War II-hero
Audie Murphy as Danny Lester, a violent criminal who is sent to a Boys Town-like ranch
community for rehabilitation.
Of the three film, Knock on Any Door is most notable for going against the
aforementioned trends in Cold War-era Hollywood. The film emphasizes the social criticism
angle, with Morton listing the wrongs dealt to Nick Romano by a society that was indifferent to
his family’s poverty and immigrant status. Although the film does make some use of psychology,
depicting Nick as a deranged sociopath, it argues that social injustice was to blame for this
psychological development. Nevertheless, the film does not absolve Nick himself of blame: he is
revealed to have actually committed the crime he is accused of, and he is shown refusing several
opportunities to better his life, instead allowing himself to become jaded and angry. A similar
approach is used by City Across the River. In this film, young men who feel disenfranchised by
mainstream society end up forming their own delinquent subculture in a gang. The film does not
employ the social criticism of Knock on Any Door, though, instead representing delinquency as
the natural result of growing up poor in the inner city. Once again, the film places some of the
blame on the boys themselves, with their refusal to report the accidental killing of their teacher
ultimately leading to one boy’s death. This is partly blamed on their subcultural group:
50

individually they might have turned themselves in, but as a unit they are committed against
“squealing.”
Knock and City both use delinquency to examine postwar society’s concern with “the
pockets of angry restlessness in urban slums,” though they follow different strategies in doing
so.
50
Bad Boy, on the other hand, is notable both for its emphasis on psychology and for
divorcing delinquent behavior from urban poverty. Danny Lester is depicted as psychologically
unbalanced due exclusively to his dysfunctional home life, rather than any kind of social
injustices. Moreover, that home life is represented as comfortably middle-class, with the narrator
explicitly stating that he’s “no Dead End Kid,” signaling a deliberate attempt to break with
previous poverty-focused delinquency films. The film evades controversy regarding social
criticism, but courts controversy in a new way: by reflecting the growing suspicion that
delinquency could arise within the white middle class.
The differences of approach among these three films illustrates the uncertainty that the
industry was feeling towards the juvenile delinquency subject, as does the fact that they were all
low-budget movies with relatively low profiles. One piece of common ground among the three
films, however, is indicative of a fundamental shift in how juvenile delinquency was being
represented onscreen. In most 1930s delinquency films, the crime committed by the delinquents
themselves were generally mild. The Dead End Kids, for example, might lift some trinkets,
rough up another kid, or talk back to adults; at worst, they might give an adult a mild injury in
the name of self-preservation. Ultimately, though, their perceived threat was less about the
crimes they committed than about the possibility they might grow up to become adult criminals
like the ones portrayed by Bogart and Cagney. On the other hand, Nick Romano and the gang
from City Across the River both end up killing an adult. Danny Lester doesn’t kill anyone, but he
51

does rob people at gunpoint, give out savage beatings, and engage in gunfights with the police.
In the postwar era, delinquents were increasingly being seen as potentially dangerous threats to
adult society in their own right.
Following 1949, juvenile delinquents continued to appear in scattered, low-budget film
which generally made little impact on the national consciousness. In 1953, however, onscreen
delinquency abruptly received a higher profile. According to James Gilbert, both Gallup polls
and surveys of popular magazine articles show a sharp increase in public concern over
delinquency starting in 1953. That same year, Columbia Pictures released the Stanley Kramer-
produced film The Wild One, starring Marlon Brando as Johnny Strabler, the youthful leader of
the Black Rebels: a wild and antiauthoritarian biker gang who stop off in the small town of
Wrightsville. Though they don’t break any laws, the gang’s uninhibited behavior results in
clashes with the townspeople, which escalate on both sides. Eventually, a group of townspeople
capture Johnny and beat him after mistakenly thinking he attacked a young townswoman. The
bikers are eventually told to get out of Wrightsville.
Although the bikers are arguably a bit old to be considered juvenile delinquents proper
(Brando was 29 when the film was released), the film “expressed the rebellious attitudes of the
younger generation” so effectively that it is often classed as a juvenile delinquency movie.
51
The
film was certainly interested in youthful disaffection, and it dealt with the issue differently than
prior delinquency movies had. As Jim Morton notes, the bikers were not stealing for survival or
motivated by the hardships of slum life: they “broke the rules just for the fun of it.”
52
The film
thus reflected the perception that youth culture was increasingly opposed to mainstream (white,
middle-class) culture.
52

To a greater extent than the delinquency films that preceded it, The Wild One courted
controversy. The initial draft of the script was rejected by the PCA on the grounds that
“teenagers might find the bikers’ conduct exciting and seek to emulate it.”
53
Clearly, the PCA
was worried that the film would be cited as proof of Hollywood’s negative influence on young
people. This fear was no doubt enhanced by the fact that the film presented the bikers as
sympathetic figures of identification; indeed, it seems as though they are the victims of the
paranoid and intolerant adults more so than the other way around. According to Andrew Dowdy,
the film “seemed to suggest that there was a latent fascism in middle America even more horrific
than the hipster nihilism of the Black Rebels.”
54
More than simply being indifferent to the
suffering of impoverished inner-city families, the adults in Wild One seem to be actively
attempting to repress dissenting worldviews.
In light of this, it is not surprising that the film met resistance from the PCA; what is
surprising is that it was allowed to go on the screen with only small changes from the original
script. Emphasis was “shifted to the violence of the gang” rather than the oppressiveness of the
adults, and “attempts to justify [the gang’s] attitude were blunted.”
55
Furthermore, Johnny
behaves like a “solid citizen” at the end of the film by rescuing his love interest, a young
townswoman, from his own gang, thereby offering “sufficient compensating moral values” for
the PCA.
56
Nevertheless, the sympathetic portrayal of the bikers, and the negative portrayal of
the adults, remains largely intact.
Unsurprisingly, the film generated controversy on its release. The Hollywood Reporter
warned that the film would appeal to “lawless juveniles who may well be inspired to go out and
emulate the characters portrayed.”
57
The British Board of Film Censors banned the film, out of
fear that the gang “would likely attract the admiration of British youth.”
58
These reactions were
53

in line with the predictions of the PCA, yet the fact remains that the organization allowed the
film it be released with minimal alterations. This example illustrates the changing nature of
censorship in Hollywood: though the PCA remained an authority on controversy, it was also
limited in its ability to prevent controversial films from being released.
The controversy around onscreen delinquency reached its peak in 1955, a year which saw
the release of arguably the two highest-profile delinquency films of the postwar era: MGM’s
Blackboard Jungle and Warner Bros.’ Rebel Without a Cause. These films differed in significant
ways not only from The Wild One, but from one another as well, indicating that Hollywood was
still uncertain about how best to deal with the delinquency issue onscreen. What they did not
suggest any uncertainty of, on the other hand, was the fact that juvenile delinquency was an issue
worth exploiting. Blackboard and Rebel were both high-profile films that suggested a high
degree of commitment from their respective studios to the delinquency subject matter. The two
films would epitomize, in their own time and to this day, the relationship between Hollywood
and youthful rebellion.
Blackboard Jungle stars Glenn Ford as Richard Dadier, a World War II veteran who
takes a job teaching at inner-city North Manual High School. The working-class, racially and
ethnically-mixed students are defiant and disrespectful of authority, but Dadier is determined to
get through to them. Dadier’s struggle for the hearts and minds of his students comes down to a
battle with irredeemable delinquent Artie West (Vic Morrow) over African-American student
Gregory Miller (Sidney Poitier). Miller eventually sides with Dadier and West is presumably
expelled, allowing the film to end with the promise of improvement.
In some ways, Blackboard Jungle is a throwback to earlier delinquency films. The film’s
protagonist and central figure of identification, Dadier, is a social reformer searching for a
54

solution to delinquency, resembling reformers from previous delinquency films such as Boys
Town’s Father Flanagan. The film also resembles City Across the River in its portrayal of violent
inner-city high-schoolers who are a threat to their teachers’ safety. Though no teachers are killed
in Blackboard, one female teacher is nearly raped and Dadier himself is beaten up by West and
his followers. At the same time, the film also breaks new ground for the delinquency film. For
one thing, it examines racial issues more overtly than virtually any other delinquency film of the
postwar era, even if that examination is not particularly deep. Miller feels that his race will keep
him from entering the middle class, but Dadier dismisses his concerns, assuring him that racism
is no longer the impediment it once was. In siding with Dadier, Miller symbolically embraces the
values of the white middle-class, implying the hopes of one day entering the middle class
himself. Blackboard also differs from previous delinquency films in its realistic depiction of teen
culture, particularly its use of rock ‘n’ roll music at the beginning and end of the picture. This
allowed for greater identification between the teenagers onscreen and those in the audience,
despite the fact that the adult was the ostensible hero of the film.
Directed by Nicholas Ray, Rebel Without a Cause stars James Dean as Jim Stark, a
frustrated and aimless young man who becomes friends with fellow misfits Judy (Natalie Wood)
and Plato (Sal Mineo). All three are disturbed by their dysfunctional middle-class families and
all three act out as a result. Jim takes part in a dangerous “Chickie Run” with another boy, Buzz
Gunderson; Buzz is killed, and Buzz’ gang pursues Jim and his friends out of fear they will talk.
The situation escalates and eventually Plato, who has brought a gun with him, is killed by the
police. The film ends with Jim’s father promising to be better for him.
Where Rebel most clearly differs from other delinquency films, including Blackboard, is
in the class status of its central delinquents. Jim, Judy, and Plato are all middle-class kids, with
55

their problems stemming not from the harsh conditions of inner-city poverty, but from their
neurotic relationships with their parents. Rebel epitomizes the public’s fear that delinquency is
increasingly becoming a middle-class phenomenon. The film also emphasizes psychology, as
Jim, Judy, and Plato all demonstrate mental confusion and anguish as a result of their parents’
treatment of them. Indeed, the film resembles Bad Boy’s portrait of a mentally disturbed middle-
class delinquent. Unlike Danny Lester, however, Jim is not a violent psychopath. Indeed,
whereas most postwar delinquency films up to this point, including Blackboard, had depicted
delinquents as a dangerous threat to adults, Rebel’s delinquents are primarily dangerous to
themselves. Jim behaves self-destructively, getting drunk and getting into fights; Buzz is killed
as a result of the reckless masculinity demanded of his role as gang leader; Plato is viewed as a
threat by the police, but ultimately he is the one who is killed by them. The film suggests that the
real threat of juvenile delinquency – at least, middle-class delinquency – is aimed not at adults,
but squarely at the teens themselves.
Both Blackboard and Rebel were sold as as films about juvenile delinquency, embracing
the subject’s inherent controversy. The marketing campaign for The Wild One avoided reference
to delinquency and youth gangs, instead playing up Marlon Brando’s starring role.
59
Blackboard
Jungle, on the other hand, featured taglines like “A drama of teen-age terror! They turned a
school into a jungle!” Posters for Rebel Without a Cause featured lines like “Warner Bros.
challenging drama of today’s teenage violence!” and “the bad boy from a good family.” At the
same time, the films can be seen employing strategies to mitigate the controversy. Blackboard
Jungle, for example, took a page from classical exploitation by employing a “square-up:” the
film begins with a “written foreword declaring that the school depicted in the film was not your
typical American high school” in what Drew Casper called a “sop to HUAC.”
60
That MGM
56

would employ a technique so strongly linked to the hated exploitation industry suggests a degree
of self-awareness regarding the exploitative subject matter of its own film.
As with The Wild One, both films were approved by the PCA. Geoffrey Shurlock later
stated of Blackboard that “if I tried to block the movie solely because it dealt with juvenile
delinquency, I would be saying that movies must not deal with contemporary problems.”
61
His
statement implies that the social redeeming value of delinquency-themed films outweighs their
unstated potential dangers as corrupting influences. Many were not convinced by his
justification. Shurlock “would ultimately receive more criticism for his approval of The
Blackboard Jungle than for any other film he endorsed during his initial five years as Code
director.”
62
With the release of Rebel, as with Blackboard, “the MPAA was the focus of furious
reaction to the film.”
63
The two films served as clear evidence of the organization’s declining
ability to regulate content onscreen. For decades, the PCA had symbolized the industry’s
commitment to policing its own films; now, with the actual power of the PCA in decline,
juvenile delinquency films were posing a significant challenge to that perception.
Criticism of the films frequently invoked Cold War ideology, claiming that they damaged
efforts to defend the American way of life overseas. The MPAA worried about displaying the
films “in foreign markets where, it was feared, any negative portrayal of the United States would
incite anti-American feelings.”
64
Los Angeles Times reviewer Philip Scheuer warned that
Blackboard Jungle could damage the nation’s cause in foreign countries, “particularly if it ever
fell into Communist hands.”
65
The American Legion voted Blackboard the movie “that hurt
America the most in foreign countries in 1955.”
66
Such criticisms are reflective of the same
social pressures that were leveled against films like The Best Years of Our Lives; they reflect the
belief that exposing the country’s social problems ran counter to the nation’s need to provide a
57

strong, positive front in the ideological struggle of the Cold War. Thus, attacks against high-
profile delinquency movies were not limited to concerns over their potential negative influences
on young people, but also incorporated political criticisms that the films undermined America’s
national identity.
Nevertheless, concern over the films’ influence on teens was still a significant part of the
criticism. This found inspiration in the fact that teenagers made up a significant portion of the
audience for both films. Thomas Doherty notes that though both were “purportedly adult films,”
they “were embraced enthusiastically by the nation’s young.”
67
Given the conduct of the teenage
characters in both films, it is not surprising that teenage interest in the films would be interpreted
threateningly. James Gilbert writes that reactions to the films “provided a glimpse of the
audience division between generations and cultures.”
68
Richard Staehling puts it another way:
“Appropriately enough, since the pictures were serious and intended for adult audiences, all the
adults did was bitch.”
69

If the pitfalls of making high-profile delinquency films like Blackboard and Rebel were
obvious, then the rewards were equally so. Both films saw “box-office grosses of over five
million dollars.”
70
Blackboard Jungle, in fact, proved to be MGM’s “most successful release in
nearly two years.”
71
The controversial subject matter of the two films, combined with their
ability to attract teenage audiences, proved to be a lucrative combination. Yet it was also a
dangerous combination, as the success of the two films with teenagers provided perpetual fuel to
the adults’ outrage, who felt that this meant that more teenagers were being exposed to negative
influences. Indeed, the success of these two films would help turn the attention of the arbiters of
American culture towards Hollywood and its perceived relationship to juvenile delinquency.
58

By this time, the industry was not unaccustomed to defending itself from delinquency-
related concerns. These defenses often rested on both the MPAA’s cultivation of beneficial
political relationships, and on ability to project the image, thanks in part to the PCA, as a positive
culture institution that had the best interests of the public at heart. A useful case study is given by
James Gilbert, who describes the industry’s relationship to the Continuing Committee on the
Prevention and Control of Delinquency, formed by Attorney General Tom C. Clark in 1946 and
under the leadership of Executive Secretary Eunice Kennedy. The Committee was created to
study the possible causes of juvenile delinquency, including the effect of the mass media on
children. The film industry “took a special interest in the deliberations” of the Committee, as a
judgment “that the media were implicated in causing delinquency would… be unacceptable”
given the public concern surrounding the issue.
72

The film industry, though, had worked to cultivate friendly relationship with the
government, and had succeeded in part due to its cooperation during World War II, during which
it turned out a series of positive, patriotic films. President Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed that
“the American motion picture is one of our most effective mediums in informing and
entertaining our citizens.”
73
This relationship, though, could take on contradictory appearances:
at the same time that “Hollywood films were deemed a valuable means of promoting
Americanism overseas by the State Department and other agencies,” Congress was also accusing
“the studios of employing political subversives and of being overly critical of the American way
of life.”
74
Still, Hollywood’s political clout helped it to overcome threats where delinquency was
concerned. Eunice Kennedy actually invited the industry to help with the promotion of the
industry’s conference on delinquency in September 1948. The industry used this opportunity to
send representatives to the panel on mass media, resulting in the panel becoming deadlocked
59

over the issue of the movies’ influence. The industry continued to use its role in helping with the
Committee’s publicity to subtly shape its agenda. Ultimately, according to Gilbert, “the activities
of the Committee were… largely determined by the motion picture industry.”
7576

In the aftermath of Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause, however, the scrutiny
being placed on Hollywood was turned up significantly. Accusations that the movies created
delinquency were not new, but the fact that these two very successful and very high-profile films
dealt seriously and unambiguously with delinquency served to crystallize for many the
connection between Hollywood and teenage corruption. Senator Estes Kefauver, who had taken
over chairmanship of the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency at the beginning of the
year, announced new hearings on the subject of the motion picture industry. These hearings
epitomized the outrage that was facing Hollywood at the time. During his testimony on the
redeeming sociological aspects of Rebel Without a Cause, Jack Warner was repeatedly
interrupted by hecklers in the audience who accused Warner Bros. of glorifying bad behavior.
Jerry Wald of Columbia Pictures and producer-director Harry J. Brown were similarly heckled.
77

According to Gilbert, “it became apparent that one of Kevauver’s purposes was to
channel this anger into better enforcement of the code.”
78
Kefauver was reluctant to impose
government censorship and felt that self-regulation was the best way of controlling the film
industry.
79
However, he apparently felt that a Production Code that allowed films like
Blackboard and Rebel to be produced was not doing its job. At the conclusion of the hearings,
following myriad testimony and counter-testimony on the industry’s supposed encouragement of
delinquency, he summed up his expectations thus: “Now that the industry has been presented
with the very revealing facts of its influence on the mores of this country, I am sure they will be
more selective in their programming.”
80

60

Ultimately, Gilbert concludes that the Subcommittee did not have much actual effect on
Hollywood. Jerold Simmons concurs, stating that the “public hearings did little to harm the
industry.”
81
Both cite the fact that delinquency films, often with increasingly bombastic
advertising strategies, continued to be produced through the remainder of the decade. However,
their analysis did not account for the fact that the majority of these later films were teenpics:
creations of independent producers and small studios whose aims and business models were very
different from those of the rest of the industry, and which will be discussed in the next section.
Where the major studios were concerned, however, the juvenile delinquency films produced after
1955 differed significantly from the lucrative models established by Blackboard and Rebel,
suggesting that the outcry over those films did, in fact, lead to important changes.
In late 1956, Universal released The Unguarded Moment, which featured a plot centered
on a dangerous teenage high-schooler, Leonard Bennett (John Saxon). The young man, however,
does not bear any of the iconography of cinematic delinquency: no rock music, teen slang, knife
fights, or complaints about being misunderstood by grown-ups. Instead, he is portrayed as a
sociopath who puts on the appearance of middle-class respectability while secretly attempting to
sexually assault his teacher, Lois Conway (Esther Williams). Leonard’s problems are not caused
by society, but by his father’s pathological misogyny. Thus, although the film does attempt to
exploit the fear surrounding out-of-control youth, it is careful to divorce itself from previously-
established conventions of onscreen delinquency.
The same year, Teenage Rebel was released by 20
th
Century Fox. The titular character is
middle-class Dorothy McGowan (Betty Lou Keim), who is forced to spend a few weeks with her
mother, Nancy Fallon (Ginger Rogers), whom she resents for divorcing her father when she was
a child. Dorothy’s “rebellion” is of a rather unorthodox kind. Rather than expressing her
61

resentment against her mother by going out with other kids her own age, she does precisely the
opposite: she shuns the company of her peers and attempts to act excessively serious and
“grown-up.” Nancy tries to connect with Dorothy by helping her learn to act like a teenager,
leading to the curious spectacle of Ginger Rogers attempting to teach a young woman how to
dance to rock ‘n’ roll music. In the film, teen culture is not a threat, but a way to help mother and
daughter connect with one another. Thus, although the film’s title attempts to capitalize on
interest in delinquency, the film itself avoids the issue by inverting the conventional parent-child
dynamic in such movies.
In 1957, Paramount’s The Delicate Delinquent chooses to offer a humorous take on the
delinquency subject. The film stars Jerry Lewis as Sidney Pythias, a young janitor who is
mistaken for a juvenile delinquent by good-hearted social crusader and police officer Mike
Damon (Darren McGavin). In reality, Sidney just suffers from aimlessness and low self-esteem.
He eventually resolves his issues by becoming a police officer himself: a rather un-delinquent-
like fate. The film takes all of the potentially threatening aspects out of the juvenile delinquent,
using the subject as a source of comedy rather than danger.
Serious attempts to examine juvenile delinquency as a sociological problem did not
disappear completely after 1955. Crime in the Streets (Allied Artists, 1956) stars John
Cassavetes and Sal Mineo as working class delinquent gang members Frankie Dane and Angelo
Gioia, who commit petty crimes and engage in “rumbles” with other gangs. Evoking Nick
Romano from Knock on Any Door, Frankie is portrayed as pathologically angry over his
difficult, impoverished upbringing. He enlists Angelo’s help in plotting to kill a meddling older
man who got another gang member arrested, though ultimately he’s not able to go through with
it. Social worker Ben Wagner (James Whitmore) endeavors to help turn the boys away from
62

crime and violence, and he repeatedly frets about how to get through to those kids. Though the
film resembles Blackboard Jungle in its dark and violent take on juvenile delinquency, it is
telling that it was produced by Allied Artists rather than by a major studio. Crime lacked either
the budget or the publicity of Blackboard or Rebel, and it consequently did not achieve the same
level of profitability nor notoriety. In the aftermath of the controversy and Congressional
hearings of 1955, it seems that no major studio was willing to produce a serious delinquency film
in the mold of Blackboard or Rebel, despite those films’ tremendous profitability. Instead, the
majors allowed the territory to be taken over by what would soon become known as teen
exploitation.

“The Market of the Future:” Delinquency in Teen Exploitation Cinema
Teen exploitation pictures, or teenpics, were a cycle of low-budget films made by
independent producers and small production companies. Thomas Doherty defines them as having
“three elements: (1) controversial, bizarre, or timely subject matter amenable to wild promotion
(‘exploitation’ potential in its original sense); (2) a substandard budget; and (3) a teenage
audience.”
82
In spite of its name, it should be noted that teen exploitation was distinct from the
exploitation film industry discussed earlier in this chapter. Exploitation producers were wholly
separate from the mainstream film industry, and tended to exhibit only in certain theaters.
Teenpics, on the other hand, existed on the fringes of the mainstream industry; they sometimes
employed filmmakers who crossed over with the bigger studios, and their product was exhibited
in more mainstream settings.
Teen exploitation is also sometimes affiliated with the B-films turned out by Hollywood
during the studio era. This is also not strictly accurate, though the teenpic did have its origin, in
63

part, in the decline of the B-film. During the postwar era, Hollywood had been trending towards
fewer and more expensive films. In part, this derived from a demand for bigger budgets that
would allow Hollywood to better differentiate its product from the small-screened, black-and-
white television programs. It also had to do with the vertical de-integration that was going on in
the industry at the time. As stated earlier in this chapter, prior to the Paramount decision, the
studios had guaranteed exhibition of all their films. These included B-films, which were
inexpensive productions that were not expected to turn a significant profit. B-films were sold to
exhibitors for a flat fee, rather than a percentage like A-films were, and were generally paired
with an A-film on a double bill.
83
B-films were a sensible investment because the studios knew
that these films would be exhibited, regardless of their quality.
After the studios lost their guaranteed exhibition following the Paramount case, they
were suddenly in the position of having to compete for the best theaters.
84
Because of this, the
major studios shifted their focus to making the most competitive A-films possible. As a result, B-
films fell by the wayside. “In 1952, Warner Brothers and Twentieth Century Fox dropped B
pictures from production, Jack L. Warner labeling them ‘a menace to the industry.’”
85
Yet the
demand for B-films had not decreased, as exhibitors were still attracted to low-budget films that
they could get inexpensively to help fill out their programs. Thomas Doherty writes that “by the
mid-1950s, they were ‘wide open and hungry’ for indie product that was cheap, regular, and
exploitable.”
86
The teenpic was an inexpensive and very exploitable way to satisfy this hunger.
As American International Pictures (AIP) cofounder Samuel Z. Arkoff said: “The word went out
that there would be no more B pictures. So there was, in essence, a shortage of pictures. That’s
why we started in that particular time.”
87

64

The other major factor in the rise of teen exploitation was the shifting of audience
demographics in the postwar era. Specifically, teenagers were buying a larger share of the movie
tickets. This shift can be attributed to multiple factors. One was the demographic changes in the
postwar period that were shrinking the movie-going audience on the whole. As middle-class
families moved into the suburbs, there were fewer potential viewers with disposable income
clustered around the large movie houses. As more adults chose to stay home and watch
television, it left teenagers looking for entertainment outside the house to make up an increasing
proportion of total theater-goers. Furthermore, following World War II, teenagers were acquiring
more money and more leisure time. These factors contributed to the growth of teen culture,
which in turn led teens to view themselves as increasingly independent from the dominant
culture of middle-class adults. As Doherty writes of teenagers at this time, “There were more of
them, they had more money, and they were more aware of themselves as teenagers.”
88
These
young people were ready for films that gratified this self-awareness by addressing themselves
directly to the teenage viewpoint.
The tremendous success of Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause were clear
evidence of the commercial power of the teenage market, given that teens made up a large
segment of the audiences for both films. Yet the major studios made no immediate efforts –
delinquency-focused or otherwise – to further cultivate teenage audiences. Doherty, in discussing
Hollywood’s “courtship” of teenagers, expressed surprise at “how long it took the industry to
make the first move.”
89
In part, their slowness can be attributed to caution: the accusations that
the two films were encouraging delinquent behavior were enhanced by the very fact that so many
teenagers were watching the films. The major studios may have felt that there was no way to
depict teenage culture onscreen without having it connected to delinquency: a fair assumption
65

given that many adults considered “teen culture” and “juvenile delinquency” to be
interchangeable. At the same time, the major studios’ reluctance can also be attributed to their
essential conservative business sense. The movies had been successful for decades by addressing
themselves to adult and family audiences, and the studios were reluctant to change that. The
result was that small studios like AIP had free reign to profit from the teenage market. As
Samuel Arkoff quipped in his autobiography, “AIP didn’t invent the American teenager, but the
big studios lagged so far behind that they must have thought our company did.”
90
It was only
after the teenpics demonstrated the value of the teenage market that the major studios finally
began to follow their lead.
In truth, American International Pictures not only did not invent the teenager, but they
also did not invent the teenpic either. The true teenpic pioneer was independent producer Sam
Katzman. A former studio producer of serials and B-movies, Katzman was known for his ability
to spot an exploitable topic. According to Richard Thompson, “Katzman’s serial work gave him
the reflexes to make a picture and release it before a fad played out, and probably contributed the
eye for the satisfyingly weird with which he picked the mass idiocies he would immortalize.”
91

Katzman, furthermore, had experience making films about teenagers: he had produced the East
Side Kids film series for Monogram between 1940 and 1945. Built around what was left of the
Dead End Kids when their contract with Warner Bros. ended, the East Side Kids films saw the
social commentary of the earlier films replaced by Katzman with relatively uncontroversial
adventures for the boys, such as solving mysteries and competing in sporting events.
Nevertheless, the Kids never lost their tough, swaggering attitudes even as their activities
became more socially respectable. With the East Side Kids films, which were successful enough
to sustain 22 installments, Katzman was able to drain a group of juvenile delinquents of their
66

controversy while still maintaining a small measure of the rebelliousness that made them
appealing in the first place.
Following the success of Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause, Katzman
perceived a similar opportunity. Having recently become an independent producer, he sought to
make a film that would draw on the aspects of Blackboard and Rebel which made them
successful while also avoiding the aspects which made them controversial. The result was a film
which celebrated teen culture, specifically rock ‘n’ roll music, while avoiding any mention at all
of juvenile delinquency. Distributed by Columbia Pictures, Rock Around the Clock (1956)
featured a plot involving band manager Steve Hollis (Johnny Johnston), who discovers rock band
Bill Haley and His Comets performing in a small country town and seeks to make them national
stars. Along the way, the film features performances from a number of rock ‘n’ roll groups,
climaxing in a performance of the title song. These performances are interspersed with shots of
teenagers dancing enthusiastically to the music.
That the film was inspired by Blackboard Jungle is obvious given the fact that “Rock
Around the Clock” was the song played at the beginning and end of the earlier film. Katzman
saw that teenagers responded positively to depictions of their own culture and music, and
correctly assumed that this would remain true even independent of any overt displays of
rebellion. Indeed, Katzman hedges his bets and goes out of his way to avoid controversy. Despite
the fact that rock ‘n’ roll music was frequently linked to delinquency by its critics, there is no
mention of delinquency in the film, and none of the young people are depicted as even slightly
antisocial. Nor does the film follow Rebel’s lead in makings its protagonists into teenagers. The
viewer’s perspective is always tied to Hollis, an adult who nevertheless identifies with the
teenage point of view. Still, the film’s unambiguously positive view of rock music makes it clear
67

what audience the film was aimed at, and the film was richly rewarded by that audience. Doherty
describes the film as “the first hugely successful film marketed to teenagers to the pointed
exclusion of their elders.”
92
He adds that “in an era when Hollywood was banking more and
more on fewer and fewer films, Rock Around the Clock showed that with the right kind of
project, filmmakers might gain much while risking little.”
93

Though Katzman was responsible for originating the teenpic formula, it was AIP that
refined the business model, eventually becoming the largest and most important producer of teen
exploitation. Founded by Arkoff and Jim Nicholson in 1954 as American Releasing Corporation,
American International Pictures is credited by Randall Clark with establishing “the production
and marketing practice that have become standards in the [teen] exploitation film industry.”
94

Mark Thomas McGee explains their appeal:
No longer able to enjoy the luxury of guaranteed bookings, the studios began asking for a
higher percentage of the box office. Television was already cutting into the exhibitors’
profits so they began looking for bargains. AIP offered an alternative: black and white
double feature programs, tailored to the juvenile trade and for a fraction of what a single
feature cost from the majors.
95

Another factor in AIP’s success was its recognition of the value of drive-in theaters. Even
though overall movie attendance was declining during the 1950s, the drive-ins were undergoing
a period of “rapid growth.”
96
Kerry Segrave argues that, contrary to their later reputations as
teenage “passion pits,” the growth of drive-ins was initially spurred on by families. A trip to the
drive-in “was a family outing that satisfied the needs of families to spend time together, to do
things together, as a unit.”
97
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, drive-ins were so profitable
that exhibitors felt that “the film on the screen was largely irrelevant, as long as it was
wholesome.”
98
By the mid-fifties, however, drive-in owners had begun to worry “that the novelty
effect had worn off,” and began to agitate for better product.
99
The major studios were unwilling
68

to let them have first-run films, however, due to the belief that drive-ins attracted business based
on novelty rather than film quality, and that allowing them to exhibit first-run pictures would
harm the indoor theaters more than it would help the drive-ins.
100

AIP saw another opportunity to exploit a resource that was being untapped by the major
studios. Exhibiting their films in drive-ins would sate the drive-ins’ desire for first-run product as
well as allow them to expand their appeal with teenage audiences. Arkoff recalls his realization
that “if we were going to be making films to appeal to kids who have wheels, we could find a
ready group of exhibitors in the drive-in owners, and turn those outdoor theaters from ‘last-run’
into ‘first-run’ venues.”
101
The arrangement had additional benefits for the drive-ins, which were
known for their “uninhibited emphasis on refreshment sales.”
102
A significant increase in
concession revenues during the 1950s was “largely attributable to the adolescent capacity for
junk food.”
103
Soon, AIP and drive-ins had become so closely connected that many AIP pictures
never saw exhibition in indoor theaters.
104
Other teenpic producers followed AIP’s lead, and
were rewarded for it: “by the mid-fifties estimates placed 60 percent of the movie audience
between ages twelve and twenty-four, with nearly a quarter of all revenue derived from the
drive-in circuits.”
105

AIP’s marketing strategies drew heavily on the traditions of classical exploitation cinema
in crafting lurid and exciting advertising campaigns designed to exploit their films’ subject
matter. Arkoff wrote that “AIP simply approached moviemaking differently than anyone else. In
fact, the content of the films themselves sometimes seem to take a backseat to the titles and the
advertising campaigns that were carefully crafted before the first roll of film was ever shot.”
106

Arkoff’s claim to be “different” seems disingenuous, given how closely this strategy resembles
that of classical exploitation. Nevertheless, it paid dividends for him. Wrote Arkoff: “The majors
69

thought we were crazy, working ‘back assward’ because we had the title, the artwork, and the
catch lines finished before we ever gave approval to have a screenplay written. But we reasoned,
‘Why make the picture if the public isn’t likely to buy it?’”
107
Like the exploitation industry, AIP
relied on the power of subject matter to sell its films.
It’s important to note that the teenpic was a new type of film, distinct from both B-
movies and classical exploitation. In comparing B-movies with teen exploitation, Randall Clark
notes that “the crucial difference between the two is that ‘B’ movies were intended to be the
second feature in a double feature, while exploitation films were designed to be lead features,
which is more profitable for their producers.”
108
Though they had the budgets of B-films, the
highly exploitable subject matter of teenpics gave the producers leverage to sell them on more
lucrative terms.
Still, while the teenpics resembled the exploitation industry in their ostentatious
marketing campaigns, the films themselves were quite different. The budgets of teenpics, while
low, were higher than those of classical exploitation films being produced during the same
period by a factor of 4.
109
Teenpics were also closer to the Hollywood mainstream in style and
content; Schaefer argues that the films “were narratives in the strict classical Hollywood cinema
mode, eschewing the educational or titillating spectacle that had differentiated classical
exploitation from Hollywood product.”
110
In fact, Doherty states that “exploitation moviemakers
who specialized in teenpics were a conservative and timorous lot, far less willing than the
Hollywood establishment to challenge the Production Code.”
111
Arkoff himself stated that, “of
course, because Jim and I were pretty old-fashioned, we weren’t necessarily trying to break new
ground in areas like violence and sex.”
112
Teen exploitation was labeled as such less for its
70

scandalous content than for the fact that it was endeavoring to attract a market that was different
from the traditional Hollywood audience.
The teenpic producers’ general conservatism and risk-aversion can be seen in how they
approached the juvenile delinquency subject. Delinquency tended to appear in one of two forms
in these films. First, in films centered on rock ‘n’ roll music, delinquency often arose as part of
the discourse that parents and other adults engaged in, with them accusing the music and its
performers of being a corrupting influence on their children. Second, some teenpics depicted
juvenile crime and violence directly onscreen. Both of these types of films were pioneered, once
again, by Sam Katzman, whose productions would influence later teenpics.
Katzman’s Rock Around the Clock had been almost conspicuous in its avoidance of the
controversy surrounding rock ‘n’ roll music. In 1956, rock music was one of the biggest targets
for social critics looking for potential causes of juvenile delinquency. Katzman’s follow-up to
Rock Around the Clock, Don’t Knock the Rock (Columbia, 1956), opted to engage with this
social discourse directly. The film concerns a small town which is considering a ban on rock ‘n’
roll music; adult rock performer Arnie Haines (Alan Dale) has to convince them that rock ‘n’ roll
music and dancing are really just harmless fun. Indeed, the film suggests that the adults’
concerns are totally baseless: the kids are clean-cut and well-behaved, with hardly a trace of
antisocial rebellion. Apart from its obvious primary purpose in providing a showcase for rock
music performances, the film adopts a double-edged strategy in debunking the link between rock
‘n’ roll and delinquency. Teen audiences are gratified in seeing adult fears proven groundless
and silly, while adult audiences are reassured by the sight of teenagers who go back to be being
respectable middle-class kids after they finish dancing. The strategy represents an
acknowledgement that, although teenpics are aimed at teenage audiences, there will also
71

inevitably be adults watching as well; consequently, teenpics must make themselves acceptable
to both audiences.
Later films like AIP’s Shake, Rattle and Rock! (1956) employed a very similar formula.
Significantly, the part of the music’s primary defender is always played by an adult. Although
the perspective of these films was strongly pro-teenager, given their celebration of rock ‘n’ roll
music and of teenagers’ ability to choose their own entertainments, it must always be an adult
who is the one to officially declare the music harmless. This serves not only to reassure adults on
this point, but to also convince teenagers that there were certain adults out there who, like the
grown-ups who made teenpics, understood and empathized with them and their desires perfectly
well.
Whereas the rock ‘n’ roll teenpics strove to present a world free of delinquency, other
teenpics chose to follow Hollywood’s lead in putting juvenile delinquents on screen. The major
studios may have been dissuaded by the risk involved in making films about delinquency, but the
teenpic producers were less concerned about protecting the image of the industry as a whole.
They had seen how lucrative films like Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause could be.
Unlike Blackboard and Rebel, however, the teenpics tended to eschew all but the most
rudimentary discussion of delinquency as a sociological or psychological problem. These issues
were seen as “adult” concerns; the teenpics were more interested in the spectacle of teenagers
engaged in criminal and / or violent activities. At the same time, the producers were still
cognizant of the controversy that threatened to accompany any representation of juvenile
delinquency in the cinema. As such, they faced a balancing act between providing the requisite
thrills while mitigating as much as possible the potential for the films to be seen as corrupting
influences.
72

The teenpics’ primary strategy of achieving this balance was through a highly Manichean
division of teenagers. Such a division was partly an outgrowth of adult perceptions in the larger
culture. As Richard Staehling writes, “To the majority of Americans, confronted with news of
gang wars, Elvis, and drag racing, there were only two kinds of kids: the good ones and the bad
ones. The same stereotypes emerged in films, only in exaggerated form.”
113
Indeed, something
similar can be seen in Blackboard Jungle, where Sidney Poitier’s Gregory Miller represents the
basically good, redeemable kid, while Vic Morrow’s Artie West is the wicked, irredeemable one.
West must be scapegoated for all the sins of delinquency, allowing Miller to be reclaimed by
middle-class adult society. The teenpics took this dynamic and made the differences even
starker.
Randall Clark explains the formula of the delinquency teenpic as involving the meeting
of two figures: the naif (a mildly rebellious teen who is nevertheless innocent in the ways of
violence and crime) and the sophisticate (an experienced and irredeemable hoodlum who seeks
to induct the naif into that lifestyle). He states that “good usually, though not always, triumphs,
and while the naif may enjoy the forbidden fruit offered by the sophisticate, he rejects the
sophisticate’s way of life for something that comes closer to conformity with adult society.”
114

Thus, the film is able to offer a conclusion that is satisfactory to both teenagers and their parents:
Youth are attracted by the depiction of their own world, and the seeming understanding
of their own inner turmoil, while curious adults learn something about the young, but are
not threatened by the films, and frequently even reassured by the endings in which
traditional society triumphs.
115

Ultimately, adults watching these films are provided with ways of rationalizing the behavior
exhibited on screen in relation to teenagers in the real world: “The adults who saw the films
satisfied their curiosity about teenage life, had their worst fears about teens confirmed (which
73

again, is probably what they wanted), but were reassured that ‘good’ teens (like theirs) always
reformed at the end.”
116

Unsurprisingly, the division between “good” and “bad” teens often came down to class
difference. Sam Katzman’s Teen-Age Crime Wave (Columbia, 1955), which was actually
released before Rock Around the Clock though it did not achieve nearly the same success, helped
to establish the delinquency teenpic formula. In this film, middle-class Jane Koberly (Sue
England) goes out on dates with “bad boys” because she is ignored by her parents. She is
inadvertently roped into a crime spree being committed by working class teens Mike Denton
(Tommy Cook) and Terry Marsh (Molly McCart). In spite of her association, Jane remains
“good” throughout the film, eventually helping the police to locate Mike and Terry, the latter
being killed in a shoot-out with the police.
Subsequent delinquency teenpics employed similarly stark divisions between good and
bad. Katzman’s own Rumble on the Docks (Columbia, 1956) stars James Darren as the head of a
working-class teenage gang, the Diggers, but his gang is depicted as generally honorable and
upright. His rival gang, the Smashers, are totally dishonorable and dangerous; the two gangs get
into a “rumble” due to the efforts of some Diggers to prevent a group of Smashers from sexually
assaulting a young woman. The Diggers are more like defenders of their neighborhoods than
menaces to them. In AIP’s The Cool and the Crazy (1958), Bennie Saul (Scott Marlowe) is a
thoroughly reprehensible hoodlum who is secretly employed by a marijuana ring, and he
endeavors to get a group of tough-but-basically-good high schoolers “addicted.” Bennie
eventually meets his deserved end in a fiery car crash, sparing the high-schoolers a terrible fate.
In the Albert Zugsmith-produced, MGM-distributed High School Confidential (1958), Russ
Tamblyn plays Tony Baker, a defiant and antisocial young delinquent who is trying to break into
74

the marijuana-selling racket of thoroughly reprehensible fellow-high school student J.I.
Coleridge (John Drew Barrymore). Tony, however, turns out to be an undercover agent for the
DEA who puts J.I. and his supplier out of business.
In films such as these, the “bad” delinquents are not only portrayed as completely
villainous, but are also denied any reason for being that way. There is no explanation for why the
Stompers became hoodlums and attempted rapists while the Diggers did not, nor for how Bennie
Saul and J.I. Coleridge became the sorts of people who sold drugs to their peers. The villainous
delinquents committed violent and destructive actions because, as Staehling puts it, “that is what
bad guys are supposed to do; it’s as simple as that.”
117
In denying “bad” teens a reason for their
crimes, the teenpics avoid engagement with the sociological discourses surrounding delinquency.
Instead, audiences were free to ascribe whatever causes they chose to account for the behavior,
and could be gratified by that behavior’s eventual punishment by the end of the film.
Indeed, the teenpics repeatedly attempted to offset the controversy of their subject matter
with a strongly moralistic worldview. As Doherty writes, “the more controversial the teenpic, the
more it tried to present itself as a public service.”
118
This can be seen most strongly in films like
The Cool and the Crazy and High School Confidential, which deal with drug use by teenagers – a
topic that Hollywood had left to the exploiters in the 1930s. By the 1950s, the subject had lost
enough of its controversy that the teenpics were willing to employ it, provided that it was
portrayed in highly moralistic terms. Albert Zugsmith, the producer of High School Confidential,
characterized his films as moral essays: “I don’t make movies without a moral, but you can’t
make a point for good unless you expose the evil.”
119
Zugsmith and the other teenpic producers
were clearly influenced by the conventions of the exploitation industry, following their lead in
using moral education as a pretense for sensation.
75

Critically, however, the moral education in the films rarely came from adult characters. In
the aforementioned films, the villains are defeated, in part or in whole, due to the actions of other
teenagers. These other teenagers, rather than adults, form the moral centers of the films. Samuel
Arkoff himself wrote that “parental characters who often gave lectures to their teenagers” were
“an immediate turn-off for young audiences.”
120
Thus, the films offered characters like Tony
Baker who, despite being a DEA agent, was also a teenager himself. Teenagers like Tony have
already absorbed the moral lessons of middle-class adulthood, which spares them the need to be
lectured to by adult characters in the films. Just as the rock ‘n’ roll teenpics made the music more
palatable to adults by portraying the teenagers dancing to it as good, clean kids, the delinquency
teenpics made adult morality more palatable for teenagers by putting it in the mouths of “cool”
teenage characters. Thus, the films can claim to be offering positive moral lessons for teenage
viewers while also endeavoring not to alienate those viewers.
For all their supposed morality, however, the teenpics were still trafficking in
controversial material, which was something that the major studios were not pleased with. Even
though teenpics kept relatively low profiles and were seldom viewed by non-teen audiences, the
fact remained that they were working in territory that the majors considered off-limits. In one
famous anecdote, renowned Hollywood producer Jerry Wald attended a 1958 luncheon put on by
AIP for the Theater Owners Association of America. An invited guest, Wald was given the
opportunity to address the room, and he responded with an attack against AIP’s teenage
exploitation films such as Hot Rod Gang and High School Hellcats. He declared, “It’s not the
type of picture on which we can build the market of the future. While they may make a few
dollars today, they will destroy us tomorrow.”
121

76

Wald argues that the short-terms profitability of films dealing with controversial teenage-
centered subjects like juvenile delinquency is not worth the threat of lasting damage to the film
industry’s reputation. Indeed, this is reflective of the reasoning that led the major studios to step
back from the delinquency subject in the aftermath of the enormous success of Blackboard
Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause. Wald feared that the teenpics were degrading the entire
industry by feeding perceptions that the movies were irresponsibly modeling negative behavior
for teenagers.
AIP cofounder James H. Nicholson responded to Wald’s attack by stating that “I’d rather
send my children to see these pictures than God’s Little Acre,” referring to a popular and
controversial film, based on a popular and controversial book, that had been released earlier that
year by United Artists. Arkoff added that there were fewer “connotations” in AIP films than in
Peyton Place (1957) or No Down Payment (1957): two high-profile films produced by Wald for
20
th
Century Fox.
122
Nicholson and Arkoff argue that their films are actually tamer than those of
the major studios, who, in the 1950s, were increasingly challenging the traditional restrictions of
the Production Code. The only difference, the AIP founders imply, is that the major studios’
films showcase adult delinquency, and thereby attempt to obscure the issue of negative
influences on teenagers. Teenpics, though they directed themselves to the teenage gaze, claimed
to actually be more child-friendly than major studios pictures of the same time frame.
Despite their misgivings about teenpics, the major studios nevertheless recognized the
success that AIP and others were having and, apparently reasoning that enough time had passed
since the controversy around Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause, began making
tentative attempts to emulate the teenpics. Indeed, the earliest such efforts would have begun
appearing even before Wald’s anti-teenpic diatribe. The first and most prominent of these efforts
77

were a cycle of films starring Elvis Presley. Presley, the most successful rock ‘n’ roll artist of the
1950s, was signed by Paramount but also made films for 20
th
Century Fox and MGM prior to
being drafted into the army in 1958. After awkwardly working a few rock ‘n’ roll songs into the
Western picture Love Me Tender (20
th
Century Fox, 1956), Presley settled into a formula that
resembled that of successful rock ‘n’ roll teenpics: onscreen musical performances linked by a
plot involving the show business of rock music. What distinguished them from Hollywood’s
traditional backstage musicals was how they, like the teenpics, foregrounded issues of juvenile
delinquency. Presley’s second film, Loving You (Paramount, 1957), featured a plot clearly
derived from teenpics like Don’t Knock the Rock and Shake, Rattle and Rock, with an adult
publicist who must convince other adults that the character played by Presley was not a
corrupting influence on teenagers.
Presley’s subsequent films, Jailhouse Rock (MGM, 1957) and King Creole (Paramount,
1958), both portray Presley’s character as something of a juvenile delinquent himself. This
characterization implies an acceptance on the filmmakers’ part of the societal connotations of
rock ‘n’ roll music, and a desire to exploit the bad-boy aspect of Presley’s persona. Though these
films mark something of a return to the subject matter of Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a
Cause, the return was a tentative one. Publicity material for the film emphasized Presley’s
musical performances rather than the delinquency angle, as Blackboard and Rebel had done.
Furthermore, both films tie the salvation of Presley’s character to his success as a rock ‘n’ roll
performer. They dispute the notion that rock music creates delinquency, instead posing it as a
positive and productive outlet for youth’s rebellious energies. As it requires looking at rock
music as teens themselves see it, rather than as disapproving adults see it, this argument could
easily have come out of a teenpic. The Presley films demonstrate that the major studios were
78

moving away from their previously adult-oriented viewpoint on teen culture and delinquency,
instead following AIP and others in offering a more teen-focused one.
Indeed, there was ample evidence that by the end of the decade, with the controversy
over Blackboard and Rebel safely past, the majors were increasingly willing to go after the
teenage market. In the late fifties, the majors distributed a wide range of low-budget, teen-
focused independent pictures. Alan Betrock writes that “it was not only independent outfits that
were releasing these films; almost every major studio had bought or produced a teen exploitation
film, some of them quite miserable, and the market was overwhelmed.”
123
As noted earlier,
MGM distributed Zugsmith’s High School Confidential in 1958 despite its potentially
controversial drug-themed plotline. An example of a particularly “miserable” film was
Teenagers from Outer Space (1959), which was independently produced by Tom Graeff and
distributed by Warner Bros. The film centers on a youthful group of invading space aliens, one
of whom changes his ways after experiencing family life on Earth, and who gives his life to
prevent the invasion. It’s worth noting that on the film’s posters, the Warner Bros. logo is
unusually tiny and tucked away, almost shamefully, in the lower-right corner. Shameful or not,
the studio still recognized the money that could be made with this kind of subject matter.
The majors’ growing acceptance of teen-centered films was merely the latest in a long
series of business-related changes that shaped the history of the juvenile delinquency film. As
this chapter has shown, these types of films have been historically determined not only by
changes in the cultural discourses on youth and delinquency, but by the material realities of how
films were being made at different moments in time. Were it not for vertical de-integration and
the growth of television, Hollywood might never have made Blackboard Jungle and Rebel
Without a Cause, much less I Was a Teenage Werewolf. If not for Katzman, Arkoff, Nicholson
79

and their ilk to point the way, it might have taken the majors even longer to begin addressing
themselves to the teenage spectator, and thereby laying the foundation for the modern-day
blockbuster-centric business model. Throughout their history, juvenile delinquency was always a
difficult balancing act for the movies, and a model for dealing with controversial subject matters.
Only through understanding the story of how the movie business itself intersected with that of
the delinquency film can the choices that the filmmakers made begin to become understood. The
next chapter will take a closer look at some of the teen-centered movies and investigate how the
teenpic filmmakers fashioned their specific appeals to the youth demographic.

1
Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930-1939 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1993), 281.

2
Clifford R. Shaw and Henry McKay. Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1942), 52.

3
Henry James Forman, Our Movie Made Children (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1935), 232.

4
Ibid., 178.

5
Quoted in Richard B. Jewell, The Golden Age of Cinema: Hollywood 1929-1945 (Malden: Blackwell Publishing,
2007), 120.

6
Quoted in Jon Lewis, Hollywood vs. Hard Core: How the Struggle Over Censorship Created the Modern Film
Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 133.

7
Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies, Revised and Updated (New York:
Vintage Books, 1994), 175.

8
Thomas Doherty, Teenagers & Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Boston: Unwin
Hyman, 1988), 6.

9
Delinquents still appeared in exploitation films released during this period, as will be discussed in the next section.

10
Janet Staiger, “Self-Regulation and the Classical Hollywood Cinema,” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism
6.1 (Fall 1991): 228.

11
Mark Thomas McGee and R.J. Robertson. The J.D. Films: Juvenile Delinquency in the Movies (Jefferson:
McFarland & Company, Inc., 1982), 5.

12
Ibid., 10.

13
Jerome Christensen, America’s Corporate Art: The Studio Authorship of Hollywood Motion Pictures (1929-2001)
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 89.

80

14
Still, Sullivan’s last-minute good deed arguably has the effect of making him into an even more sympathetic
figure of identification for the film’s audience.

15
Christensen, 89.

16
Ibid., 89.

17
Schatz, Thomas. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1988), 257.

18
Eric Schaefer, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films 1919-1959 (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1999), 22.

19
Ibid., 8.

20
Felicia Feaster and Brett Wood, Forbidden Fruit: The Golden Age of the Exploitation Film (Baltimore: Midnight
Marquee Press, 1999), 19.

21
Schaefer, 5-6.

22
Feaster and Wood, 23.

23
Jewell, The Golden Age of Cinema, 139.

24
Schaefer, 144.

25
Ibid., 71.

26
Alan Betrock, The I Was a Teenage Juvenile Delinquent Rock ‘n’ Roll Horror Beach Party Movie Book: A
Complete Guide to the Teen Exploitation Film, 1954-1969 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 2.

27
Schaefer, 69, 116.

28
Ibid., 31.

29
Ibid., 176.

30
Ibid., 110

31
Ibid., 244

32
Ibid., 239.

33
Ibid., 325.

34
Schatz, The Genius of the System, 298.

35
Sklar, 373.

36
Schatz, The Genius of the System, 4.

37
Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1997), 4.

38
Peter Lev, The Fifties: Transforming the Screen, 1950-1959 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 89.

81

39
Schatz, Boom and Bust, 323.

40
Lewis, Hollywood vs. Hard Core, 111.

41
Sklar, 295.

42
Schatz, Boom and Bust, 319.

43
Lev, 67.

44
Drew Casper, Postwar Hollywood: 1946-1962. (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2007), 79.

45
Lev, 101.

46
Ibid., 73.

47
Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1983), 25.

48
James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986), 28.

49
Richard B. Jewell with Vernon Harbin. The RKO Story. (New York: Arlington House, 1982), 195.

50
Andrew Dowdy, The Films of the Fifties: The American State of Mind (New York: William Morrow and
Company, Inc., 1973), 132.

51
McGee and Robertson, 25.

52
Jim Morton, “Juvenile Delinquency Films,” in Incredibly Strange Films, eds. V. Vale and Andrea Juno (San
Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1986), 143.

53
Jerold Simmons, “Violent Youth: The Censoring and Public Reception of ‘The Wild One’ and ‘The Blackboard
Jungle.’” Film History 20.3 (2008): 384.

54
Dowdy, 138.

55
McGee and Robertson, 24.

56
Simmons, 384.

57
Quoted in Simmons, 384.

58
Ibid., 385.

59
McGee and Robertson, 27.

60
Casper, 292.

61
Quoted in Simmons, 388.

62
Simmons, 388.

63
Gilbert, 188.

82

64
Ibid., 185.

65
Quoted in McGee and Robertson, 30.

66
Quoted in Gilbert, 185.

67
Doherty, 75.

68
Gilbert, 184.

69
Richard Staehling, “From Rock Around the Clock to The Trip: The Truth About Teen Movies,” in Kings of the
Bs: Working Within the Hollywood System: An Anthology of Film History and Criticism, eds. Todd McCarthy and
Charles Flynn (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1975), 221.

70
Betrock, 27.

71
Simmons, 388.

72
Gilbert, 48.

73
Quoted in Jewell, The Golden Age of Cinema, 32.

74
Schatz, Boom and Bust, 289.

75
Gilbert, 52.

76
For a full account of the industry’s manipulation of the Committee, see Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage.

77
Ibid., 157.

78
Ibid., 158.

79
Ibid., 156.

80
Ibid., 158.

81
Simmons, 389.

82
Doherty, 8.

83
Brian Taves, “The B Film: Hollywood’s Other Half,” in Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business
Enterprise, 1930-1939, ed. Tino Balio (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 314.

84
Jewell, The Golden Age of Cinema, 300.

85
Doherty, 30.

86
Ibid., 34.

87
Linda May Strawn, “Samuel Z. Arkoff,” in Kings of the Bs: Working Within the Hollywood System: An Anthology
of Film History and Criticism, ed. Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1975),
259.

88
Doherty, 45.

83

89
Ibid., 61.

90
Sam Arkoff with Richard Trubo, Flying Through Hollywood by the Seat of My Pants: From the Man Who
Brought You I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Muscle Beach Party (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1992), 4.

91
Richard Thompson, “Sam Katzman: Jungle Sam, or, The Return of ‘Poetic Justice, I’d Say,’” in Kings of the Bs:
Working Within the Hollywood System: An Anthology of Film History and Criticism, ed. Todd McCarthy and
Charles Flynn (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1975), 76.

92
Doherty, 74.

93
Ibid., 81.

94
Randall Clark, At a Theater or Drive-In Near You: The History, Culture, and Politics of the American
Exploitation Film (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995), 37.

95
Mark Thomas McGee, Fast and Furious: The Story of American International Pictures (Jefferson: McFarland &
Company, Inc., 1984), xi.

96
Clark, 43.

97
Kerry Segrave, Drive-In Theaters: A History from Their Inception in 1933 (Jefferson: McFarland & Company,
Inc., 1992), viii.

98
Ibid., viii.

99
Ibid., 54.

100
Ibid., 59.

101
Arkoff, 41.

102
Segrave, 89.

103
Doherty, 115.

104
Segrave, 174.

105
Dowdy, 149.

106
Arkoff, 2.

107
Ibid., 39.

108
Clark, 31.

109
Schaefer, 311.

110
Ibid., 311.

111
Doherty, 186.

112
Arkoff, 66.

113
Staehling, 230.
84

114
Clark, 50.

115
Ibid., 50.

116
Ibid., 72.

117
Staehling, 236.

118
Doherty, 135.

119
Quoted in McGee and Robertson, 87.

120
Arkoff, 87.

121
Doherty, 158.

122
Ibid., 159.

123
Betrock, 33.
85

Chapter Two: The Teenage Menace: Juvenile Delinquency in Teen Rock ‘n’ Roll and
Horror Films

Introduction: “A Nation of Criminals”
“How ridiculous! Did they think that all teenagers, at the light of the full moon, would turn into
werewolves?”
1

American International Pictures (AIP) founder Samuel Z. Arkoff’s response to adult
criticism of his company’s film, I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), which depicts a troubled
high-schooler’s transformation into a homicidal lycanthrope, was no doubt intended as a tongue-
in-cheek commentary on the tendency of grown-ups to overreact to the violent potential of young
people. Yet from the discussions of juvenile delinquency specifically and youth culture generally
that circulated during the postwar era – particularly in the white middle-class reaction to rock ‘n’
roll, the preferred musical style of the new youth culture – it seems clear that for many adults
there was something truly monstrous about the teenage generation. Teenagers, the dominant
sentiment seemed to say, were increasingly turning away from adult authority and responsibility.
This, many adults feared, was a threat not only to the stability of American society, but to the
safety of law-abiding citizens. The teenagers themselves, painfully aware of the effects of adult
paranoia where they themselves were concerned, flocked to see the films of producers like
Arkoff, who provided a counterpoint to these fears from a teenage perspective.
Many commentators of the postwar era warned of an outbreak of teenage crime, often
painting the threat in apocalyptic terms. In 1953, United States Attorney General Herbert
Brownell predicted that “within the coming year… one million boys and girls would get into
trouble serious enough to be picked up by the police.”
2
More alarmist was FBI director J. Edgar
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Hoover, who wrote in 1946 that due to the “wartime spirit of abandon” and broken homes, the
threat of juvenile crime had become “[l]ike the sulphurous lava which boils beneath the
slumbering volcano.”
3
Clinton N. Howard, the general superintendent of the International
Reform Federation, declared that unless Hoover’s warnings were heeded, “we are in danger of
becoming a nation of criminals within the next generation.”
4

The question of whether juvenile crime was actually increasing in postwar America,
much less whether it was threatening to overrun the entire nation, was actually rather unclear. In
1943, when fears about delinquency began to surface, the Children’s Bureau stated that “such
statistics as are available had shown no alarming tendency to increased ‘juvenile crime’ as
newspapers perennially claim.”
5
James Gilbert’s study of juvenile crime statistics in the 1950s
offered no definitive evidence one way or the other, but he states that “even if there was an
increase in delinquency, status crimes, and real crimes by adolescents during the 1950s, the
public impression of the severity of this problem was undoubtedly exaggerated.”
6

This exaggeration can be attributed to the fact that the fear of juvenile crime was itself an
exaggeration of a deeper anxiety regarding the changing shape of adolescence in postwar
America. Specifically, it was after World War II that teenagers began to be recognized as an
audience that was separate from adults and children, and began to be targeted as consumers by
the purveyors of popular culture. The result was the emergence of a teenage style that went
against the expectations of the adult mainstream. Indeed, teenage life was becoming increasingly
foreign to adult observers. Leo Braudy describes magazine articles that scrutinized teenage
culture as if “explaining strange native rites to its ‘civilized’ audience.”
7
Fear that teenagers were
becoming less civilized led naturally, if not entirely logically, to the conclusion that teenagers
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were becoming more violent. The adult anxiety surrounding the emergence of teen culture
resulted in its becoming associated with crime. As Karen Sternheimer writes,
fears about juvenile delinquency are not necessarily rooted in criminal activity, but on the
shifting notion of what it means to be an adolescent…. Nonconformity, often expressed
through the embrace of popular culture that many adults didn’t like, came to be equated
with delinquency.
8

When a large number of teenagers refused to conform to mainstream adult culture, when they
looked and acted differently than teenagers of the previous generation, it became easy for adults
to view them as a threat. The widespread fear of teenage violence was ultimately an outgrown of
the fear of teenage culture.
The single largest factor in the adult mainstream’s fear of teen culture was that culture’s
danger to the traditional boundaries of class and race. Prior to and during World War II, juvenile
delinquency was associated almost exclusively with marginalized class and racial groups; that is,
those against which the white middle-class was traditionally insulated. In their 1942 study,
Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas, sociologists Clifford Shaw and Henry D. McCay note
that delinquency is most common among “the Negroes and the foreign born, or at least the
newest immigrants, who have least access to the necessities of life and who are therefore least
prepared for the competitive struggle.”
9
Although Shaw and McCay take pains to stress that this
prevalence is not due to inherent factors of race or ethnicity, but rather because these groups are
the most marginalized by American society, their findings nevertheless affirm the commonly-
held belief that juvenile crime is fundamentally connected with impoverished communities of
racial and ethnic minorities. This, they say, is a factor of culture: children growing up in “areas
of low economic status” are exposed to “a wide diversity in norms and standards of behavior…
within the same community, theft may be defined as right and proper in some groups and as
immoral, improper, and undesirable in others.”
10
Because children growing up in middle-class
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communities are generally “not faced with the problem of making a choice between conflicting
systems of moral values,” delinquency does not tend to develop in these communities.
11
As such,
there was little reason for white middle-class adults to fear the spread of delinquency into their
own neighborhoods.
Postwar teen culture came to pose a challenge to this assumption. According to Gilbert,
what most offended middle-class parents about teen culture was “the inclusion of values, codes,
fashions, and speech usually associated with lower-class behavior.”
12
In order to signal their
symbolic rebellion against the adult mainstream, many middle-class teens began adopting the
clothes, language, and activities previously associated with the working class. As Braudy
observes, “that lower-class image was reason for paranoia enough, but when supposedly ‘safe’
middle-class teenagers started wearing the same clothes, the anxiety level really went up.”
13
Or,
as Grace Palladino puts it, “teenage rebels resurrected the specter of juvenile delinquency,
largely because they looked the part.”
14
Appearance alone was enough to suggest to middle-class
adults that the divide between classes was being broken down by teen culture. As stated by
Simon Frith, “The adult fear associated with the concept of teenager was, in the 1950s, primarily
a fear of working-class adolescents.”
15

Added to this was the fact that rock ‘n’ roll, the musical genre that became synonymous
with teen culture, was predominantly derived from African American musical styles. It is in the
discussion of rock music that the racial component of adult anxieties over teen culture is most
clearly articulated, as criticisms of rock ‘n’ roll were often tacitly, and sometimes overtly
expressed in racial terms. Furthermore, with the possible exception of comic books, rock music
was the form of media that received the greatest amount of scrutiny and condemnation for its
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influence on young people, accused of usurping the role previously reserved for the family. It
epitomized the widespread fear that “the mass media stood between parent and child.”
16

Combined with the fact that young people’s preferences for clothing and music were
becoming more similar across race and class lines, the high schools of the postwar era were
becoming more diverse. The percentage of working-class students attending high school went
from 50 percent in 1930 to 90 percent in the early 1960s, and the percentage of African
American students who completed high school doubled between the early 1940s and late
1950s.
17
To white, middle-class parents, it appeared that “the best and brightest college-bound
teenagers now walked the halls with a tough-looking crowd.”
18
This represented still more
reason for these parents to fear the breakdown of class and race divisions.
The sociologist Stanley Cohen wrote that, in adult discussions of delinquency throughout
history, there is a tendency to describe it as a communicable disease by which “people are
somehow ‘infected’ by delinquency, which ‘spreads’ from person to person, so one has to ‘cure’
the ‘disease.’”
19
With anxiety that class and race divisions were breaking down, the notion that
juvenile delinquency was being passed from the working classes and racial minorities to white
middle-class teenagers became more accepted. Gilbert writes that on many issues relating to
delinquency, “the predominant metaphor was one of contagion, contamination, and infection.”
20

In 1955, Benjamin Fine wrote that “juvenile delinquency is already creeping from the wrong side
of the tracks to the right side.”
21
Three years later, Harrison Salisbury wrote that “patterns of
conduct formerly exclusive to poor, working-class or lower-middle-class youngsters, have spread
to the middle-class as a whole and to upper-class youth, as well.”
22

The fear surrounding the transmission of delinquency from the working class and racial
minorities to white middle-class teenagers led the parents of the latter group to view all members
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of the former as threatening. Thomas Doherty writes that “despite disclaimers that delinquents
were but a small minority of the total teen population, the contemporary media fixed on the
image of the urban juvenile as a switchblade-brandishing menace.”
23
To white middle-class
parents, any members of these marginalized groups were potential carriers of the delinquency
“disease.” It therefore became easy to believe that the culture of these groups was the means by
which the “disease” was transmitted. Hence the extreme reaction against the proliferation of
working-class clothing and hairstyles and, particularly, against rock ‘n’ roll music.
The result of all of this was that postwar teenagers found themselves in an uncomfortable
position in relation to their elders. For doing nothing more than dancing to rock music, middle-
class teenagers were made to feel as if they were potential criminals, capable of breaking into
violence at any time. For working-class youths, they were stereotyped as potential criminals
whether they liked rock music or not. Samuel Z. Arkoff’s quip about parents fearing that their
children would turn into werewolves may have been an exaggeration, but it perfectly captured
the suspicions that postwar teenagers must have had about what adults really thought about them.
Indeed, one of the effects of the emergence of teen culture was that some popular media
was now attempting to speak to the teenage perspective. This can be seen in the emergence of
what Thomas Doherty calls the teen exploitation film, or the teenpic.
24
Whereas the major
studios were slow to recognize the commercial value of the teenage audience and continued to
target adult and family audiences with their films, a small number of independent producers and
minor studios began turning out low-budget films specifically directed at teenagers. Among the
earliest examples of these films were the rock ‘n’ roll teenpics, which were centered around on-
screen performances by popular rock artists. Many of these films addressed adult fears of rock
‘n’ roll, but did so from a teenage perspective; it was a given that rock was simply good, healthy
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fun, rather than training for a crime wave. By defending rock music, these films, by extension,
defended teen culture itself, thereby functioning as tacit justifications for their own existence and
continued profitability.
Another teenpic sub-genre centered on juvenile delinquency, typically juxtaposing
“good” teenagers with wild and violent criminal teens. These films also attempted to defend teen
culture against adult criticism, though they did so by making partial concessions to that criticism.
The films suggested that some teenagers (often from working class backgrounds) were bad, but
good teens (usually from middle-class backgrounds) were incorruptible. The good teens may
have given their elders some attitude, but they always resisted the criminal ways of their bad
peers. The films rejected the conception of juvenile delinquency as a disease, even as they
contributed to the stereotyping of working class youth. At the same time, the films also subtly
mocked adult fears of violent teenagers by exaggerating their threat to absurd proportions. This
is best seen in a cycle of teenage horror films produced between 1957 and 1958 by AIP,
beginning with I Was a Teenage Werewolf.
This chapter will examine the film industry’s depiction of the threat of teenage violence
and crime as seen in films that speak to a teenage perspective. The chapter will focus on the
teenpics of independent producer Sam Katzman and teen-oriented minor studio AIP, since they
can be considered to be, respectively, the originator of the teenpic and the most successful
creator of teenpics. It will also focus on one example of the major studios’ attempt to tap into the
teenage rock ‘n’ roll audience: the films of Elvis Presley, who went from being the most famous,
or infamous, symbol of teen culture to the most consistently profitable star in Hollywood. Rock
‘n’ roll films will receive the greatest share of attention, as the public discussion of rock music
was where the debate over teen culture, and its challenge to race and class barriers, was most
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clearly articulated. The chapter will end by contrasting the rock teenpic with the horror teenpic;
whereas the former attempted to dismiss concerns of teen violence, the latter exaggerated those
concerns to their most extreme and visceral level. The focus on teenpics has two justifications.
One is that these films have tended to be neglected in serious academic studies of how juvenile
delinquency has been dealt with onscreen. The other is that these films gave teens a rare chance
to return the gaze of the adult world that was scrutinizing them and see adult fears disproven or
made ridiculous, and the adults themselves made to look like delinquents who oppress or exploit
innocent teens. At a time when the major studios were asking what should be done about the
teenage “problem,” the teenpics looked at things from the perspective of the other side. It is a
perspective that is important to the understanding of the film industry’s relationship to juvenile
delinquency.

“The Savage Beat:” The Origins of Rock ‘n’ Roll and Its Controversy
Before discussing the films, it is necessary to provide context for the reception of rock ‘n’
roll in the 1950s. Different sources dispute the precise combination of prior musical styles that
led to the genesis of rock, but most agree that its biggest influence was rhythm and blues (R&B).
It is difficult to regard R&B as a single influence, however, given that the genre originated as a
repository for various musical styles that were performed by African Americans: jazz, blues, and
gospel. In fact, the label “rhythm and blues” had been a late-1940s substitution for the blunter
label of “race music.”
25
The R&B genre originally functioned as a form of musical segregation
by which black artists, with only a handful of exceptions, could be kept in a separate category
from the white mainstream. R&B was marketed exclusively to African American audiences.
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Nevertheless, R&B did manage to gain a following among white teenagers. Glenn
Altschuler notes that, while “most music stores in white neighborhoods did not stock” the
records, “white teenagers proved to be resolute and resourceful” in their “pursuit of R&B.”
26
The
growing audience for R&B led several artists – both white and black – to experiment with the
music, sometimes hybridizing it with other musical styles. Bill Haley, whose song “Rock Around
the Clock” would become an anthem for 1950s teenagers, stated that he created his style simply
by using “country and western instruments to play rhythm and blues” music.
27
Alan Freed, an
Ohio disc jockey, found significant success playing R&B and R&B-inspired music on his radio
show, and was the first to use “rock ‘n’ roll” to refer to a musical genre. Although Freed would
claim that the term was inspired by the “rolling, surging beat of the music,” it was in fact “a
black euphemism for sexual intercourse” that “had appeared in a song title as early as 1922.”
28

Although Freed, arguably more than anyone else, contributed to the mainstreaming of rock ‘n’
roll music, he gave it a name that was not only drawn from African American culture, but which
evoked the sexual power of the music that adults would find objectionable.
It did not take long for rock ‘n’ roll to have a significant impact on the culture at large.
Lucy Rollin, in her overview of teen culture throughout the twentieth century, writes of the
1950s that “in no other decade has music been of such paramount importance as an activity, an
economy, and a symbol, and without doubt part of the reason was the new buying power of
teens.”
29
Rock music fit perfectly into the newly developing teen culture, allowing the younger
generation to cultivate its independence from adult tastes and activities. Rock ‘n’ roll dancing,
for example, provided teenagers with an adult-free environment for self-expression. As Frith
states, “the rise of rock ‘n’ roll meant a generation gap in dancing, as dance halls offered rock ‘n’
roll nights or became exclusively rock ‘n’ roll venues.”
30

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At the same time, rock ‘n’ roll facilitated the previously-mentioned challenge to class and
race barriers. Palladino writes that, due to the music’s synthesis of styles from outside the
mainstream, rock ‘n’ roll “broadened the teenage market beyond its affluent middle-class base,
bringing working-class teenagers, both black and white, into the mix.”
31
There were limits to this
broadening; for example, the popular music performance television show American Bandstand,
which showcased teenagers dancing to the newest rock hits, did not allow African American
dancers until 1957, and even then were limited to two dancers who were only allowed to dance
with each other.
32
Nevertheless, rock ‘n’ roll was able to cut across previously rigid musical
divides. It also facilitated the blending of cultures. Palladino writes that “thanks to rock ‘n’ roll
and the rebel culture associated with the music, teenagers now had a choice of social identities,
whatever their family background.”
33
Doubtlessly, many white middle-class parents whose
children chose not to act like white middle-class teens were ready to condemn rock ‘n’ roll as a
dangerous influence.
According to Robert Greenfield, “rock ‘n’ roll was everything that middle-class parents
feared: elemental, savage, and dripping with sexuality, qualities that respectable society usually
associated with ‘depraved’ lower classes.”
34
Furthermore, teenagers’ enthusiastic embracing of
the music accentuated the fact that teen culture was undermining parents’ traditional means of
controlling their children. Rock ‘n’ roll epitomized the concern “that adults can no longer limit
what their children see, hear, and know.”
35
Adult fears about rock ‘n’ roll represented a
multifaceted set of anxieties surrounding the changing shape of adolescence and of race and class
identity in the postwar world. In the actual articulation of adult fears, however, these anxieties
were displaced onto concerns about violence.
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1950s adults had a tendency to fixate on stories that seemed to connect rock music with
violent behavior. Writing about rock concerns, Altschuler states,
For two years the [New York] Times printed dozens of articles linking destructive
activities at, outside, or in the aftermath of concerts to ‘the beat and the booze’ or the
music alone. Public interest in rock ‘n’ roll was so great, Times editors even viewed the
absence of a riot as newsworthy.
36

As a result of these reports, and of the public outcry that followed them, many public officials
were “convinced… to ban live rock ‘n’ roll shows.”
37
In reality, many of these reports were
exaggerated. Sternheimer states that newspapers would report on incidents ranging from “small
fistfights and arrests for use of foul language” to “larger alcohol-fueled skirmishes. If the
audience stood up, danced, screamed, and refused to sit and listen to the music quietly the press
might have said that a ‘riot’ took place.”
38

Nevertheless, the reports linking rock ‘n’ roll music to violent behavior were received
with credence because they seemed to support what many adults already suspected. In a 1955
article, “the Los Angeles Times described rock and roll as ‘a violent, harsh type of music, that,
parents feel, incites teenagers to do all sorts of crazy things.’”
39
In 1958, the Christian Science
Monitor cited critics who “maintain that the savage beat of the music incites some teenagers to
misdeeds and acts of violence.”
40
According to Altschuler, “commentators in the national media
warned parents that the ‘bad elements’ in the neighborhood and at school gravitated toward rock
‘n’ roll.”
41
For adults, the jump from “bad” to “violent” and “crazy” was hardly a jump at all.
Parents and commentators alike painted a picture of youth that was driven out of control by rock
‘n’ roll music, corrupted by influences that were outside of a young person’s proper experiences.
The reports and commentary added up to the message, as Altschuler puts it, that “teenage rock
‘n’ rollers should not be left on their own.”
42
The need for a restoration of parental authority over
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teenagers, it seemed, was clear. How that was to be achieved, outside of constant criticism, was
less clear.
Much of the adult attacks on rock ‘n’ roll music contained hard-to-miss racial undertones.
Sternheimer writes that “many critics of rock and roll referenced the supposed ‘savage’ nature of
the music, a thinly-veiled reference to its African American roots.”
43
For instance, psychiatrist
Francis J. Braceland referred to rock music as “cannibalistic and tribalistic.”
44
In some instances,
these undertones took much more overt forms. In their book U.S.A. Confidential, Jack Lait and
Lee Mortimer linked juvenile delinquency “with tom-toms and hot jive and ritualistic orgies of
erotic dancing, weed-smoking and mass mania, with African jungle background,” and claimed
that “white girls are recruited for colored lovers.”
45
One of the most vocal critics of rock ‘n’ roll
was segregationist Asa Carter, who claimed that the music contained “degenerate, animalistic
beats and rhythms…. This savage and primitive type of music which comes straight from Africa
brings out the base things in man.” He accused the NAACP of using “this type of music as a
means of pulling the white man down to the level of the Negro.”
46

As Sternheimer writes,
For segregationists, the growing popularity of rock and roll among whites in the early
1950s signaled their worst fears coming to fruition: young people were ignoring racial
boundaries to enjoy the same music, and even accepting and admiring African American
artists, or at least music derived from black performers.
47

Yet one did not have to be an overt segregationist to find these developments distasteful. The
comments from the likes of Lait, Mortimer, and Carter were merely overt articulations of what
many white parents secretly suspected: that rock music, through its association with black
culture, symbolized dangerous values that were opposed to the white mainstream. Any story
linking rock ‘n’ roll with violence was seeming proof that the music was making young whites
97

act like “savages.” Rock ‘n’ roll, it seemed, was a carrier of black culture, and for many white
adults that was no different from saying that it was a carrier of juvenile delinquency.
It should be noted, though, that adult criticism of rock ‘n’ roll was not limited to whites.
As Altschuler points out, black parents would have had at least two strong reasons for objecting
to the music as well. One was that, even if they rejected the racial subtext of white criticism of
the music, African American parents would nevertheless have shared in the anxiety over rock ‘n’
roll’s alleged undermining of traditional modes of parental control. The other reason was “the
possibility that, thanks to rock ‘n’ roll, Negro culture would be defined and disdained as vulgar
and licentious, the contributions of its intellectuals, politicians, and professionals ignored.”
48

Essentially, many feared that rock music would reinforce the very assumptions about black
culture that led whites to condemn rock ‘n’ roll in the first place. In this respect, rock music
represented a vicious cycle by which white society’s racist assumptions about black culture were
self-perpetuated. Black teens who liked rock 'n' roll were thus caught between white adult racism
and black adult fear of that racism. Unfortunately for them, their perspective was largely ignored
by the film industry, which focused on rock ‘n’ roll’s effects on white teens. The black
perspective, it seemed, was inevitably taken for granted.

“We’ll Have Some Fun When the Clock Strikes One:” Blackboard Jungle and Its Reception
Any discussion of the teenpic must begin with Blackboard Jungle. Produced and released
by MGM in 1955, the film was aimed at a general, rather than teenage, audience. However,
Blackboard Jungle, more than any other major studio film, provided the impetus for the creation
of the teenpic. This development is not forecasted by the film’s storyline. Indeed, the film
follows a standard juvenile delinquency formula that goes back as far as MGM’s Boys Town in
98

1938, in which a social crusader sets out to reform a group of delinquents, inevitably drawn from
the working class. Although Blackboard Jungle updates the formula for 1955, it follows the
preexisting tradition of foregrounding the heroic adult, whose mission of reformation is depicted
as just and necessary, with the delinquents themselves portrayed as antagonists who must be
overcome by the grown-up hero.
In this film, the role of social crusader is taken by new inner-city high school teacher,
Richard Dadier (Glenn Ford), who is determined to get through to the wild, disrespectful, and
oftentimes violent students who inhabit his classroom. The film makes sure that all of the
delinquents depicted in the film are working class; in a sequence added late in the film’s
production, and rather awkwardly integrated into the main narrative, Dadier visits a middle class
school that is full of smiling, well-behaved students. The film largely disavows the existence of
middle-class delinquency, while the fear of working class youth as incubators of delinquency
seems to pervade the film, adding urgency to Dadier’s mission.
Dadier’s effort to reform his students is represented as a struggle for the “soul” of one
student: Gregory Miller (Sidney Poitier). Miller is defiant but intelligent, angry at the world and
yet possessing the skills necessary to succeed in it; he is pulled between the paths offered to him
by Dadier, who suggests that he could go to college and escape his job in an auto shop, and that
of irredeemable delinquent Artie West (Vic Morrow), who spends the film terrorizing Dadier and
his wife. It is significant that the Miller is African American, in part because it enables the film
to minimize the implications of racial discrimination in the larger society. Dadier dismisses
Miller’s concern that his race will prevent him from bettering his social standing, citing a small
handful of successful African Americans who supposedly prove that racial discrimination is not
a serious obstacle. Ultimately, Miller sides with Dadier against West, rejecting the antisocial
99

values of the juvenile rebel in favor of Dadier’s adult middle-class values, in the hopes thereby
of booking his own passage into the middle class. Most of the class follow Miller’s example; the
irredeemable West is sent to the principal’s office and never heard from again. As Leerom
Medovoi puts it, “the reign of juvenile delinquency ends at Manual High, and the school is
reborn as a successful democratic experiment in integration.”
49

Dadier’s work, then, operates as a reversal of the supposed effects of rock ‘n’ roll.
Whereas rock caused white middle class teens to absorb the values and behaviors of
“undesirable” groups, Dadier convinces a black working-class teen to accept the values of the
adult middle class. The film suggests that the latter values are the key to redeeming working
class delinquents and, by extension, protecting middle class whites from the delinquency
“disease.” The film concludes with the symbolic triumph of mainstream adult authority over
teenage rebellion.
This conservative message in the film, however, was at odds with much of the film’s
reception. Medovoi writes that although the film was “marketed primarily to adults as a ‘social
problem film’ about the scourge of juvenile delinquency and the heroism required of teacher who
would overcome it,” and was successful in doing so, “it was unexpectedly embraced by
teenagers as well, and in ways that adults found deeply troubling.”
50
This troubling “embrace” of
the film was tied to the decision to use Bill Haley & His Comets’ song “Rock Around the Clock”
at the beginning and end of the film. The film’s opening scene, however unintentionally on the
part of the filmmakers, depicted a union of sound and image that perfectly encapsulated the
rebellious power of rock ‘n’ roll: as “Rock Around the Clock” blares over the soundtrack, the
viewer sees teenagers in the courtyard of their high school dancing energetically to the music,
even as they are surrounded by a chain-link fence seemingly designed to keep them prisoners. As
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Altschuler puts it, “for two minutes and ten seconds, ‘Rock Around the Clock’ issued a clarion
call to students to break out of jail and have fun.”
51

According to Mark Thomas McGee, it was the song’s appearance in Blackboard Jungle
that sparked the popularity of “Rock Around the Clock.” By July of 1955, “the song was the
best-selling record in the nation and in no time became a national anthem for the young.”
52

Multiple sources, including McGee, Altschuler, and Rollin, credit (or blame) the film for
cementing in the public consciousness the connection between juvenile delinquency and rock ‘n’
roll. The energy of Haley’s song seemed to perfectly mirror the defiance and rebellion against
adult culture enacted by the film’s onscreen delinquents, prompting concerns that teenage
viewers who reveled in the music were also identifying more with the delinquents than with the
responsible adults. According to Medovoi, parents were concerned “that young people were
seeking out Blackboard Jungle because it encouraged misreadings that glorified teenage violence
and terrorism.”
53

In spite of the film’s success in articulating its adult-friendly theme, many adults
criticized the film, and in ways that mirrored the criticism of rock ‘n’ roll. The media reported on
riots that occurred at movie houses, where “upwards of 75 per cent of the audience” was
“composed of rambunctious teens.”
54
Though critics blamed the film’s content and soundtrack
for these incidents, Palladino states that
they were missing the larger point. Teenagers ‘rioted’ when management tried to make
them stop dancing to the movie’s rock ‘n’ roll theme, or told them to quiet down and take
their feet off the seats. Adults had been trying to control teenage conduct as long as
movie houses had existed, but now that teenagers dominated the audience, they intended
to set the tone.
55

Blackboard Jungle was symbolic of the effect of the growing teenage consumer market on the
film industry. Teenagers would increasingly “set the tone,” if not in terms of movie house
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conduct, then in terms of cinematic content. Even though Blackboard Jungle was not aimed at a
teenage audience, the film’s reception among teenagers pointed the way to the teenpic, which
would cater directly to this powerful new consumer class.
Thanks both to teenage viewership and to the controversy around its topical subject
matter, MGM’s Blackboard Jungle was “the studio’s most successful release in nearly two
years.”
56
It is striking, then, that MGM did not make an effort to follow up on that success. With
the exception of the 1957 Elvis Presley film Jailhouse Rock, MGM avoided the subjects of rock
‘n’ roll and juvenile delinquency for the remainder of the decade. In the face of both enormous
profits and overwhelming controversy, it seems that MGM opted to take the money and run,
choosing not to push its luck by trying to replicate the Blackboard Jungle formula. Instead,
MGM would cede that territory to the independent producers and studios that made teenagers
their target audience.

“It’s a Business, Just Like Any Other Business:” The Rise of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Teenpic
After 1955, which saw the release of both Blackboard Jungle and Warner Bros.’ Rebel
Without a Cause, the major Hollywood studios did still put out occasional films dealing with
rock ‘n’ roll and juvenile delinquency. Generally, though, these subjects were kept separate, with
the former often treated as a strange faddish novelty and the latter as a sociological problem to be
solved (the Elvis Presley films, discussed later, represent a notable exception to this
generalization). The output of the major studios remained predominantly adult-oriented; they
either did not recognize, or did not want to cater to, the tastes of the teenage audience that had
helped make Blackboard Jungle a hit. As such, the teenage audience was relinquished to the
makers of teen exploitation pictures: independent producers or small independent studios who
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specialized in catering to teenage tastes. A major studio might sometimes deign to distribute
these films, as Columbia did with many of Sam Katzman’s pictures, but their production was left
in the hands of a relatively disreputable bunch.
Katzman was the first of this group to successfully capitalize on the teenage market. He
was a Hollywood veteran, having produced serials and B-movies since the 1930s. Even by B-
movie standards, his movies were known for being produced quickly and cheaply (which is to
say, shoddily), and for their sensational subject matter. Within the industry, “his name was
synonymous with sleaze.”
57
No doubt it was his negative reputation that convinced him he had
nothing to lose by associating himself with the equally disreputable subject of rock ‘n’ roll
music. Katzman “was one of the few filmmakers around who could make a movie quickly
enough to capitalize on passing fads.”
58
He’d also had previous experience with youthful movie
subjects from the twenty-two East Side Kids films he had produced for Monogram between 1940
and 1945. In those films, he took the juvenile delinquency actors previously known as the Dead
End Kids and attempted to strip away the elements that made them controversial in adult eyes,
while retaining enough of their underlying appeal to keep them interesting to viewers,
particularly young ones. Katzman now sought to do the same thing with rock ‘n’ roll, setting to
work on a film that would replicate the success of Blackboard Jungle, but do so from a pro-
teenager perspective.
The title of this film was, naturally enough, Rock Around the Clock (Columbia, 1956).
Katzman enlisted Bill Haley and His Comets to appear in the film as themselves and to play their
music in front of the camera. Aside from the presence of Haley’s song, however, the film has
little resemblance to Blackboard Jungle. Juvenile delinquency is entirely absent from the film;
instead, the teenagers who are seen listening and dancing to rock music are happy, clean-cut kids
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who are just looking to have a good time. This depiction was in line with the rock ‘n’ roll music
industry’s own attempts to clean up its image with adults. According to Altschuler, in the middle
of the decade the industry “launched a comprehensive campaign to dissociate rock ‘n’ roll from
juvenile delinquency and enlist it in the drive for intergenerational understanding and
harmony.”
59

Accordingly, Rock Around the Clock and the teenpics that followed it “emphasized that
the music of teenagers was a ‘harmless outlet,’ and the youngsters themselves no less than
loveable.”
60
Indeed, Katzman’s film featured an onscreen appearance by Alan Freed, the first of
many such appearances in rock teenpics, who had become one of the music’s most vocal
defenders. When Blackboard Jungle was released, Freed called it unfortunate “that Haley’s song
about having a good time had been used ‘in that hoodlum-infested movie,’ which ‘seemed to
associate rock ‘n’ rollers with delinquents.’”
61
In his onscreen roles, Freed typically played
himself as someone who fought “to defend the good name of rock ‘n’ rollers, who were, after all,
good-hearted, responsible kids who really just wanted to dance.”
62
Palladino argues that
“wholesomeness was just a prop to get past adult censors,” but that teenagers understood and
accepted these terms as the only way they were going to get their onscreen rock ‘n’ roll.
63

In spite of its avoidance of the juvenile delinquency subject, Rock Around the Clock is
still noteworthy for establishing many elements of the formula that later rock ‘n’ roll teenpics
would follow. The film is a fictionalized story of Bill Haley’s discovery and rise to fame, though
the focus is not on Haley himself but on his manager, Steve Hollis (Johnny Johnston). At the
beginning of the film, Hollis is working for a big band, but leaves the position when he realizes
that big band dance music is losing its appeal to the public. He sets out in search of a sound that
will get people dancing again, and happens to come across Bill Haley performing for a group of
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teens in a small, rural town. The film’s emphasis on dancing is indicative of its efforts to
represent the teenage perspective. As Leo Braudy writes, major studio films that depicted rock
‘n’ roll performances, such as The Girl Can’t Help It (1956), “presented rock ‘n’ roll as if it were
about words and music rather than about dancing and the body.”
64
As Thomas Doherty writes,
the makers of The Girl Can’t Help It “know little and care less about rock ‘n’ roll music and
teenagers.”
65
Rock Around the Clock, on the other hand, made sure to emphasize the importance
of dancing to rock ‘n’ roll’s appeal. During the film’s numerous rock performances, the camera
frequently cuts away from the performers to show young people doing lively, energetic, and
athletic dances. The film attempts to depict rock music on the terms on which young people
actually enjoyed it.
Nevertheless, the film also makes some attempts to whitewash rock ‘n’ roll’s origins.
Haley is discovered in the town so small and rural that Haley claims he is sometimes paid for his
performances in turnips or onions. His music’s origins are linked with the country, and with the
uniformly white teenagers the film depicts living there, rather than with the racial and ethnic
diversity of the city. In spite of Haley’s real-life pronouncement that his style of music was
playing rhythm & blues music with country & western instruments, the film tacitly
acknowledges his music’s link to country, while avoiding any formative link to R&B. Although
the film does showcase the black R&B group The Platters, its reluctance to acknowledge R&B’s
influence on Haley suggests an awareness of the racial aspect of the rock ‘n’ roll controversy.
In addition, the film avoids making onscreen acknowledgement of the fact that rock ‘n’
roll was considered controversial by much of the adult public. The adults in Haley’s town seem
to have no objections to their children listening or dancing to the music. When Hollis attempts to
take Haley public, their biggest obstacle is not adult disapproval of the music, but a contrived
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love triangle. Nefarious booking agent Corinne Talbot (Alix Talton) controls access to the
venues Hollis needs, but because she is in love with Hollis she wants him to fail so that he will
be forced to join her agency. The middle-aged Hollis, however, has fallen in love with the much
younger Lisa Johns (Lisa Gaye). With the help of Alan Freed, Haley ends up getting the
exposure he needs to become a success, and Hollis and Johns are happily married.
The love triangle plot was partly motivated by the film’s choice of protagonist. Like most
future rock ‘n’ roll teenpics, the film attempts to showcase the teenage perspective not through a
teenage protagonist, but through an adult protagonist who sympathizes with teenagers. The rock
‘n’ roll teenpics, therefore, do not represent a complete embrace of teen culture; instead, they
hedge their bets by making concession to adults. Although protagonists like Hollis understand
teenagers on their own terms, rather than representing the mainstream adult view of them, their
adulthood also lends them the authority to pass judgment on teen culture in the eyes of any adults
in the audience (or so the film would seem to hope). The adult protagonist is there to assure those
in the audience who need assurance that teen culture is nothing like it is reputed to be.
Hollis’ choice between the two women is used to demonstrate his affinity for teen culture
(and for teenagers themselves). He rejects Talbot’s adult world of cynical and manipulative
business practices for Johns, a rock ‘n’ roll dancer who symbolizes the freedom and liberation of
rock music. At the same time, Johns is an unusually “adult” young person, whose intelligence
makes her an asset to Hollis’ management of Haley’s band. The two meet each other half way,
with their intergenerational romance proof that the two sides are more alike than it would seem.
Hollis, in some ways, can be read as a stand-in for the rock ‘n’ roll music industry, or for Sam
Katzman himself: he is an adult who listens to and understands teenagers, and who reaps great
monetary rewards for doing so.
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Katzman did indeed reap such rewards. According to McGee, “everywhere the picture
played it raked in the money.”
66
The film’s success can probably be attributed in large part to its
novelty – never before had teenagers seen a film that was so clearly meant for them. As Doherty
writes, “Rock Around the Clock became the first hugely successful film marketed to teenagers to
the pointed exclusion of their elders.”
67
The film quickly sparked a flood of similar films aimed
at teenagers, many of them similarly based around rock ‘n’ roll. One element of the rock ‘n’ roll
teenpic, though, would soon change. According to Randall Clark, although Katzman’s initial
film avoided depiction of “teenage problems,” “soon, however, rock and roll movies would make
a direct connection between rock music and teenage rebellion.”
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This shift began with Katzman’s follow up to Rock Around the Clock, titled Don’t Knock
the Rock. The latter film starred Alan Dale as Arnie Haines, an adult rock ‘n’ roll star who takes
his band and his promoter, Alan Freed, back to the small town he grew up in. Although they are
embraced enthusiastically by the town’s teenage population, he encounters immediate adult
disapproval. The mayor, who has apparently been reading the newspapers, declares that rock ‘n’
roll is “outrageous, depraved” and vaguely states that “you can see the moral effect it’s having
on our younger generation,” evoking the specter of juvenile delinquency. When some teenagers
listening to the exchange try to interject, the mayor declares that “teenagers should be seen and
not heard,” which Freed quips is “a quote from the middle ages.” When the mayor bans Haines
from performing in town, it threatens to start a snowball effect of anti-rock legislation. The film
suggests that the entire future of rock ‘n’ roll is dependent on Haines and his teenage allies
changing the adults’ minds about rock music.
In contrast to Katzman’s previous film, which shied away from controversy by
positioning rock ‘n’ roll music as unconventional but inoffensive, Don’t Knock the Rock makes
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the cultural controversy over the music central to its plot. The small-town adults of Rock Around
the Clock, who good-naturedly accepted their children’s enjoyment of rock music, have become
anti-rock crusaders who demand that Haines “stay away from our children!” This shift represents
an acknowledgement that part of the reason rock ‘n’ roll was popular was that it was
controversial, and suggests that the filmmakers expected that it will be more profitable to
examine this controversy rather than avoid it. The film attempts to construct a defense of rock ‘n’
roll that will appeal to the teenagers that make up the film’s audience, while also satisfying
adults who might have been concerned about what kind of messages teenpics were sending to
their children.
That strategy begins with the film’s protagonist,. Unlike Rock Around the Clock’s
protagonist Steve Hollis, Arnie Haines is a singer. However, despite the insistence of all the
characters in the film, including Haines himself, on labeling him as a rock ‘n’ roller, there is little
onscreen evidence to support the assertion. Haines initially appears onscreen performing a song
that sounds more like swing than rock ‘n’ roll, and his backing group looks more like a big band
than a rock band. McGee states that the performer, Alan Dale, “wasn’t a rocker, he was a
crooner” and called him “out of place” in the film.
69
In fact, Haines bears a significant
resemblance to singer Frank Sinatra. During the 1950s, Sinatra was one of the music industry’s
harshest critics of rock ‘n’ roll, declaring that the music
smells phony and false… It is sung, played, and written for the most part by cretinous
goons, and by means of its almost imbecilic reiteration and sly, lewd, in plain fact dirty,
lyrics it manages to be the martial music of every side-burned delinquent on the face of
the earth.
70

It should be noted that, years earlier, Sinatra had himself been a teenage idol, even though
“teenagers” had not yet been broadly recognized as a separate commercial market. Having
Haines evoke Sinatra, despite making him “out of place,” subtly points the hypocrisy of Sinatra’s
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attitude: having previously appealed to young people (and no longer doing so), Sinatra now
criticizes those who appeal to modern teenage tastes. Sinatra, the film suggests, could easily have
been Arnie Haines in a different generation.
The connection between Haines and Sinatra is strengthened by a scene in which Haines
romances college student Francine MacLaine (Patricia Hardy). While lying together on the
beach, Haines spontaneously sings her a traditional, Sinatraesque romantic ballad. When she
asks him why he chooses to sing rock ‘n’ roll instead, he replies that “the people who buy my
records like rock ‘n’ roll; the public always decides what kind of entertainment it’s going to get.”
To hammer home the point, Francine expresses her realization that rock music is “a business,
just like any other business.” In this exchange, the film paradoxically formulates a defense of
rock ‘n’ roll by portraying it as a cynical business that is, like any business, interested only in
money. Cultural theorists Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel would later write that the fact that rock
music was “produced for a commercial market means that the songs and settings lack a certain
authenticity.”
71
It was this lack of authenticity that the film attempted to accentuate. Arnie
Haines is not a rock ‘n’ roll singer because he supports teenage rebellion or wants kids to resist
their parents; he just wants to get paid. Because rock ‘n’ roll music (and, by extension, rock ‘n’
roll teenpics) are commercial creations, their rebellious images should not be taken seriously.
This line of reasoning is further developed later in the conversation. Haines, who had
previously expressed confusion about his popularity with teenagers, comes to the realization that
“kids just pick somebody like me and wave me like a flag; they wanna hold me in front of their
parents’ noses, like a pair of red britches in front of a bull.” Rock ‘n’ roll, the film suggests, is
popular with teenagers not because it is actually rebellious, but because it has the surface
appearance of rebellion. This surface appearance could be used by teens to assert to their parents
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a rebellious spirit that they themselves felt long before they had heard of Arnie Haines. Rock ‘n’
roll did not create rebellion, but was simply something teenagers could use to articulate it.
The film’s rhetoric suggests an intelligent strategy on the part of the filmmakers. For one
thing, the argument cleverly appeals to the cynicism that adults would have had towards the
purveyors of rock ‘n’ roll. Being seen as profit-driven opportunists was likely preferable to being
seen as corruptors. Furthermore, the film entreats parents to be wary of appearances where
teenagers are concerned, which can be extended to teen culture broadly. Just because teenagers
were looking and behaving like juvenile delinquents did not mean they were actually
delinquents; they were probably just trying to get a rise out of their parents. With teenagers
themselves, though, it’s easy to see how the argument might have had a mixed reaction. On the
one hand, reducing rock ‘n’ roll’s appeal down to parental antagonism was doubtlessly a
simplification, and many teenagers may have resented seeing their love of the music seemingly
trivialized. At the same time, the film also affirmed the agency of teenagers in determining the
shape of their culture. The film dismisses the image of the rock ‘n’ roller as a pied piper leading
teenagers to corruption. Instead, it is teenagers who set the terms of their music, with the industry
forced to meet those terms. It is rock ‘n’ roll’s commercialism, the film suggests, that makes it
both nonthreatening to adults and empowering to teenagers.
Like Rock Around the Clock, Don’t Knock the Rock employs an intergenerational love
triangle to provide drama. Francine MacLaine, like Lisa Johns in the previous film, is a lover of
rock ‘n’ roll music who is also unusually mature and intelligent for her age. She enjoys
discussing rock ‘n’ roll and its teenage audience in sociological terms, making pro-teenager
statement like “teenagers are almost adults; they’re entitled to their own opinions, not what
somebody dictates for them” or “rock ‘n’ roll is a symptom of the young people asserting
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themselves for their right to do things as they see fit; they resent the wrong kind of discipline by
parents.” Her union with Haines, as in the previous film, suggests a merging of perspectives that
were not as far apart as it would seem.
Teen Sunny Everett (Jana Lund), on the other hand, is a sexual delinquent who makes
repeated attempts to seduce Haines. When he rejects her, she attempts to sabotage his efforts to
save rock ‘n’ roll. Haines had organized a secret rock ‘n’ roll dance party, with performances by
Bill Haley, Little Richard, and others, to be attended by the town’s teenagers and by Francine’s
mother Arlene, a powerful gossip columnist modeled on Hedda Hopper who had been criticizing
Haines in her column. Haines and Francine hope to use the dance to prove to Arlene that rock ‘n’
roll doesn’t cause teens to behave like juvenile delinquents. Sunny steals some of her father’s
liquor, pretends to get drunk, and makes a scene at the dance, flinging alcohol onto the other
teenagers. They must have absorbed the alcohol osmotically, since a fight immediately breaks
out. The result confirms the adults’ biases that the music leads to delinquent behavior.
Haines and Francine engineer the solution of having the teenagers of the town put on a
“pageant of art and culture” for the town’s adults, in which they demonstrate historical dances.
After a dignified European minuet, the teenagers go into a performance of the Charleston, the
popular dance of the 1920s. The energetic and chaotic dance bears an obvious visual
resemblance to rock ‘n’ roll dancing; not stated overtly was the fact that the Charleston, like
rock, was derived from African American music and dance styles. Alan Freed, the host of the
event, points out that many adults in the room had once performed the Charleston, and uses it as
proof that music and dance do not produce delinquency.
This demonstration is another example of the film’s attempt to appeal to both teenagers
and adults in its defense of rock music. For teenagers, it was surely gratifying to see the anti-rock
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adults made to look foolish and hypocritical. Adult condemnation of rock for creating juvenile
delinquency surely loses its moral authority when those same adults performed similar dances in
their own youths. At the same time, adults, despite having their onscreen analogues mocked,
were reminded of the continuity that existed between generations. The assertion that rock ‘n’ roll
teens would not become delinquents was based on the fact that adults who danced the Charleston
in their youths grew up to be what Freed called “fine people.” As elsewhere, the film sought to
locate similarities between children and adults, and thereby foster reconciliation between the
two.
For most of the adults onscreen, the demonstration was enough to completely transform
their views on rock ‘n’ roll. Arlene MacLaine claims to have come to the realization that “we
were just trying to find a scapegoat for our own shortcomings in bringing up our children.”
Sunny Everett is given the full blame for the fight at the dance. Much like Artie West, Sunny is
scapegoated for the bad behavior of the teenage community, and her punishment is what allows
the others to reconcile with adults: her father vows to “whale the living tar outta her hide just as
soon as we get home,” to the approval of both the teens and adults in the room. The film ends
with Haines leading the teenagers in an impromptu rock ‘n’ roll dance, with the smiling approval
of their parents.
Katzman’s follow up to Rock Around the Clock was another commercial hit, though it
was “nothing close to the original.”
72
Although the box office drop can be attributed to the film’s
lack of the novelty of the original, or to headliner Bill Haley’s declining popularity, Katzman
“concluded that rock was on the way out” and switched to making films about calypso music.
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Nevertheless, Don’t Knock the Rock would provide the template for a number of rock ‘n’ roll
teenpics, including the initial effort of a small studio called American International Pictures.
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Shake, Rattle & Rock (1956) was AIP’s “first movie… aimed at the juvenile trade,” and
its success was partly responsible for convincing owners Samuel Z. Arkoff and James H.
Nicholson to focus their company on producing teenpics.
74
For the most part, the film follows a
similar plot to Don’t Knock the Rock: a fictional citizens group, The Society for the Prevention
of Rock and Roll Corruption of American Youth (SPRACAY), has begun a crusade against rock
‘n’ roll music, lobbying for legislation banning it. Rock is defended by teenagers and their
sympathetic adult spokesman, DJ Garry Nelson (Mike “Touch” Connors). In spite of its
similarities, the film does differ from Don’t Knock the Rock in a few notable ways.
One key difference is that whereas Katzman’s films had depicted rock ‘n’ roll teenagers
as small-town middle-class kids, the teens in Shake, Rattle & Rock are working class city-
dwellers. They are presented as ethnically diverse, even including a few African-Americans,
though none are given speaking parts. The class politics mean that the film’s depiction of the
relationship between rock music and juvenile delinquency is changed. Don’t Knock the Rock
claimed that rock ‘n’ roll has no connection to juvenile delinquency outside of appearances.
Shake, Rattle & Rock argues that rock ‘n’ roll is actually a solution to juvenile delinquency.
The teenagers of the film are members of a rock ‘n’ roll dance group that is overseen by
Garry Nelson. Many of the members were former juvenile delinquents, but, according to Nelson,
rock music “brought them together and once that happened, why, their activities branched out.”
The kids are seen listening to rock ‘n’ roll while performing innocuous activities like painting,
sculpting, and sewing wallets. They hope to renovate an abandoned building to create “Teen
Town,” an activity center where teenagers can have their own community space. This is
reflective of the discourse around juvenile delinquency in that adults needed to create social
programs to provide prospective delinquents with alternative options to crime. Benjamin Fine
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wrote that communities should develop “adequate recreational facilities,” which serve as “strong
deterrents to delinquency.”
75
This idea was also brought up by the rock music industry, which
attempted to advance the idea that rock ‘n’ roll was not a cause of delinquency, but a positive
alternative way to channel the teenager’s potentially destructive energy.
76
The film draws on
these discourses in order to offer a defense of rock music and, by extension, films that portray
rock music.
The film also features the character of gangster Bugsy Smith, who is a parodic throwback
to the gangster figures who appeared in 1930s juvenile delinquency films, such as Rocky
Sullivan (James Cagney) in Angels with Dirty Faces (Warner Bros., 1939). Characters like
Sullivan would employ impoverished delinquents in committing minor crimes, and symbolized
the threat that the delinquents would grow up to become adult criminals themselves. Smith, who
has just returned from prison, discovers that the rock ‘n’ roll dance club has absorbed his former
teenage employees. Despite his demands, the teens refuse to give up their new activities to go
back to their lives of crime. Smith decries rock ‘n’ roll music in terms that comically mirror the
criticisms of the conservative moral crusaders: he asks his henchman “do you see what’s
happening to the youth of today? The next thing you know they’ll be going to school every day!”
and he claims that Nelson has “committed brainwash.” He later accuses Nelson of spoiling his
neighborhood by convincing the teenagers to stop committing crimes and go to school and
church, and declares that he is “ashamed to live there no more.” In its heavy-handed way, the
film suggests that the moral crusaders have it backwards. By combatting rock ‘n’ roll, they
ignore the fact that the music can also be used by adults to advance their own ends: providing a
lure to draw teenagers away from crime and towards more productive activities.
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The teens eventually open Teen Town and attempt to hold a rock ‘n’ roll dance there, but
SPRACAY gets it shut down on a charge of disturbing the peace. Smith, who also attended,
convinces a group of angry teens to vent their frustration by destroying the SPRACAY leader’s
car. SPRACAY uses this as evidence that rock ‘n’ roll breeds juvenile delinquency. The film,
however, implies that it is not the music itself, but rather adult oppression, that breeds teenage
violence around rock ‘n’ roll performances. Teenagers who listen to rock ‘n’ roll get along fine if
they are left alone. It is only when adults attempt to interfere with their fun that they threaten to
become angry and violent. Nevertheless, the teens who destroyed the car eventually confess and
take responsibility for the crime in an attempt to take the blame off of Nelson and the musical
influence he represents. Rock ‘n’ rollers may be wild, the film claims, but they are ultimately
good kids who will end up doing the right thing.
The film’s most striking scene occurs near its climax. Nelson and SPRACAY agree to a
televised “trial” with rock ‘n’ roll music itself as the defendant. SPRACAY will attempt to prove
that the music is a destructive influence and should be outlawed, while Nelson and his teens
attempt to prove the opposite. The prosecutor, SPRACAY’s leader, calls his “first exhibit:” he
invites a group of teenagers (all of them white) do dance to rock ‘n’ roll music. At the same time,
he projects documentary footage of sparsely-clad African natives dancing to drumbeat. The
prosecutor declares that this juxtaposition clearly demonstrates “the disgusting source of this
‘cultural form’” and that it makes the “utter depravity” of the music self-evident.
This scene serves to make overt the deeply racist subtext beneath adult objections to rock
‘n’ roll music on multiple levels. On one level, the prosecutor offers an absurd condemnation of
the entire African musical tradition as being “disgusting” and “depraved.” At the same time, his
presentation also implicitly reduces all people of African descent, including African Americans,
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to the level of “primitives.” He implies that white teenagers, by mirroring the dances of these
native Africans, will thereby take on the characteristics of the latter. White teenagers will
thereby, he suggests, becoming something “less” that white.
It’s notable that neither Nelson, nor the film itself, make much of an attempt to challenge
the prosecutor’s implications about blackness. Nelson does not make a direct rebuttal to the
demonstration, and he does not discuss race in any of his arguments. Instead, he defends rock ‘n’
roll the same way that Don’t Knock the Rock did: by comparing it with the wild music and
dancing of the Roaring Twenties. Nelson screens footage of young whites performing the
Charleston and the Black Bottom, the latter dance being based on the Charleston and also being
derived from African American performers. Nelson explicitly names the latter dance, subtly
though clearly alluding to its racial origins. When it transpires that one of the dancers in the
footage grew up to become a member of SPRACAY, the crusaders’ argument is destroyed.
Nelson states that all his teenagers want is “a chance to work their own way out of their teens,”
just as their elders did in their own time.
Nelson’s defense of rock ‘n’ roll hinges on the fact that white teenagers in the 1920s
performed dances derived from African American sources and yet grew up to become “normal”
citizens. This defense makes no statement on the question of whether black music and dance
(and, by extension black culture in general) are “disgusting” or “depraved” as the prosecutor
claims; indeed, Nelson and the film are mute on this subject. Instead, Nelson’s defense suggests
that any depravity that may exist in black culture cannot be transmitted through music, since
white dancers of the Black Bottom managed to avoid becoming depraved themselves. The film
raises the specter of racism through SPRACAY’s demonstration, not to criticize it, but to deflect
it away from the debate over rock ‘n’ roll. This example suggests that the teenpic’s teenage
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appeal was not meant to extend to African American teenagers. The film declines to take a
position on whether black culture deserves the derision heaped upon it by whites, simply stating
that the question shouldn’t interfere with white enjoyment of rock ‘n’ roll music.
The film ends with the teenagers, along with some of the adults, dancing to a
performance by African American musician Fats Domino. The performance is a bit strange,
though, as Domino appears on a TV set rather than being in the same room with the dancers, as
is conventional in these films. This was for production reasons, as Domino’s limited availability
prevented him from appearing on set with the other actors.
77
Nevertheless, Domino’s absence
from the scene seems apt as a metaphor for the separation between the black performer and the
predominantly white dancers. Domino’s connection to the dancers was mitigated and indirect.
White adults could watch their children dancing to his music and, the film suggests, feel assured
that it would not cost them their whiteness.

“It’s Just the Beast in Me:” Elvis Presley in the Movies
During the 1950s, as previously stated, the major Hollywood studios for the most part left
teenage audiences to the teen exploitation producers. Nevertheless, there was one concerted
effort on the part of the majors to capture the audience of teenage rock ‘n’ rollers. Elvis Presley,
who in 1956 was the biggest star in rock ‘n’ roll, made four films between ‘56 and ‘58, when he
was drafted into the army. Unlike the low-budget teenpics, these had sizeable budgets (though
still modest by major studio standards) and glossy production values. His first four films were
produced and distributed by three different studios, indicating that all of Hollywood wanted a
piece of him. These films make for an interesting comparison with the teen exploitation pictures.
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The studios had to proceed cautiously, though, since Presley was a highly contentious
figure, in part due to his racial connotations. Like many rock ‘n’ rollers, his musical style drew
heavily from black gospel and rhythm & blues music as well as white country & western.
Presley, though, exhibited the African American influences on his music and performance styles
more overtly than most white performers. This was key both to his controversy and to his
success. Presley’s first big break in the music industry had come when he made a recording at
Sun Records and Marion Keisker, assistant to owner Sam Phillips, decided to play the recording
for her boss, which in turn eventually led to Presley’s first record contract. Keisker stated that
she did so because she remembered Phillips saying, “If I could find a white man who had the
Negro sound and the Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.”
78
Phillips was perceptive
enough to recognize that the success of African American musical styles was constrained by
white resistance to black performers. A white performer, however, could be considered safe
enough to gain a broader (i.e. whiter) audience. At the same time, a white performer with “the
Negro sound and the Negro feel” was also transgressive enough to be exciting to white
audiences.
The African American influences of Presley’s music was tied to his overt sexuality. As
Simon Frith writes, “black music makes obvious the potential chaos of sexual feeling, and rock’s
black-based dance forms have always been perceived by moralists as a threat to respectable
codes of behavior.” He adds that “the media censors realized immediately that Elvis Presley’s
rock ‘n’ roll was a form of sexual display.”
79
Though still highly controversial, Presley’s own
race mitigated the reaction; as a white man, it was unlikely that he was taking his life in his
hands by displaying his sexuality.
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Nevertheless, it is clear that that contemporary observers recognized the African
American influence on Presley’s style, and this was foregrounded in much of the criticism of his
music. After the release of Presley’s first single, “That’s All Right” (originally recorded by
African American blues singer Arthur Crudup with a different arrangement) in 1954, many radio
stations refused to play it, “saying it sounded ‘too black’ for them.”
80
Presley’s music was
referred to in print as a “barrage of primitive jungle-beat rhythms,” and his dancing was
compared to “an aborigine’s mating dance.”
81
According to Dave Marsh, what disturbed white
adults was not that Presley simply appropriated black musical styles, but that he mixed them with
white country & western styles. He writes, “the crime of Elvis’ rock & roll was that he proved
that black and white tendencies could coexist and that the product of their coexistence was not
just palatable but thrilling.”
82
For Marsh, Elvis was a challenge to the supposedly clearly-
demarcated barriers between the races. When white audiences looked at him, they saw someone
who appeared white but who internally seemed to be an unusual mix of white and black. For
white parents, Elvis was a symbolic gateway between races, and a danger to their children
because of this.
Due to these factors, the studios would likely have been apprehensive about using him in
their films. Presley’s immense popularity, though, must have made it difficult to refuse. As such,
the studios faced the problem of how to capitalize on him while also rendering him
nonthreatening to adults. Presley’s first film, made for 20
th
Century Fox, was Love Me Tender
(1956). The film is atypical of Presley’s film career since Presley does not play the lead role; he
portrays Clint Reno, the younger brother of Vance Reno (Richard Egan), a Civil War veteran
who returns from war to find that Clint has married his old sweetheart, Cathy (Debra Paget).
What is also atypical is that, due to the Civil War setting, Presley does not perform any rock ‘n’
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roll music. He does perform four songs, but they are all ballads or country & western style
numbers, which is to say that none of them show any African American influence.
The film represents an awkward tension between sanitizing Presley’s image and retaining
his teenage appeal. Clint is innocent, naïve, and good-natured, and he is devoted to his family.
He does eventually turn violent, but he does so in defense of his marriage, which Vance’s return
has threatened. Presley’s musical performances are a bizarre study in contradictions. He
performs two of the songs while his character is on stage at a country fair. Both his music and his
performance style are toned down; the Christian Science Monitor’s review stated that “[t]he
objectionable features of Mr. Presley’s style are kept under control for the most part.”
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At the
same time, Presley is filmed in full body shots, including his hips and pelvis, and he performs a
few of his signature gyrations. Each gyration is accompanied by an orgasmic scream from his
audience, which is made up almost exclusively of young women. Given the contrast between the
19
th
century setting and behavior being exhibited here, the scene comes off as rather surreal.
Presley’s character is able to evoke ecstatic reactions from mobs of attractive young
females, yet he cannot hold the attention of his own wife, who spends the entire film pining for
Vance. This contradiction is indicative of the uncertainty the filmmakers felt about how to
exploit and yet control Presley’s sexuality. The film represents a clear attempt to whitewash
Presley’s image, and yet the film still makes an attempt to give teenagers something resembling
the Elvis Presley they knew and loved.
Whatever the difficulties that the filmmakers experienced with using Presley safely and
effectively, the success of Love Me Tender made it inevitable that Presley would appear in more
films: “within three weeks the million dollars of the film’s cost had been recovered. Never
before had any Hollywood film gotten its money back so rapidly.”
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For his next film, Loving
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You (Paramount, 1957), it was decided that Presley would star as a thinly-veiled version of
himself, complete with rock ‘n’ roll music. In part, this decision can be attributed to Presley’s
growing popularity, convincing Paramount that they needed a more authentic onscreen Elvis. But
another factor is clearly the success of Sam Katzman and A.I.P.’s rock ‘n’ roll teenpics, which is
evidenced by the fact that Loving You takes much of its plotline from those earlier films. The
majors were beginning to recognize the market that existed for teen-centered rock ‘n’ roll films,
and Presley must have seemed like their best bet to get a piece of it. The first thing they had to do
was to convince the public that Presley was not a juvenile delinquent.
Mark Thomas McGee said that Loving You “would more aptly have been called Loving
Elvis as it was a pretty Technicolor package designed specifically to sell Elvis Presley to middle
America.”
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Elvis biographers Peter Harry Brown and Pat H. Broeske call the film “vapidly
wholesome.”
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But the film is no more wholesome than the teenpics on which it was modeled.
Although Presley is ostensibly the star of the film, an equal amount of attention is paid to his
adult costars. As in Rock Around the Clock and Don’t Knock the Rock, the film features an
intergenerational romance, though with a gender inversion. Presley’s character Deke Rivers, a
young singer from a working-class background who is clearly meant as a mirror image of
Presley himself, is attracted to an older woman: his unscrupulous manager, Glenda Markle
(Lizbeth Scott). Like Don’t Knock the Rock and Shake, Rattle & Rock, the film foregrounds the
debate over rock ‘n’ roll’s influence on teenagers, though it shifted the emphasis from the music
generally to Rivers/Presley specifically. Markle at one point defends Rivers’ music on the
grounds that the adults now trying to suppress it had once danced to the Charleston and the Black
Bottom. The film ends with a televised “trial” in which adults are invited to watch Deke Rivers
perform and then “judge for [them]selves.”
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The film follows Don’t Knock the Rock’s strategy of emphasizing rock music’s
commercialism and emphasis on surface appearances in order to defend it, though it takes the
strategy to a greater extreme. Rivers is presented as a good-hearted country boy whose docile
demeanor contrasts heavily with his exuberant (though still toned-down) onstage performances.
One character claims that Rivers’ performance style grew out of his desire to “cover up his
feelings with his songs,” hiding the fact that he was really “scared and shy.” The wild
performances of Rivers/Presley were, the film claims, just a cover for the real man, who is too
gentle to do any of the things his adult critics accuse him of. That being said, the film does not
attempt to neuter the character completely. Rivers does engage in one violent fistfight, but only
after an obnoxious “fan” repeatedly and aggressively demands that Rivers perform for his
friends, and finally strikes Rivers’ friend. Like the archetypal stoic Western hero embodied by
Shane, Rivers avoids violence for as long as possible, only engaging in it when it becomes
necessary. The film acknowledges Rivers/Presley’s capacity for youthful violence, providing
young viewers with a thrill in the process, but it assures parents that his violence will be
managed responsibly.
The film suggests that not only is the controversy around Rivers/Presley unwarranted, but
it actually serves to benefit the singer more than hurt him. Markle recognizes that controversy is
a way to generate valuable publicity, and she goes out of her way to cultivate Rivers’ rebellious,
dangerous, and sexual image. At one point, she pays two middle-aged women to attend a Rivers
concert and loudly express their disapproval; the angry reaction from Rivers’ fans leads to the
outbreak of a small-scale riot which Markle arranges to have photographed. Later, when a Deke
Rivers concert is suppressed by city hall and the town’s angry teenagers protest in the streets,
Markle declares that “this is so good, I’m ashamed of myself for not having planted it.”
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Like Shake, Rattle & Rock, Loving You argues that teenage violence and misbehavior
around rock music is the result of adult disapproval and suppression of the music. But the latter
film goes further by blaming adults themselves for rock ‘n’ roll’s subversive image in the first
place. It is Markle’s manipulations of Rivers’ image that causes him to be perceived as a danger
to teenagers, and it is adult condemnation of him that gives Markle exactly what she wants: more
publicity and more fuel for that dangerous image. Teenagers and rock ‘n’ roll performers are
absolved of blame, while adults are admonished that they should be trying to understand rather
than condemn. For Markle’s part, her growing realization of Rivers’ essential goodness leads her
to change her ways, working to clean up his image and allowing him to couple with a sweet,
virginal farmgirl his own age. Indeed, her change becomes an analogue for the film itself,
working to transform Presley’s image and inviting adults to see the “real” man behind the
performances.
Given that Loving You worked so hard to reform Presley’s image for adult eyes, it’s
striking that in his next film, Jailhouse Rock (MGM, 1957), Presley “portrayed an outright
heel.”
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This change was likely attributable to the film’s producer, Pandro S. Berman, who had
also produced Blackboard Jungle. Many of Berman’s films for MGM in the mid-to-late 50s dealt
with controversial subject matter, such as revolutionary foreign politics in Bhowani Junction
(1956) and illicit romance and social prejudice in Tea and Sympathy (1956). In Presley, Berman
presumably saw an opportunity for MGM to get juvenile delinquency back on the screen, though
in a less overt and potent form. Like Loving You, Jailhouse Rock is a quasi-autobiographical
account of Presley’s rise to fame, though it portrays Presley character as a much darker and more
complex figure. It shifts the focus from Presley’s effect on his teenage fans to his own struggle
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for self-mastery. Instead of asking whether his music turns kids into delinquents, Jailhouse Rock
asks whether Presley can redeem himself from his own delinquency.
Presley’s character, Vince Everett, is a criminal almost from the beginning of the film,
though the picture attempts to mitigate his guilt. Early on, Everett gets into a violent bar fight,
but only because he was defending a woman from her abusive husband. Everett is clearly
winning, but despite the other patrons’ cries that his opponent has “had enough,” Everett cannot
resist one final punch, which proves to be fatal. Everett’s sin is not that he is violent, since the
film attempts to justify the fight itself, but that he lacks the control to restrain his violence at the
proper moment. Later in the film, when Everett is romantically pursuing the attractive young
music promoter Peggy Van Alden (Judy Tyler), he impulsively and aggressively kisses her and
explains that “it’s just the beast in me.” The “beast” is presumably what caused him to throw that
final fatal punch, but it is also what makes him attractive to Van Alden and, it follows, to his
fans. The duality between the damage and the appeal that his unbridled violent and sexual
instincts accrue, and the character’s struggle to master the very things that feed his success, are
the film’s central tensions.
Everett ends up in jail for manslaughter, where he encounters two contrasting father-
figures. The first is his cellmate, Hunk Houghton (Mickey Shaughnessy), an older man who was
a former country & western singer. Houghton recognizes Everett’s musical talent and nurtures it,
teaching him the fundamentals of performance and giving him tips to help build his career.
Houghton also serves to help accentuate the role that country & western plays in
Everett/Presley’s musical style. As with Bill Haley in Rock Around the Clock, the film
demonstrates the performer’s country influence while obscuring his R&B influence. Vince
Everett may be a killer, but the film takes pains to show that he is fully white.
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Everett’s other father figure is the warden of his prison, who takes the role of
domineering patriarch. The warden mistreats his prisoners and exploits the power that he has
over Everett and the others. When Everett joins in a riot over the poor quality of the food the
prisoners are given, the warden has him brutally whipped. When Everett challenges the warden
over his illegal actions, the warden mocks Everett’s powerlessness against him, telling him to
“have me arrested.” Whereas Houghton represents the nurturing, supportive father, the warden
represents an abuse of adult power that was clearly aimed to resonate with young viewers. When
he is released after serving his term, Everett sarcastically tells the warden that “you’ve been just
like a father to me.” Though his words are meant as an insult, they also reveal that Everett
considers the warden, not Houghton, to be the true patriarch, and that his future actions will be
dictated by his resentment against the adult society the warden represents.
After his release, Everett embarks on a successful music career with the help of Van
Alden. His success is ascribed to Van Alden’s advice to sing “like you feel it. Put your own
emotions into the song, make it fit you.” Everett resolves to “get a little fire” into his music, and
his career quickly takes off. His music becomes an expression of the youthful individuality that
had been suppressed in prison. Yet the same “fire” that makes him a success also threatens his
personal relationships. When Houghton gets out of prison and joins Everett’s entourage, he is
treated not as a father but as a “flunkie.” Having seduced Van Alden, Everett now bullies her and
flaunts his relationships with other women. Everett is a wealthy success, but his behavior is still
that of an irresponsible delinquent.
Redemption, though, comes for Everett through physical violence. Fed up with Everett’s
abuse of Van Alden and himself, Houghton challenges him to a fight. Everett refuses to fight
back, and a blow to the throat causes damage that jeopardizes his singing voice. Van Alden calls
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Everett’s refusal to fight “an act of true love.” It represents not only his recognition of the
importance of his surrogate family, but of his ability to control his destructive impulses. Everett
is rewarded for his newfound self-control with the restoration of his singing voice, and the film
ends with him serenading his “family.”
The film plays off the recognition that rock ‘n’ roll music represents uninhibited teenage
energy, and the adult fear that that energy will lead to a destructive loss of control. Jailhouse
Rock strives to show audiences that Elvis Presley, at least, possesses the self-control necessary to
avoid this. Although his character is branded a criminal at the start of the film, and continues to
embrace the criminal identity throughout most of its running time, this only serves to heighten
the impact when he is finally able to tame “the beast.” The film’s upbeat ending suggests that
Everett/Presley will be able to continue his successful career even with his newfound self-
control. As with Loving You, this ending functions as a metaphor for Presley’s film career itself,
which seeks to render him less threatening to mainstream sensibilities.
That being said, the film is also clearly designed to appeal to teenagers. Thomas Doherty
writes that the film’s “treatment of rock ‘n’ roll music, both as narrative content and cinematic
performance, is knowing and respectful,” and it shows “an indigenous appreciation of Presley
and rock ‘n’ roll.” Like Katzman’s and AIP’s teenpics, Jailhouse Rock strives to depict rock ‘n’
roll in the way that its teenage audience sees it, rather than look at it through skeptical adult eyes,
as in The Girl Can’t Help It. However, Jailhouse Rock also differs from the teenpics, and even
from Loving You, in one key fact: Presley’s character changes over the course of the film. In the
earlier films, the young people never had to change because they were never at fault; they were
all good kids who were just misunderstood. It was the adults, guilty of unfairly judging or
exploiting those young people, who had to change their ways. Jailhouse Rock, despite its built-in
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teenage appeal, reveals a much greater concession to the adult viewer than the low-budget
teenpics (or Loving You, which attempted to imitate them). The fact that the young protagonist
must change shows that there was something wrong with young people in the first place. In this
film, the onus is on teenagers to control their behavior, rather than on adults to adjust their
perceptions.
Presley’s final film before his induction into the army was King Creole (Paramount,
1958), which once again told the story of a young man, Danny Fisher, trying to make it as a rock
‘n’ roll singer, though by the end of the film he’s achieved only local celebrity rather than
superstardom. Like Jailhouse Rock, King Creole largely ignores the question of rock ‘n’ roll’s
effect on teenagers in favor of a study of Elvis’ character and his attempts to escape a life of
crime. In this case, Danny is a high school student in New Orleans. His mother died three years
previously and his father (Dean Jagger), weakened by grief, lost his drug store business and had
to move his family from their suburban home to an apartment in an impoverished section of the
city. Danny has to support his father and sister by working odd jobs before and after school. As a
result, he is an angry and bitter young man, prone to getting in fights, and his principal accuses
him of having “all the earmarks of a hoodlum.”
As Leerom Medovoi points out, the theme of downward mobility in the film results in the
conflation of class politics and generational politics. Mr. Fisher represents the “professional
middle-class position” at the same time as he represents the family patriarch, while the son,
Danny, has been shaped by a “working-class, urban boyhood.”
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Mr. Fisher wants his son to
finish school and get a respectable job. Danny, on the other hand rejects the possibilities that
school offers to someone like him. He ends up caught between two options: to become an
entertainer, or to become a “hoodlum.” Mr. Fisher, for his part, disapproves of his son’s
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aspirations to become a rock ‘n’ roll singer, considering the profession to be a “sewer,” mirroring
middle-class attitudes towards rock ‘n’ roll. For working class Danny, however, rock ‘n’ roll
represents the only viable escape from the grim reality of his class status.
King Creole is much more open than previous Presley films about the impact of race on
his style. As its title suggests, the film deals with race mixing, though it mostly does so
indirectly. Danny is first seen singing a duet with a black woman selling crawfish from a horse-
drawn wagon. This introduction suggests an immediate connection between the two of them that
is based not only on music, but on labor. Whereas the middle class suburbs were presumably
more racially segregated, Danny’s current neighborhood is a space where racial barriers are less
stratified. The music that emerges from physical labor, and which cuts across racial barriers, is
suggested to be the music that will later make Danny into a success. At the same time, Danny
sings his part of the duet from a balcony. His elevated position relative to the woman implies
that, though he can relate to her, his whiteness still bestows on him a superior position that serves
as a form of separation between them.
Later in the film, during Danny’s first professional rock ‘n’ roll performance, he is
backed by an all-African American band. This combination is again suggestive of racial mixing,
though Danny’s location at the front of the stage, with his bandmates standing well behind him,
again implied Danny’s separate and advantageous position. Later in the film, though, as Danny
becomes increasingly successful, his band comes to be composed entirely of white performers.
This transformation suggests that, just as rock music represents a way of escaping Danny’s
working class situation, it is also a way of escaping from blackness. The most successful Danny
becomes, the whiter his world gets. Although the film acknowledges Elvis Presley’s connection
to African American music that previous films had rather clumsily attempted to hide, it also
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depicts Presley’s character moving away from the connection. By the time he performs the title
song, “King Creole,” late in the film with an entirely white band for an entirely white audience,
there is little there to suggest race mixing. Just as the real-life Presley was doing with his film
career, Danny adopts the influences of African American music only to gradually discard them
as he achieves success.
A possible alternate path for Danny is represented by the character Shark, who is played
by Vic Morrow as if he were an extension of Artie West, his character from Blackboard Jungle.
Shark is a dangerous juvenile delinquent who attempts to recruit Danny into his criminal gang.
Danny initially agrees to help them in their peculiar plan to perform a rock ‘n’ roll song in a five-
and-dime, providing a distraction to the store’s predominantly young female clientele while
Shark and his gang shoplift freely. Adults who felt that there was some sinister ulterior motive
behind Presley’s magnetic attraction for teenage girls were likely gratified by this scene. After
his singing career begins to take off, however, Danny stops associating with the gang. As in
Shake, Rattle & Rock, the music is an alternative to, rather than an enabler of, juvenile crime.
The film acknowledges, however absurdly, that the attractive power of rock ‘n’ roll music is a
potentially dangerous force, but stresses that Danny/Elvis ultimately chooses to use it
responsibly.
Shark ends up joining the criminal organization of local gangster Maxie Fields (Walter
Matthau). Like James Cagney’s Rocky Sullivan in Angels with Dirty Faces (which shares its
director, Michael Curtiz, with King Creole), Fields recruits juvenile delinquents into his
organization, symbolizing the transition between delinquency and adult crime. Such figures had
become less common in postwar delinquency movies, but in King Creole he serves the purpose
of showing that crime is just another oppressive patriarchal force that is trying to contain Danny.
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Just as Mr. Fisher attempted to force Danny to follow his middle class aspirations, Fields
attempts to force Danny into his organization so that he can exploit Danny’s singing ability in his
own nightclubs and on Fields’ restrictive terms. Danny’s craving for independence means that he
must reject the path of crime just as he rejects the path of education. He chooses the third path
offered by rock ‘n’ roll music, and is rewarded for doing so.
Ultimately, Shark, like Artie West, is scapegoated, though in more final terms. Shark
accidentally stabs himself to death while trying to kill Danny, symbolizing the dead end that the
path of crime leads to. Fields is also killed, also by his own weapon, also while trying to kill
Danny. The film ends with Danny giving a performance that is attended by his father,
symbolizing their reconciliation across both generational and class divisions. Mr. Fisher has
accepted that Danny is unable, or unwilling, to attain class advancement through traditional,
middle-class means, but that rock ‘n’ roll music provides its own avenue for advancement.
Mr. Fisher’s understanding mirrors the film’s message to middle class adults, which is
that Presley’s own choice to become a rock ‘n’ roll performer emerged not out of greed or lust,
but out of necessity. For Presley, like Danny, rock ‘n’ roll music was his only path out of his
working class existence, and it may have saved him from a much more destructive fate. Adults,
therefore, should not judge Danny or Elvis too harshly, since they may be wild but are ultimately
just trying to do what is best for themselves and their families. The film refers back to Don’t
Knock the Rock’s picture of rock ‘n’ roll as a simple business. For Danny/Elvis, rock ‘n’ roll is a
living, rather than a deliberate attempt to corrupt the morals of the younger generation. Like all
aforementioned rock ‘n’ roll movies, King Creole is simply out to prove that rock ‘n’ rollers, and
the young people who admire them, are just kids, not monsters.

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“To Unleash the Savage Instincts:” Juvenile Delinquents and Teenage Monsters
Whereas rock ‘n’ roll movies typically strived to depict teenagers as basically good kids,
an alternate cycle of teenpics had no problem representing teens as dangerous monsters. The
teenage monster film was an outgrowth of the larger category of the juvenile delinquency
teenpic, which contrasted with the larger-budgeted and adult-oriented films dealing with the
same topic. Films like Crime in the Streets (Allied Artists, 1956) and The Young Savages (United
Artists, 1961) examined juvenile delinquency as a social problem that could be solved, and
foregrounded crusading social workers or attorneys who investigate the social, and sometimes
psychological, conditions that turn young people into violent criminals. Juvenile delinquency
teenpics, by contrast, offered a much more Manichean view of crime. Mark Thomas McGee and
R.J. Robertson write that in delinquency teenpics, “more often than not, the juveniles were
divided into two group: thoroughly reprehensible ‘bad’ teenagers and the basically decent if
often misunderstood ‘good’ teenagers.”
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The divisions between “good” and “bad” teenagers emerged out of the class politics
surrounding juvenile delinquency. Doherty writes, “The unredeemable j.d. psycho sprang from
the lower orders, the troubled but salvageable youth from the middle class.”
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Simon Frith
describes two of the contrasting images of teenagers that circulated in the mass media of the
postwar era:
On one hand were the rebel images – knife-flicking gangs, leather nihilists, corner boys;
on the other hand were the all-American college boys and girls, the sports stars and
cheerleaders, the high-school hoppers, the petting-party goers who always knew exactly
when to stop.
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The idea of knowing when to stop is important, because self-control links the “good” teens of the
delinquency films to the teenpic rock ‘n’ rollers. The latter group exhibited some wild behavior,
but they always ultimately kept control over themselves unless provoked by meddling adults.
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Similarly, “good” teens in delinquency films may have experimented with misbehavior, but they
ultimately rejected delinquency in favor of “something that comes closer to conformity with
adult society.”
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Ultimately, the division in teenpics is a simplified version of the dichotomy that
also exists in adult delinquency films like Blackboard Jungle: the salvageable kids like Gregory
Miller who are capable of being assimilated into the adult world, and the irredeemable kids like
Artie West who must be removed from the community.
The strategy of dividing kids into “bad” and “good” teens had a twofold purpose. One
was that the “good” teens acted as figures of identification for teenage viewers. Since, contrary
to adult suspicions, most teens were not criminals or drug dealers, nor necessarily even in direct
contact with such figures, these films were able to provide a sensationalized window into another
world. Alan Betrock notes that such films could have a reassuring effect on the teenage viewer
regardless of their class status, since they could say to themselves afterwards, “Gee, I’m glad that
my life isn’t as bad off as the lives of the kids onscreen.”
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The presence of the positive teen
identification figure meant that teenage viewers could enjoy the sensational exploits of the
onscreen delinquents while also feel that, unlike in adult delinquency films, no accusations were
being made against them directly.
At the same time, parents who might have viewed these films had the bar raised for
delinquent behavior, and at the same time were told that their own (middle class) kids were not
so corruptible. As Randall Clark puts it, “The adults who saw the films satisfied their curiosity
about teenage life, had their worst fears about teens confirmed (which again, is probably what
they wanted), but were reassured that ‘good’ teens (like theirs) always reformed at the end.”
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These films encouraged a sense of parental exceptionalism, in which the problems of
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delinquency were deflected onto “other people’s kids,” reinforcing the notion, commonly
accepted before World War II, that delinquents did not come from “good families.”
The model for the delinquency teenpic was established by Teen-Age Crime Wave
(Columbia, 1955). Produced independently by Sam Katzman, the film represented his initial
attempt to capture the teenage market following the success of Blackboard Jungle, preceding his
later rock ‘n’ roll pictures. Though not nearly as lucrative as Rock Around the Clock would be,
Teen-Age Crime Wave was another film that helped establish the formula that later teen
exploiters would utilize. The film, and the delinquency teenpics that followed it, “are patterned
after the brutish vision of Blackboard Jungle; these are Hobbesian melodramas that condemn the
delinquent at the same time they relish his antisocial energy.”
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The film centers on the young criminal couple Mike Denton (Tommy Cook) and Terry
Marsh (Molly McCart), who go on the run after Mike kills a policeman. Terry is slightly
humanized – she talks about growing up in a broken, impoverished home, and she shows some
distaste for cold-blooded murder – but Mike is depicted simply as a monster. No mention is
made of his background or of any factors that may have led him to crime, and he is shown to
delight in violence and killing. He is representative of the type of delinquent who frequently
populated delinquency teenpics: “The bad guy doesn’t sell reefers to kids in high school or run
old men down with his rod because his father doesn’t understand him. He does it because he is
bad and that is what bad guys are supposed to do; it’s as simple as that.”
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The “good” teen is Jane Koberly (Sue England), who dates “bad boys” as a cry for
attention to her neglectful middle-class parents. She is represented as a good-hearted kid, but she
gets mixed up with Mike and Terry and gets dragged along with them and labelled as their
willing accomplice. Her father refuses to believe that his daughter could have gone bad, and his
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faith is rewarded when he inadvertently helps the police to find the fugitives. His belief in his
daughter’s essential goodness and incorruptibility mirrors the feelings that the film attempts to
inspire in the parents in the audience, and which the film suggests to the teenagers in the
audience that they deserve from their own parents. Mike and Terry end up in a gunfight with the
police, and Terry is killed. The film ends with Mike weeping uncontrollably over her body; the
monstrous delinquent is revealed as an overgrown child who never acquired the capacity for self-
control that “good” teenagers possess.
While Katzman largely moved away from delinquency teenpics after Teen-Age Crime
Wave, AIP quickly emerged as a major producer of these films. As with all their teenpics, AIP’s
delinquency films were built around sensational advertising campaigns, compared to which the
“contents of the pictures were quite often dull… and always very moral.”
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As Samuel Z. Arkoff
himself stated, “even though our movies – or at least the ads for them – were considered daring
for the times, most of the films themselves continued to be pretty innocent.”
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AIP continued to
follow the formula established by Katzman, in which good and bad were clearly delineated and
traditional society triumphed in the end.
During the same period, AIP had also cultivated a reputation for horror films. These films
used sensational advertising campaigns to target teenage audiences, but rarely featured teenage
characters. In 1957, however, the company stumbled upon the idea of combining two of their
most successful product lines. The product of the fusion of the dangerous youth and the monster
was I Was a Teenage Werewolf. The film is notable not only for its novel variation on the
juvenile delinquent theme, but for its tremendous success: the film “reportedly took in two
million dollars in less than a year, a giant sum by AIP’s hit-and-run standards.”
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Thomas
Doherty calls it “the film that brought the company to national prominence.”
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It’s striking that,
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after AIP and Sam Katzman had found such success with teenage audience making films which
portrayed rock ‘n’ roll-loving teen as good, harmless kids, AIP would achieve its biggest success
to date with the same audience by portraying a teenager as a literal monster. Clearly, the film
struck a chord with its teenage audience, and is worth closer examination for that reason.
The titular werewolf starts the film out as high school student Tony Rivers (Michael
Landon). Tony is immediately marked as a troubled young man, as he is introduced having a
fistfight with another boy. Tony throws dirt in the other boy’s face and attacks him with a shovel,
indicating a savage lack of self-control. This is reinforced by the revelation that Tony had
attacked the boy simply for touching him on the shoulder. Tony is far from the harmless teenager
of the rock ‘n’ roll movie. But he is also not the evil delinquent of something like Teen-Age
Crime Wave. Other than his inability to control his anger, Tony seems to be a well-adjusted
teenager with a girlfriend and a large social circle. Nevertheless, Detective Donovan (Barney
Phillips), fears that Tony will turn into an outright delinquent. He suggests that Tony see
psychologist Dr. Brandon, claiming vaguely that he will help the young man to “adjust.” Tony,
however, refuses to “adjust” to the demands of adult society.
Tony’s anger issues are implied to derive from his class status. Although he attends a nice
suburban high school, his family life is marked as working class. Tony’s mother is notably
absent, and his father is a manual laborer who regularly works nights, leaving Tony alone and
without parental supervision. Mr. Rivers advises Tony to conform to the expectations of others,
citing his own experience of following his foremen’s demands rather than cause conflict, but
Tony rejects this apparent weakness.
In contrast to Tony, his girlfriend, Arlene Logan (Yvonne Lime) is comfortably middle
class, with parents who are present in the evenings when Tony calls on her. Her parents passive-
135

aggressively express their disapproval of Tony and criticize his manners of courtship to his face.
Clearly, they already consider him to be some kind of wolf. Mr. Logan snidely remarks that he
likes to be “proud” of the men that Arlene dates, and he expresses the desire for Tony to “bow to
authority,” implicitly criticizing both his class status and his defiant attitude. Despite what has
already been shown of Tony’s violent nature, the parents’ haughty attitude directs the viewer’s
sympathy towards Tony.
Up to this point, the film depicts Tony as a young man chafing under adult authority. He
is a figure of identification for teenage viewers for this reason; he is constantly being told to
adjust, to conform, to bow. For many teenagers, his anger at his condition is justifiable. What is
less justifiable is the frightening violence that this anger elicits. Contrary to adult fears about
delinquency, this violence is not aimed at adult society. Instead, it is targeted at other teenagers.
This is seen in the opening fight and again when Tony savagely attacks his own friend over a
harmless Halloween prank. The horrified reactions of his other friends to this violence mirrors
those of the teenage viewers. Tony is simultaneously a figure of identification and a source of
fear: a surprisingly complex signification compared to other teenpics. It is this latter attack which
convinces Tony to seek psychological help. As Doherty points out, it is not adult society that
Tony wants to “adjust” to, but teen society.
101
The film understands that, for teenagers, the fear
surrounding antisocial behavior is not of censure from adults but of rejection by one’s peers.
Tony is a complex character who eschews the traditional teenpic dichotomy of “good” teen vs.
“bad” teen, but, thanks to adult authority, he will not remain that way for long.
Though Dr. Alfred Brandon (Whit Bissell) promises to help Tony, he actually plans to
use the young man for his own ends. Brandon believes that “mankind is on the verge of
destroying itself; the only hope for the human race is to hurl it back into its primitive dawn, to
136

start all over again.” He endeavors to prove that this is possible by using hypnosis to regress
Tony “back to the primitive past that lurks within him,” to “unleash the savage instincts that lay
hidden within.” Naturally, the result of this is that Tony periodically transforms into a werewolf.
Brandon is pleased by this, even when Tony, in werewolf form, murders two teenagers. Brandon
regards Tony as a “guinea pig” and considers his victims to be a small sacrifice to his noble
scientific cause.
As Kevin Heffernan observes, “Many horror plots of the mid-fifties contained the central
motif of reincarnation or regression of the protagonist into monstrosity,” the impetus for which
was the best-selling book The Search for Bridey Murphy, which “recounted the supposed
regression of a young woman to a past life.”
102
Even in consideration of this, however,
Brandon’s plot can justifiably be characterized as bizarre; but it is this bizarreness that lends it an
ambiguity that allows for many possible interpretations. For teenagers, Brandon can be seen as a
symbol of adult authority, claiming to be trying to change teenage behavior for their own good,
but actually just seeking their own selfish benefit. Brandon’s belief that mankind is about to
destroy itself is a clear allusion to the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation: a situation
that adult society is itself responsible for. His paranoia regarding Armageddon can be read as a
mockery of what teenagers would have seen as the general paranoia of the adult world, given
their irrational fears about their own children. Furthermore, his willingness to sacrifice a few
teenagers for what he saw as the greater good amounts to a denial of teenage individuality.
Society could afford to sacrifice a small number of teens because they did not matter as unique
people, but only as an undifferentiated mass. Teenager viewers would have been able to see in
Dr. Brandon many of their grievances against adults.
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For adults who may have watched the film, on the other hand, it was possible to read
Brandon not as a criticism of adults in general, but of scientific excess in particular. Postwar
science fiction / horror films like The Thing from Another World (RKO, 1951) depicted the
pursuit of science unmediated by basic humanity as a threat. Indeed, it was easier to blame the
threat of the atomic bomb on the scientists who invented it rather than the governments that
threatened to use it. Despite his fear of atomic annihilation, it would be easy to read Brandon as
making the same mistake: creating a destructive force without regard for the dangers that is
poses. Furthermore, it is even possible to connect Brandon with teenage culture itself. Heffernan
observes that “the late 1950s was a time of almost unprecedented concern with the seemingly
hypnotic powers that advertisers wielded over the public,” and that the same year I Was a
Teenage Werewolf was released saw the publication of Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders,
which exposed “the advertising industry’s cynical manipulation of consumers through techniques
learned from psychology and psychiatry.” Brandon’s use of hypnotism to manipulate Tony
connects to what, in the minds of many adults, amounted to the manipulation of teenagers by the
commercial purveyors of teen culture. Teen culture made commodities out of aspects of working
class and African American culture, hypnotizing kids into dressing like delinquents and dancing
to rock ‘n’ roll music, threatening to turn teenagers into supposed monsters, just as Brandon does
to Tony. The film’s use of ambiguity allows it to speak to teenage grievances against adults,
while also enabling adults to read their own grievances into the film’s message.
But what may, for teenage viewers, be the most disturbing result of Brandon’s
experiment is the fact that he turns a complex character into a pair of simplistic archetypes. On
the one hand, the treatment causes Tony to lose his defiance towards adult authority and to
become a model student. His principal congratulates him on his improved conduct, stating that
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he is “coming along just fine.” She offers to recommend him to the state college board, sending
him on a path towards a career and, it is implied, assimilation into adult society. She states that
he could become a “credit to your father and to your school.” Tony’s “adjustment” to adult
expectations, however, also alienates him from his teenage friends. Tony shuns their company,
leaves a party early so that he can get some sleep before math class the next morning, and turns
down invitations to hang out because he’s “for peace and quiet.” For Tony, adhering to adult
expectations is the real form of antisocial behavior.
At the same time that he turns into the adult idea of a “good” teenager, he also becomes
prone to transforming into a literal monster, an exaggerated version of Artie West or Mike
Denton. As a werewolf, Tony is a force of pure destruction, a savage killer who must eventually
be destroyed. But unlike West or Denton, the targets of Tony’s savage violence are not adults but
other teenagers. As with the human Tony’s attacks on his peers earlier in the film, the werewolf’s
murder of two teenagers affirms what many delinquency films ignore: that juvenile violence is
primarily a threat to other juveniles. The film maintains a teenage perspective throughout; adults
seem to exist only to oppress Tony, to make him into a monster, and, at the end of the film, to
kill him.
Brandon’s transformation of Tony into two extreme, contrasting archetypes mirrors adult
society’s stereotyping and pigeonholing of teenagers at large. In becoming, alternatingly, both
the salvageable, assimilatable teenager and the destructive, unacceptable teen, Tony loses the
complex characterization that made him human at the beginning of the film. Tony was a flawed,
troubled young man early on, but this characterization is what made him more interesting than
the typical teenage protagonist. He loses his unique individuality as a result of Brandon’s
treatments. Furthermore, both the “good” and “bad” teenager archetypes are shown to be
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negative for teenagers themselves. “Good” teens lose the ability to relate to their peers, and
“bad” teens are a danger to those same peers. Both would result in alienation from authentic
teenage society. Yet society at large, as demonstrated by both teenpic and adult-oriented
delinquency films, continues to dichotomize teens. I Was a Teenage Werewolf appeals to teenage
resentment of being stereotyped and having their complex individuality denied by the adult gaze.
Indeed, part of its success relative to other teenpics can be attributed to its willingness to subtly
critique its own conventions.
Another aspect of the film’s success is its use of humor. Although Tony’s monstrous
form is ostensibly played for horror onscreen, the image of a werewolf wearing a high school
varsity jacket is inherently comical. Indeed, humor was a key aspect of the AIP horror film.
Heffernan states that, for teenagers, “the social ritual of horror movie attendance was often an
occasion for laughter.”
103
Arkoff himself attributed his company’s success, in part, to the fact
that “we never took ourselves too seriously.”
104
In I Was a Teenage Werewolf, the humor serves
a dialectical point: adult fear of teenagers was clearly laughable. Just as Arkoff ridiculed parents
for believing that their children would turn into werewolves at the light of the film moon,
teenage audiences could share in that same ridicule of adult fears. The varsity jacket-wearing
werewolf served as a visual parody of adult paranoia about teenagers, and allowed kids to have a
covert laugh at their parents’ expense.
Following the success of I Was a Teenage Werewolf, AIP released three more films about
teenage monsters within the next year. All of the succeeding films followed Teenage Werewolf’s
conceit of having the monsters “made that way by evil adults.”
105
Interestingly, though, only one
of the three featured a teenage protagonist: Blood of Dracula (1957) centers on a young woman
who is hypnotized by a female psychologist into becoming a vampire.
106
The other two films, I
140

Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957) and How to Make a Monster (1958), place the focus on the
adults who create the monsters.
Teenage Frankenstein stars Whit Bissell playing a mad scientist once again: Professor
Frankenstein, who believes that experimenting on youthful corpses will help him to unlock the
key to eternal life. He acquires a number of athletic young body parts thanks to some fortuitous
car and plane crashes, and uses them to assemble a teenage monster. As Thomas Doherty
observes, Frankenstein behaves towards his creature like “an overbearing 50s parent.”
107
He
teaches the monster strict obedience and keeps the creature isolated in his basement laboratory.
The danger of repressive parenting is demonstrated with the monster sneaks out one night and
becomes aroused by the sight of a young woman undressing in her bedroom. She sees him and
screams, and in trying to keep her quiet he accidentally strangles her.
In spite of its apparent criticism of overprotective parenting, Teenage Frankenstein’s
examination of teenage culture and juvenile delinquency is nowhere near as complex as Teenage
Werewolf’s. This is largely because the later film largely eschews the teenage perspective of the
earlier one. Whereas Teenage Werewolf focused on Tony’s mental state and behavioral
problems, and featured multiple scenes of teenagers enjoying themselves on their own terms,
Teenage Frankenstein only places teenagers onscreen to serve as victims of the monster.
Teenage characters hardly have any lines, apart from the odd scream; even when the police go to
interview the teenage survivor of one of the monster’s attacks, her story is related secondhand by
her mother rather than by the young woman herself. This change suggests that AIP was returning
to its previous convention of populating its horror films with adult characters, with the conceit of
the teenage monsters retained as a marketing gimmick rather than an integral component of the
film’s narrative. By the time of How to Make a Monster, in which a vengeful movie makeup
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artist hypnotizes made-up teenagers to murder the studio bosses who are firing him, teenagers no
longer even serve the role of victims. The fact that the killers themselves are teenagers is of no
narrative importance; their roles could have been played by adults and it would have been
essentially the same film.
AIP’s move away from showcasing the teenage perspective in its horror films is striking,
given that it doubtlessly played a significant role in making I Was a Teenage Werewolf such a
commercial success. It suggests that the studio’s leaders recognized that Teenage Werewolf had
deviated from the “moral” and “innocent” fare that the company normally strove to produce.
Teenage Werewolf used the tropes of the horror film to deliver what could be read as a
substantive critique of adult society’s views of teen culture and juvenile delinquency, and
teenage audiences embraced the film. Still, it’s easy to see how studio bosses would have feared
that the film was too successful in articulating teenage grievances, including grievances about the
shape of the typical teenpic that AIP depended on. As such, starting with Teenage Frankenstein,
the company attempted to graft the conceit of the teenage monster onto a safer, more innocuous
formula. Teenage Frankenstein was still successful, “doing about two-thirds of the business of
the original.”
108
Following How to Make a Monster, however, AIP abandoned the teenager-as-
monster plotline.
The example of I Was a Teenage Werewolf demonstrates the importance of caution to the
producers of teen films in the postwar era. Even when the films were attempting to speak directly
to teenagers, one had to be sure that they were saying the right things. Teenage Werewolf proves
that pushing the envelope of acceptability could be profitable, yet the promise of short-term
rewards were not enough to induce the producers to make a permanent change in the way they
made films. This is seen in the rock ‘n’ roll films as well, with their generally standardized
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narratives and frequently recurring events, ideas, and wholesale plotlines. The teenpics were
venturing into uncharted territory, appealing to a new audience that movies’ traditional
audiences, adults, were deeply concerned about. As such, risk-aversion should be expected.
Nevertheless, both in what they did and what they did not do; in both films that followed the
established formula and those that deviated in subtle ways; in how they spoke to teenagers and
how they addressed adults, teen rock ‘n’ roll and horror films tell us much about the anxieties,
frustrations, and misunderstandings that surround postwar teenage culture.
Indeed, it should be noted that the films speak to one of the most ubiquitous sets of issues
associated with teenage culture: the fear that traditional gender roles were becoming destabilized.
It was the fear that young women would be corrupted by rock ‘n’ roll music and dancing into
forgetting their feminine sense of decorum, turning away from domestic responsibility in favor
of sexual hedonism. It was the fear that young men, in losing their sense of what it meant to be a
real man, would either become prone to reckless and excessive displays of masculine aggression,
as Tony Rivers does, or – even worse, in the eyes of some parents – lose their masculinity
altogether. The following chapter examines how Hollywood films – teenpics and major studio
productions alike – dealt with this particular anxiety onscreen.

1
Sam Arkoff with Richard Trubo, Flying Through Hollywood by the Seat of My Pants: From the Man Who Brought
You I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Muscle Beach Party (New York: Birch Lane Press, 1992), 55.

2
Benjamin Fine, 1,000,000 Delinquents (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1955), 7.

3
James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950’s (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986), 28.

4
Ibid., 28

5
Ibid., 34.

6
Ibid., 71

7
Leo Braudy, Trying to Be Cool: Growing Up in the 1950s (Los Angeles: Asahina and Wallace, 2013), 26.

143

8
Karen Sternheimer, Pop Culture Panics: How Moral Crusaders Construct Meanings of Deviance and Delinquency
(New York: Routledge, 2015), 16.

9
Clifford R. Shaw and Henry McKay, Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1942), 155.

10
Ibid., 171-2.

11
Ibid., 317.

12
Gilbert, 79.

13
Braudy, Trying to Be Cool, 66-7.

14
Grace Palladino, Teenagers: An American History (New York: BasicBooks, 1996), 158.

15
Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981),
186.

16
Gilbert, 3.

17
Ibid., 18-19.

18
Palladino, 162.

19
Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers (New York: Routledge,
1972), 63.

20
Gilbert, 75.

21
Benjamin Fine, 1,000,000 Delinquents (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1955), 28.

22
Harrison Salisbury, The Shook-Up Generation (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1958), 107.

23
Thomas Doherty, Teenagers & Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Boston: Unwin
Hyman, 1988), 51.

24
Ibid., 3.

25
Sternheimer, 109.

26
Glenn C. Altschuler, All Shook Up: How Rock ‘n’ Roll Changed America (New York: Oxford University Press,
2003), 18.

27
Ibid., 33.

28
Ibid., 23.

29
Lucy Rollin, Twentieth-Century Teen Culture by the Decades: A Reference Guide (Westport: Greenwood Press,
1999), 180.

30
Frith, 203.

31
Palladino, 115.

144

32
Altschuler, 40.

33
Palladino, 157.

34
Ibid., 155.

35
Sternheimer, viii.

36
Altschuler, 3.

37
Ibid., 4.

38
Sternheimer, 113.

39
Ibid., 105.

40
Quoted in Sternheimer, 112.

41
Altschuler, 106.

42
Ibid., 4.

43
Sternheimer, 112.

44
Quoted in Sternheimer, 112.

45
Quoted in Altschuler, 6.

46
Quoted in Sternheimer, 110-1.

47
Sternheimer, 110.

48
Altschuler, 45.

49
Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Duke University Press: Durham, 2005),
146.

50
Ibid., 137.

51
Altschuler, 32.

52
Mark Thomas McGee. The Rock and Roll Movie Encyclopedia of the 1950s (Jefferson: McFarland & Company,
Inc., 1990), 125.

53
Medovoi, 138.

54
Jerold Simmons, “Violent Youth: The Censoring and Public Reception of The Wild One and Blackboard Jungle,”
in Film History 20.3 (2008): 388.

55
Palladino, 160.

56
Simmons, 388.

57
McGee, The Rock and Roll Movie Encyclopedia, 126.

145

58
Ibid., 125.

59
Altschuler, 111.

60
Ibid., 117.

61
Ibid., 33.

62
Palladino, 133.

63
Ibid., 135.

64
Braudy, Trying to Be Cool, 19.

65
Doherty, 96.

66
McGee, The Rock and Roll Movie Encyclopedia, 127.

67
Doherty, 74.

68
Randall Clark, At a Theater or Drive-In Near You: The History, Culture, and Politics of the American
Exploitation Film (New York: Garland Publishing, 1995), 68.

69
McGee, The Rock and Roll Movie Encyclopedia, 28.

70
Altschuler, 6.

71
Hall, Stuart and Paddy Whannel. The Popular Arts. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), 280.

72
McGee, The Rock and Roll Movie Encyclopedia, 73.

73
Ibid., 73.

74
Ibid., 157.

75
Fine, 343.

76
Altschuler, 111.

77
McGee, The Rock and Roll Movie Encyclopedia, 160.

78
Steven Zmijewsky and Boris Zmijewsky, Elvis: The Films and Career of Elvis Presley (Secaucus: Citadel Press,
1976), 18-19.

79
Frith, 19.

80
Zmijewsky, 21.

81
Ibid., 34, 28.

82
Dave Marsh, Elvis (New York: Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc., 1982), 47.

83
“‘Love Me Tender’ at Keith’s,” The Christian Science Monitor [Boston, Massachusetts], 23 November 1956, 15.

84
Zmijewsky, 44.
146

85
McGee, The Rock and Roll Movie Encyclopedia, 108.

86
Peter Harry Brown and Pat H. Broeske, Down at the End of Lonely Street: The Life and Death of Elvis Presley
(New York: Dutton, 1997), 122.

87
Ibid., 123.

88
Medovoi, 196-7.

89
Mark Thomas McGee and R.J. Robertson, The J.D. Films: Juvenile Delinquency in the Movies (Jefferson:
McFarland & Company, Inc., 1982), viii.

90
Doherty, 132.

91
Frith, 187.

92
Clark, 50.

93
Alan Betrock, The I Was a Teenage Juvenile Delinquent Rock ‘n’ Roll Horror Beach Party Movie Book: A
Complete Guide to the Teen Exploitation Film, 1954-1969 (St. Martin’s Press: New York, 1986), 76.

94
Clark, 72.

95
Doherty, 124.

96
Richard Staehling, “From Rock Around the Clock to The Trip: The Truth About Teen Movies” in Kings of the Bs:
Working Within the Hollywood System: An Anthology of Film History and Criticism, eds. Todd McCarthy and
Charles Flynn (E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc.: New York, 1975), 236.

97
McGee and Robertson, 61.

98
Arkoff, 55.

99
Andrew Dowdy, The Films of the Fifties: The American State of Mind (New York: William Morrow and
Company, Inc., 1973), 152-3.

100
Doherty, 160.

101
Doherty, 162.

102
Kevin Heffernan, Ghouls, Gimmicks, and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1953-1968
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 74.

103
Ibid., 68.

104
Arkoff, 51.

105
Skal, David J. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993),
255.

106
Since Blood of Dracula deals with female delinquency, it will be examined in Chapter 3.

107
Doherty, 165.

147

108
Ibid., 164.

148

Chapter Three: Bad Boys, Good Girls, and Everything In Between: Gender, Domesticity,
and the Female Juvenile Delinquent

Introduction: “Our ‘Youth Troubles’ Are Boys’ Troubles”
Published in 1960, Growing Up Absurd was social critic Paul Goodman’s attack on the
transformations that American society had undergone in the past few decades. The book was a
best-seller, which testifies to its ability to speak to a large segment of the American population.
A central character in the work is the juvenile delinquent, who is invariably figured by Goodman
as a young man. Goodman notes that, for many social commentators, juvenile delinquency is the
result of society’s failure to properly assimilate young men into adult culture, and that the
problem is “a failure of communication.” Goodman, on the other hand, suggests that “perhaps
the social message has been communicated clearly to the young men and is unacceptable.”
1

Goodman argues that juvenile delinquency is not the result of any kind of mistake or
deficiency regarding the young people themselves, but of youth’s knowing and deliberate
rejection of adult society. For him, delinquency represents a form of social criticism. Goodman
decries what he calls the organized system: the homogenizing corporate forces in society which
force men to abandon their individuality and masculinity. The young “consider it the part of
reason and honor to wash their hands of all of it.”
2

Goodman’s arguments are noteworthy for multiple reasons. One is that he examines
delinquency as an attack on the social order rather than merely as a threat to property or morality.
As discussed in the previous chapter, adult concerns over the violent and criminal behavior of
delinquents was often a mask for a more deep-seated fear of delinquency as a challenge to the
stability of white middle-class society. Unlike many commentators, though, Goodman viewed
149

this challenge positively. Although parents from outside the white middle-class mainstream
would have also had ample reason to be concerned with delinquency and with its threat to the
social order, it was the mainstream which had the most to lose from social change and who,
indeed, were the main targets of Goodman’s critique. Goodman’s attack on conformity and
corporatization seem aimed directly at the suburban domestic ideal treasured by the white middle
class of the postwar era.
Another noteworthy feature of Goodman’s critique is his claim that delinquency is
heavily determined by issues of gender. He blames the dissatisfaction of young men, in large
part, on middle-class society’s retreat from of traditional masculine values. He writes that “the
world is not manly enough, it is not earnest enough.”
3
He complains that “the structure of society
that has become increasingly dominant in our country is disastrous to the growth of excellence
and manliness.”
4
He interprets the message communicated by delinquent behavior as follows:
It asks for manly opportunities to work, make a little money, and have self-esteem; to
have some space to bang around in, that is not always somebody’s property; to have
better schools to open for them horizons of interest; to have more and better sex without
fear or shame; to share somehow in the symbolic goods (like the cars) that are made so
much of; to have a community and a country to be loyal to; to claim attention and have a
voice.
5

Despite the seeming radicalness of his argument, Goodman ultimately calls for a return to
traditional ideals and values; his description of the need for “space to bang around in” is
evocative of the mythic frontier, and he advocates patriotic feeling toward a “country to be loyal
to.” He repeatedly refers to the need for a resurgence of “manly” things, as without them, “kids
have nothing to do and will have nothing worth while to do.”
6

Goodman’s complaint about the lack of masculinity in contemporary culture was, in fact,
related to broader fears about the changing nature of American society following World War II.
Many commentators worried about the transformations in masculine identity being wrought by
150

shifts in the culture. As Leerom Medovoi observes, in much of the popular discourse of the
period, “men too have become creatures of the private sphere, their wives’ domestic partners in a
child-centered family life organized by purchase and consumption of commodities.”
7
He notes,
for example, the January 1954 article in Life magazine, “A Boon to the Household and a Boom
for Industry: The New American Domesticated Male,” which “depicts the domesticated male’s
many advantages as a modern and progressive type of husband and father.”
8
Thus, not only was
traditional “manliness” under siege from the forces of conformity and corporatization, but it
risked being eroded by middle-class home life as well.
In this view, the defiance and heightened aggression of the male juvenile delinquent
becomes something that is not only threatening but liberating as well. By refusing to partake in
middle-class adult society, delinquents endeavor to escape the constraints that middle-class
society puts on its men. This helps to inform the massive public interest in juvenile delinquency
during the period. Juvenile delinquency was a dangerous and frightening force, but it also
represented a symbolic liberation. Though most adults did not join Goodman in regarding
delinquency as a positive act of resistance, the aggressive masculinity of male delinquents was
nevertheless something that could be read as admirable. As Medovoi observes, “if postwar
manhood was found lacking in masculine sovereignty… perhaps it could be located instead in
postwar boyhood.”
9

The relationship of delinquency to changing conceptions of manliness during this period
also raises an interesting and important question: what, then, was the relationship of juvenile
delinquency to postwar womanhood? For Goodman, the question is moot because he did not see
female delinquency as an issue: he states bluntly that “our ‘youth troubles’ are boys’ troubles.”
10

Girls, Goodman claims, did not rebel as boys did because they essentially had no reason to do so.
151

Whereas boys struggled with finding a properly masculine identity for themselves in the career-
oriented postwar world, “a girl does not have to, she is not expected to, ‘make something’ of
herself. Her career does not have to be self-justifying, for she will have children, which is
absolutely self-justifying, like any other natural or creative act.”
11
For Goodman, a woman’s
identity as wife and mother is enough to sustain her, sparing her the need to seek an identity
elsewhere. He writes that the problems of the organized system are “intensely interesting to
women,” but only because of their impact on prospective husbands: “for if the boys do not grow
to be men, where shall the women find men? If the husband is running the rat race of the
organized system, there is not much father for the children.”
At the same time that he scrutinizes the American male’s dissatisfaction with the
constraints placed upon him by contemporary society, Goodman rather casually assumes that the
American female – specifically, the middle-class suburban female – is perfectly content with her
role in the domestic sphere. He effectively denies girls and women the capacity to question their
roles as wives and mothers, and thereby denies that female rebellion exists. Similar attitudes are
also implied in other discussions, or lack thereof, regarding female juvenile delinquency.
Sociologists Clifford Shaw and Henry D. McKay, who were among the most important figures in
the study of juvenile delinquency in the first half of the twentieth century and published several
important books on the subject, believed that female delinquency was not an important issue. In
their work, “the primary emphasis has been placed upon ecological aspects of delinquency
among males.”
12
Sociologist Talcott Parsons writes that
It seems to be a definite fact that girls are more apt to be relatively docile, to conform in
general according to adult expectations, to be ‘good,’ whereas boys are more apt to be
recalcitrant to discipline and defiant of adult authority and expectations. There is really
no feminine equivalent of the expression ‘bad boy.’ It may be suggested that this is at
least partially explained by the fact that it is possible from an early age to initiate girls
directly into many important aspects of the adult feminine role.
13

152

Parsons suggests that because girls are raised in a domestic environment, they are made to accept
the domestic responsibilities of adult womanhood at an earlier age, eliminating the rebellious
“growing period” that boys experience. Although Parson’s explanation has credence in terms of
how girls are socially conditioned to the expectations of domesticity, it still assumes that they
will accept the roles of wife and mother uncritically. The supposed absence of female rebellion,
it seems, was taken as evidence that girls had no problems with the shape of postwar society and
its expectations for its women.
This assumption, however, is contradicted by multiple recent commentators. Wini
Breines argues that female rebellion, particularly that of white middle-class girls, was often
ignored because the adult mainstream was either unable or unwilling to recognize it. She writes
that “middle-class white girls’ disaffection was barely discernible because no one thought to
consider it and because its expression was often oblique.”
14
The disbelief that women could be
dissatisfied with their social roles, as expressed by Goodman, prevented contemporary
commentators from seeking out instances of female rebellion, or even recognizing it when they
saw it. Breines argues that because girls, particularly white middle-class girls, were expected to
conform to a greater degree than their male peers, female rebellion took on subtler forms. Often,
this took the form of cross-gender identification: “middle-class white girls who rejected
dominant values had no choice but to utilize and adapt male versions of rebellion and
disaffection.”
15

Rachel Devlin further argues that both contemporary and recent commentators tend to
underestimate the actual incidence of female juvenile delinquency. She writes that “the
contradictory responses of the media to female delinquency during the period, which alternately
sensationalized and ignored the problem, has contributed to confusion about the extent of
153

adolescent female misbehavior and the cultural role that it played.”
16
She notes that an article
asking “why girls are so good” might appear in a popular magazine the same week as another
article in another magazine warning of the “climbing female arrest rates” and of the “ever more
vicious crimes perpetrated by girls.”
17
Furthermore, she argues, paternalist authority figures often
sought to suppress evidence of crimes committed by young girls, particular white middle-class
girls: “local police and social agencies had a variety of ways of ‘sheltering’ girls from the
judicial system in order to keep their misdeeds, as the saying went, ‘off the blotter.’”
18
As such,
those in society who were predisposed to assume that young women did not, or had no reason to,
rebel against mainstream society had ample support for their position, even as other evidence
painted a different picture.
Devlin’s claim that female delinquency was both sensationalized and ignored in postwar
society is given credence by the subject’s representation in the films of the period. There were, in
fact, a number of films which included, or even focused on, the female delinquent. However,
with the notable exception of Rebel Without a Cause (Warner Bros., 1955), which will be
examined later in the chapter, female delinquents appeared almost exclusively in low-budget
pictures from teenpic producers like American Independent Pictures and Albert Zugsmith
Productions. Even by their normal standards, these films tended to portray female delinquency in
an exaggerated and shocking manner. It can be seen that, whereas the major studios generally
preferred to ignore female delinquency, the less-reputable teenpics preferred to sensationalize it:
an apt representation of the conflicting ways that the subject was dealt with in the culture.
This chapter will examine how the cinema represented the relationship of juvenile
delinquency to the gender politics of the postwar era and the middle-class cult of domesticity,
with a focus on the figure of the female delinquent and her relevance to the anxieties of the
154

period. As Medovoi has observed, “in the popular imagination, we usually associate the fifties
with a cult of domesticity,” but many of the period’s films “suggest that domesticity was actually
a deeply embattled postwar value.”
19
Analysis of the seminal delinquency film Rebel Without a
Cause will show how anxieties regarding domesticity and its related implications for gender
identity were expressed onscreen. It will also be used to demonstrate how male and female
delinquency were compared with and differentiated from one other. The chapter will then
analyze a series of films that foreground the figure of the female delinquent, most of them low-
budget teenpics. In spite of their sensationalism and marginal status, these films provide a space
through which anxieties about women’s resistance and rebellion to proscribed gender roles could
be acted out. Typically, rebellion and resistance are viewed as inherently masculine acts. Thus,
though the male juvenile delinquent may be seen as dangerous to society, his resistance still fits
into a broader ideology regarding male behavior. A girl who rebels, however, poses a challenge
to some of the most basic codes of female behavior. As such, though the films attempt to exploit
anxieties around the instability of gendered codes of behavior, they also work to reassure those
anxieties by returning to some form of status quo by the film’s end. Regarding postwar
delinquency films, the chapter will argue that, whereas male delinquency can be read as having
positive or at least redeeming qualities in the face of domestic conformist pressures, female
delinquency poses a more fundamental challenge to society and must be cured or otherwise
eliminated.

“Compulsive Masculinity:” Middle Class Delinquency and the Cult of Domesticity
Given that the cult of domesticity was specifically a middle-class ideal, it is useful to
examine the discourse around middle-class delinquency and the issues of gender that surrounded
155

it in the postwar period. As discussed in the previous chapter, middle-class parents were
concerned about what they saw as the spread of working-class culture to their own children.
Following this, there emerged a widespread concern as to whether or not middle-class youth
were actually beginning to exhibit delinquent behavior. Many experts were skeptical as to
whether this was actually a growing problem. Clifford Shaw and Henry D. McKay argued in
1942 that delinquency was fundamentally tied to issues of race and class, indicating that there
was no reason for middle-class youth to exhibit delinquent behavior. A decade later,
criminologists Sheldon and Eleanor Glueck, arguably the most respected experts on juvenile
delinquency at the time, played down the prevalence of middle-class delinquency. They wrote
that, “granting that some children of well-to-do parents are delinquent but do not as frequently
get into the courts, delinquency remains essentially a mode of behavior most frequently found
among the economically submerged classes.”
20
The pair largely confined their studies to the
working class.
Criminologist Albert K. Cohen was more ambivalent about the subject, admitting that the
conditions of middle-class life might, in some circumstances, provide breeding grounds for
delinquency. He notes, “it has been plausibly argued by some students of social class in America
that growing up in the middle class is, on the whole, a more frustrating experience than growing
up in the working class,” but cautions that “the problems may be different and to different
problems the conceivable alternative solutions may be different.”
21
Like Goodman, he
acknowledges that middle-class youth may have legitimate grievances, but he also notes that
these young people may have different methods of dealing with them. Ultimately, though, Cohen
admits that there is not enough data on middle-class delinquency for him to render a substantive
analysis.
156

Benjamin Fine, on the other hand, states in no uncertain terms that middle-class
delinquency is a growing problem: “it may come as a shock to many to find that there is a sharp
increase in delinquency rates among groups where ostensibly the child has every advantage.”
22

He attributes this not to the stresses of middle-class life, however, but to parental neglect:
“children left alone, deprived of parental love, affection and supervision, will form their own
peer groups, regardless of slums or of palaces.”
23
His arguments are echoed by Harrison
Salisbury, who argues that middle-class delinquency is the result of the “psychologically broken
home,” in which sons are “placed at an emotional distance from their father, often seeing little of
him, reacting against domination of family life by the mother by extreme masculine attitudes,
violence and even sadism.”
24
For Fine and Salisbury, middle-class delinquency is in indictment
not of society, but of bad parents.
Fine and Salisbury both argue that instances of middle-class delinquency are
underreported because of middle-class parents’ ability to cover up their children’s criminal
misbehavior. Fine relates a story told to him by a working-class teen, who said that he and a
friend had stolen a car for a joy ride along with two teens from wealthier backgrounds. When
they were caught, the parents of the wealthy boys hired lawyers, and in the end only the two
working-class boys were charged with the crime. “Four boys committed the crime” wrote Fine.
“From now on the records will show that two of them are delinquents, and two are not.”
25

Salisbury cites an anonymous “chief of detectives of a large Middle Western city with a
commendably low juvenile delinquency record” who “says privately that he has more cases and
more trouble in the district of the town’s most fashionable high school than in any other
section.”
26
Parents manage to shield their children from the label of “delinquent,” but in doing so
merely conceal the problems that they themselves are responsible for.
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One of the dominant concerns surrounding the tendency to blame middle-class
delinquency on parents, and one that is particularly relevant to this chapter, involves the
relationship between mothers and their sons. Many commentators, both in psychiatric and
popular writing, blamed the problems of middle-class boys on overprotective mothering. One of
the most famous and influential examples of this strain of thought is represented by Philip Wylie
in his 1942 book, Generation of Vipers, in which he claims that excessive mothering, or
“momism,” prevents young men from adjusting properly to their masculinity:
“Her boy,” having been “protected” by her love, and carefully, even shudderingly,
shielded from his logical development through his barbaric period, or childhood (so that
he as either to become a barbarian as a man or else to spend most of his energy denying
the barbarism that howls in his brain – an autonomous remnant of the youth he was
forbidden), is cushioned against any major step in his progress toward maturity.
27

Overprotective mothers, he claims, repress their son’s “barbaric” masculinity, so that as adults
they compensate by either becoming too “barbaric” or not “barbaric” enough. Boys must be
allowed a proper outlet for their masculinity, he implies, if they are to mature into functional,
masculine men. The repressive forces that Goodman would later ascribe to postwar society itself
are here distilled into a single figure: the mother, whose maternalism is portrayed as an
impediment to the proper development of masculinity.
For his own part, psychologist Erik H. Erikson expressed skepticism regarding the
frequency with which “the psychiatrists tend to blame ‘Mom’” for the dysfunctions of male
patients.
28
Nevertheless, although he does not blame maternal overprotectiveness for the
misbehavior of young men, he does agree that mothers may be culpable for such misbehavior by
overemphasizing the need for conformity in the postwar world:
In the pursuit of the adjustment to and mastery over the machine, American mothers
(especially of the middle class) found themselves standardizing and overadjusting
children who later were expected to personify that very virile individuality which in the
past had been one of the outstanding characteristics of the American.
29

158

Erikson notes the conflicting pressures that were being exerted on middle-class boys following
World War II. On the one hand, American society was calling for greater degrees of social
conformity, yet at the same time men were still being held to traditional ideals of masculine
individuality. These conflicting pressures, he says, produce a young man who is “bewildered by
his assumed role” and who inevitably “runs away in one form or another: leaves school and jobs,
stays out at night, or withdraws into bizarre and inaccessible moods.”
30
As with Goodman, it is
the conflict between the new conformist society and the traditions of manliness that are
responsible for juvenile misbehavior and rebellion.
It is striking that, although Erikson attempts to critique the psychiatric overreliance on
blaming “Mom” for the problems of her sons, he also ascribes the pressure of conformity entirely
to mothers, rather than fathers. As with much of the postwar discourse, conformity is conflated
with womanhood. The mother is seen as advocating conformity because conforming is precisely
what she has already done: a woman’s place in society is solely to accept and carry out the
domestic requirements of the home. It is men alone who feel the pressure of individuality, so it is
men alone who feel conflicted and who consequently rebel. As elsewhere, the possibility that
women themselves might feel a desire for individuality is not conceived of.
Another variation on the discourse regarding the relationship between “Mom” and the
juvenile delinquent is offered by Albert K. Cohen in his use of Talcott Parsons. As previously
stated, Cohen felt that there was no hard data with which to analyze the phenomenon of middle-
class delinquency, but he also stated that Parsons “has offered an extremely interesting and
plausible perspective on juvenile delinquency” that “may provide the key to the understanding of
middle-class delinquency.”
31
Parsons notes that American society “throws children of both sexes
overwhelmingly upon the mother as the emotionally significant adult. In such a situation
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‘identification’ in the sense that the adult becomes a ‘role model’ is the normal result.”
32
Because
a girl is expected to one day take up the same domestic responsibilities as her mother, “the girl
has a more favorable opportunity for emotional maturing through positive identification with an
adult model.”
33
On the other hand, a boy
has a tendency to form a direct feminine identification, since his mother is the model
most readily available and significant to him. But he is not destined to become an adult
woman. Moreover he soon discovers that in certain vital respects women are considered
inferior to men, that it would be shameful for him to grow up to be like a woman. Hence
when boys emerge into what Freudians call the ‘latency period,’ their behavior tends to
be marked by a kind of ‘compulsive masculinity.’”
34

This “compulsive masculinity,” he writes, becomes a “defense against feminine identification.”
35

What is striking here is that, according to Parsons, a boy expresses excessive masculinity
to escape feminine identification not only because of social pressures of manliness that make it
“shameful” to be feminine, but because the boy recognizes that women are considered “inferior”
within society. To be feminine is to somehow be deficient and, it may be assumed, to be
relegated to an inferior position in the world. Notably, though, recognition of this “inferiority” is
not considered to be bothersome to girls themselves. It presumably does not prevent them from
forming a “positive identification” with their mothers and accepting their social role. Only boys,
it is implied, are able to conceive objections to the place of women in society.
According to Parsons, a girl’s main source of anxiety derived from the need to find a
husband who can financially support her. Parsons does note that this leads to a more severe form
of “insecurity” than “the masculine problem of becoming established in a satisfactory
occupational career line,” and implies that this arrangement is unfair.
36
Nevertheless, his focus
on this as the major source of anxiety in a girl’s life neglects other potential sources of anxiety,
such as that which might derive from a girl’s dissatisfaction with this entire arrangement and her
own lack of options in directing the path of her life. In fact, female dissatisfaction with the cult of
160

domesticity was widespread, and it found some of its most overt expression in the figure of the
female delinquent.

“How a Girl Felt:” Discourses on Female Delinquency
At one point in Sylvia Plath’s 1963 semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, Plath’s
protagonist, Esther Greenwood, is recalling a Reader’s Digest article that her mother mailed to
her when she was at college titled “In Defense of Chastity.” The author of the article, a “married
woman lawyer with children,” explains that “a man’s world is different from a woman’s world
and a man’s emotions are different from a woman’s emotions and only marriage can bring the
two worlds and two different sets of emotions together properly.”
37
She goes on to say that
because men prefer women who are sexually pure, women should strive to remain pure or, if it
was already too late, to pretend that they were. Esther comments that “the one thing this article
didn’t seem to me to consider was how a girl felt.”
38

As the previous section indicated, failure to consider “how a girl felt” was common in the
discussions around youth and rebellion during the postwar period. Girls were expected follow the
expectations of society and little consideration was given to possible feelings of dissatisfaction.
As such, young women had to find ways of making their feelings of dissatisfaction known. For
Plath, writing became her act of rebellion: an expression of her thoughts and feelings to a society
that often ignored the interiority of women. Other women had to find different ways of rebelling.
As Wini Breines wrote, some did so by identifying with male icons of rebellion. Others, as
Rachel Devlin notes, turned to crime in order to express their frustrations with their lives,
becoming juvenile delinquents. Despite the tendency of commentators like Paul Goodman and
161

Talcott Parsons to minimize or dismiss the existence of the “bad girl,” there was nevertheless
ample evidence that female delinquency was very real.
According to Devlin, the actual instances of female delinquency were on the rise in the
postwar period. She writes that “by 1949 girls represented one out of every four juvenile court
cases, with the ratio continuing to move unevenly downward throughout the postwar period.”
39

Female delinquency, though, often took on a different shape than male delinquency. Although
some young women committed acts of violence or theft commensurate with the male stereotype
of the delinquent, “the bulk of female crimes were and continued to be status crimes of some sort
rather than violations of the penal code; that is, they were acts considered to be criminal because
of the age at which they were committed rather than the nature of the act itself.”
40
For the most
part, this means underage sexual behavior. When commentators referred to “girl delinquency,”
they often meant what the American Social Hygiene Association euphemistically referred to as
“sex delinquency of a non-commercial character.”
41

According to Albert K. Cohen, the female delinquent’s precocious sexuality was the
result of social pressures on women. He writes that
a female’s status, security, response and the acceptability of her self-image as a woman or
a girl depend upon the establishment of satisfactory relationships with the other sex. To
this end sexuality, variously employed, is the most versatile and sovereign single
means.
42

Given that women and girls are socially dependent on men in so many ways, it is natural that
some young women might employ their sexuality too freely, in Cohen’s view, in the pursuit of
male approval. Notably, Cohen frames female delinquency as a misguided attempt at conformity
with a woman’s dependent situation in society, rather as a rebellion against repressive sexual
mores. Indeed, he writes that the rebelliousness that characterizes male delinquency is
“positively inappropriate as a response to the problems which do arise in the female role”
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because it is “irrelevant to the vindication of the girl’s status as a girl.”
43
A girl, according to
Cohen, does not wish to be anything other than a girl.
Psychologist S. Harvard Kaufman argues that delinquent behavior is an aggressive
reaction to feelings of depravation, and that “there is probably no essential difference in the
reactivity of boys and girls.”
44
Though he feels that girls are just as prone to aggression as boys
are, he also states that girls are more likely to have “the overt striking out at another person”
transformed into “other forms of expressed aggression” by cultural pressures.
45
He writes that,
although there have been cases in which girls have threatened to do bodily harm to
siblings, parents or others, cases of actual assault were rarely seen in young or adolescent
girls in the Juvenile Court Clinic. The aggression was limited to open defiance of
authority, sexual activity including enuresis, writing pornographic notes, and petty thefts
of money or clothing.

Kaufman argues that there is no fundamental difference between boys and girls in terms of the
psychological causes of delinquency, but points out that cultural distinctions cause the
manifestation of delinquent behavior to take on different forms. The result is the appearance of
difference when, in reality, boys and girls are dealing with many of the same psychological
problems.
That the psychologist Kaufman takes an interest in female delinquency and devotes
considerable study to the subject, at a time when most sociologists and criminologists were either
ignoring female delinquency or discussing it as peripheral to the larger issue of male
delinquency, is suggestive of a larger trend in the discourse around the subject during the
postwar era. Devlin writes that in the 1950s, while sociologists and criminologists focused
mainly on male delinquency, “female delinquency became almost the exclusive preserve of the
psychoanalysts.”
46
This separation can be read as a result of the widespread belief that male
delinquency was a natural reaction to the frequently conflicting constraints of society, which
163

females supposedly did not share. It follows that, if there was no social reason for girls to
misbehave or commit crimes, then the reason must be purely psychological. As such, male
delinquency was studied in terms of environmental causes, while female delinquency was
conceived of as a problem that existed principally in the girl’s head. According to Devlin, the
psychoanalytic conception of female misbehavior suggested that revolt came not from “disdain
for authority,” but from “psychic confusion about self in relation to authority figures.”
47
Put
another way, young women were not misbehaving out of a conscious desire to rebel against the
roles society imposed on them, but from a mental impediment that inhibited normal
development.
A representative case is offered by psychologist John C. Coolidge’s article, “Brother
Identification in an Adolescent Girl.” In it, Coolidge describes his treatment of a young patient
he calls Anne, who had recently begun displaying a defiant attitude, skipping classes, and
shoplifting. Anne had a fraught relationship with her father, who pressured her to devote herself
to her studies rather than her socialization. She also had an older brother who was killed in a
traffic accident several years earlier. Anne displayed a definite preference for masculine
activities, such as athletics. She “openly wished she were a boy” and “feels hurt and angry when
surpassed by a boy swimming.”
48
She states that boys “can come and go more freely, and take
care of themselves better.”
49
Coolidge also reads the act of theft as a subconsciously masculine
one, “an expression of her wish to be a boy.”
50

Coolidge, however, believes that “she secretly yearns to be more feminine like other
girls.”
51
He attributes her masculine behavior to her subconscious need to take the place of her
dead brother as a result of sexual confusion caused by her relationship with her father. The father
forbid her from wearing lipstick and discouraged her from socializing with boys. According to
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Coolidge, the father’s attempts to suppress his daughter’s sexual maturity resulted in
“ambivalency in her sexual identification.”
52
In order to gain her father’s approval, Anne felt that
“she should be sexless or masculine.”
53

It is noteworthy that Coolidge does not attribute Anne’s masculine identification to
genuine dissatisfaction or frustration with the social role that her sex has dictated for her. He
attributes it instead to her neurotic relationship with her father, which has left her confused about
how she supposed to behave. Despite her claims that she wishes she were a boy, he suggests that
she secretly “yearns” to be feminine and believes that helping her to resolve her problems with
her father will help to achieve this. That masculine identification might be a normal, or even
healthy, development was not seriously considered.
As Wini Breines has pointed out, though, identification with masculinity, particularly
when that masculinity denoted rebellion, was one of the strategies for young women to express
their dissatisfaction with their place in society. Indeed, when the female delinquent was
discussed in the popular discourse, she was frequently depicted as a masculinized figure.
According to Devlin, these figures signified “the breakdown of the boundaries of gender as much
as of civil behavior.”
54
The threat posed by female delinquency went beyond the mere danger of
physical violence or sexual misbehavior: it threatened the stability of the separation of genders
that was a key component of the postwar social structure. It undermined the grounds for the
assumption that women’s femininity made them a natural fit for the domestic sphere.
According to recent scholars Lyn Mikel Brown, Meda Chesney-Lind, and Nan Stein, the
figure of the masculinized female delinquent has often been employed as a warning against the
dangers of women who attempt to challenge their positions in society. The female delinquent
carries with her the implication that, when women seek equal rights with men, “as an exorable
165

part of that process they will become more like men in areas like crime and violence.”
55
The
female delinquent served as a symbol of the concern that changing a woman’s place in society
might also fundamentally change her behavior for the worse. Furthermore, Elizabeth McCarthy
states that the popular image of the female delinquent connects with the women who, during
World War II, took over the jobs vacated by men who were fighting in the war. She writes that
the wartime image
of young women working in a team, efficient, determined, and physically robust,
brandishing traditionally masculine tools and handling them with skill and competence
are mirrored in visual representations of the aggressive girl gang found in juvenile
delinquency films and pulp novels.

The female war worker was, in fact, a direct contradiction to the cult of domesticity, which held
that women’s natural and proper place was in the home rather than in a career. Only a few years
previously, however, women proved that they could take the place of men in doing the jobs that
they vacated, including masculine manufacturing work that was important to the war effort. The
contradiction here is obvious, and it suggests that the appropriateness of female domesticity was
not a settled question. The image of the masculine female delinquent, then, can be read as an
inversion of the female war worker, turning the masculine woman into a threat to society rather
than a boon. The female delinquent connects to serious questions in the period regarding what
women could, and should, be doing.
As Wini Breines points out, though, a girl did not necessarily have to become a criminal
in order to challenge the status quo. For some, it was enough merely to like rock ‘n’ roll music.
Breines writes that the popularity of rock ‘n’ roll “suggests that teenage girls were drawn to
otherness.”
56
As demonstrated in the previous chapter, rock music crossed both racial and class
lines with its connection to African American and working class cultures. For middle-class white
girls, this connection became an escape from the conformity of the white middle-class
166

mainstream. This desire for escape from conformity extended, Breines claims, to the girls’ taste
in boys. “Put simply,” she writes, “girls were attracted to males who were different from
themselves.”
57
Often this means boys who were from outside the middle class, but it could also
indicate anyone who appropriately embodied the attitude of rebellion. It likely serves to help
explain the appeal for young women of a certain youthful movie actor who would become
known for playing alienated loners: an actor by the name of James Dean.

“A Man Who Can Be Gentle and Sweet:” Gender in Rebel Without a Cause
James Dean’s most iconic role is probably that of juvenile delinquent Jim Stark in Rebel
Without a Cause (Warner Bros., 1955). A mainstream delinquency film produced by a major
studio right on the heels of MGM’s Blackboard Jungle, released earlier the same year, Rebel was
another major success with adult and teenager alike. Unlike MGM’s film, which focused on
troubled working-class teens, Rebel instead sought to showcase middle-class delinquency.
Thomas Doherty notes that much of the film’s impact came from the fact that it depicted “well-
off suburbanites inhabiting a world similar to that of the middle-class audience so valued by
Hollywood.”
58
In spite of being well-off, the teenagers of the film experience troubles of their
own that lead them to misbehave. For middle-class viewers, regardless of age, the immediacy
and familiarity of the setting lent the film a particular urgency and power. For teenagers in the
audience, the young people on screen, particularly Dean, signified a “plaintive expression of
adolescent unrest [that] sounded just the right note.”
59

According to Leerom Medovoi, though, the film’s portrait of youthful rebellion was
calculated to appeal beyond merely the teenage audience. He notes that even though the film
bears the title of psychiatrist Robert Lindner’s 1944 book of the same name, in which Lindner
167

describes his treatment of a young criminal psychopath, the film actually bears a closer
resemblance his 1955 book, Must You Conform? In it, Lindner argues that “demands on
individuals to conform in an increasingly massified society had reached a dangerous level.”
60

Lindner gives a defense of the human affinity for rebellion, which “is an invaluable instinct that
leads humans to reject and change their environmental status quo with the aim of improving the
quality of civilized life.”
61
Much as Goodman would argue later, it is the conformist pressures of
American society that produce the need for resistance. Lindner’s arguments provide the potential
for rebellion in the film to be read positively, as a necessary counter to the flaws of American
society.
Indeed, the film’s attitude towards its young people is quite positive and empathetic. This
can, in large part, be attributed to its director: Nicholas Ray. Ray “was someone who revered
youth, who viewed adolescence as a heightened human state and who refused to relinquish the
teenager in himself.”
62
Ray had previously directed the sympathetic juvenile delinquency film
Knock on Any Door (Columbia, 1949), and with Rebel, he declared that he was determined, in
his own words, “to do a film about the young people next door.”
63
According to Stuart Hall and
Paddy Whannel, Ray empathized so deeply with his teenage subjects that he “seemed incapable
of placing any distance between his dramatization of the teenage world and his own point of
view,” and they note that the film is impressive in its ability to represent the perspective of the
teenage culture itself.
64
According to Ray, he wanted youth to be “always in the foreground” and
to depict adults “for the most part only… as the kids see them.”
65
This contrasts with Blackboard
Jungle and most previous delinquency movies, in which delinquents were primarily viewed
through the perspectives of well-meaning adult authority figures. According to Lawrence
Frascella and Al Weisel, this inversion “signaled a remarkable change in the way this kind of
168

material had always been treated.”
66
Indeed, Rebel can be seen alongside Blackboard as helping
to inspire the rise of the teenpics, which sought to address teenage audiences to the exclusion of
adults. Nevertheless, Rebel was aimed at the adult viewer as much as the teenage viewer, as its
conception of delinquency was drawn from discourses that were circulating in the middle-class
adult mainstream.
Rebel Without a Cause centers on three main teenage characters: Jim, Judy (Natalie
Wood), and Plato (Sal Mineo). All three are troubled young people and each of their problems
derive, in different yet connected ways, from the problems of their middle-class families. As
such, all three characters comment upon the middle class domestic ideal. James Dean’s Jim Stark
occupies the greatest amount of screen time out of the three, and his problems are the most
deeply explored. At the beginning of the film, Jim is introduced drunkenly lying the street, and
he is subsequently brought to the juvenile division of the police station, where he first meets
Judy and Plato. Jim’s father, Frank (Jim Backus), mother, Carol (Ann Doran), and grandmother
arrive, and they imply that Jim has been in trouble before. It comes out that Jim had once beaten
up another kid for calling him a chicken, and that his parents had moved in order to “protect”
him.
Jim, for his part, expresses to an understanding police officer (named, probably not
coincidentally, Ray) his frustration at the “zoo” he lives in. He is exasperated at his father’s
inability to control his family, as Jim’s mother and grandmother “make mush” out of the father.
Jim wishes that his father “had guts to knock Mom cold once,” even speculated that if he did so
then his mother would “be happy and then she’d stop picking on him.” Jim finally vows that he
doesn’t “ever want to be like him.”
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Frank, indeed, is depicted throughout the film as completely emasculated. In one famous
scene, he is depicted wearing an apron and, having dropped the tray of food that he was carrying
to his wife, is on his hands and knees scrambling to clean up the mess out of fear that she will see
it. He is the image of the “domesticated male” described by Life magazine and feared as a
symbol of the loss of manliness in postwar society. Frank appears to have abdicated his position
as man of the house in favor of the feminine role; in fact, when Jim comes upon him in this state
he initially mistakes him for his mother. For his part, Jim is horrified by his father’s apparent
femininity, first insisting that he let Carol see it, then fleeing in anguish from the sight of his
father.
The film makes it clear that Jim’s aggressive and self-destructive behavior stems from
what he sees as his father’s deficient masculinity and his own fear of seeming weak. When the
boy in Jim’s old neighborhood challenged his masculinity by calling him “chicken,” Jim’s attack
on him became an overzealous attempt at proving that he was not like his father. Jim’s conduct is
a hypermasculine reaction to the loss of masculinity embodied by his father, and which
symbolizes the broader loss of masculinity in the postwar world that Goodman and others
decried. Jim is convinced that a proper family is one that has a strong, manly father at its head;
he even believes that his mother will be “happy” if Frank were to “knock her cold” because this
would presumably represent the restoration of a “natural” family dynamic. Jim’s dissatisfaction
with his family is grounded in a conservative conception of gender.
Furthermore, Frank Stark’s lack of masculinity is seen to lead to a loss of integrity within
the family. Later in the film, when Jim takes part in a dangerous “chickie run” in which another
boy is killed, he informs his parents that he intends to go to the police and tell them what
happened. His parents, however, try to convince him to keep silent in order to avoid blame. His
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mother is particularly vocal about her desire to protect Jim from himself and keep him from
“ruining” his life. She is connected to the “momism” discourse of the overprotective matriarch
who stifles her son’s development of masculinity. Jim, however, feels that telling the truth and
accepting responsibility for his actions is what is required of him as a man. As such, he expects
his father to support his decision. When Jim’s repeated demands that his father “stand up” for
him are met with silence, he lashes out at Frank physically and runs out of the house in anguish.
Jim’s commitment to integrity and personal responsibility seem designed to place any
viewer, no matter how old or conformist, on his side of the argument. His parents, on the other
hand, come off as hypocrites who taught their son to value honesty but now contradict their own
ideals. Peter Biskind writes of the teenage delinquents in Rebel Without a Cause that “although
they may be angry and (self-)destructive, they are more moral, upstanding, and law-abiding than
anyone else. In fact, it quickly becomes evident that it is not Jim, Judy, or Plato who are the
delinquents, but their parents.”
67
The moral hypocrisy of Jim’s parents is linked to his father’s
emasculation, as Frank is unable to provide an articulation of manly virtue to support his son.
Jim’s lashing out at his father and flight from his home represent his dissatisfaction with the
model of manliness that his father represents.
As with Goodman’s general criticism of contemporary society, it is striking that Jim’s
implied critique of his family is couched in a desire for a return to traditional conceptions of
masculinity. As Nina C. Leibman writes, in multiple troubled youth films of which Rebel is the
premier example, teenage protagonists who “seemed rebellious” actually were “arguing for the
maintenance of (or a return to) traditional values.”
68
In films like Rebel, “teenagers are rebelling
for a return to the status quo,” and are actually “much more conservative than their elders.”
69
In
Rebel’s case, this allows the film to appeal to audiences on multiple levels. On one level, Jim’s
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overt rebellion offers an attraction not only to teenagers, but to adults who may have harbored
doubts about postwar society and its conformist character. On another level, the gender
conservatism at the heart of Jim’s frustration is also satisfying to middle-class adults who, even if
they were satisfied with the shape of postwar society, were likely put off by the extreme vision of
male domesticity embodied by Frank Stark. Jim may be a rebel, but deep down he’s rebelling for
things that most traditionalist adults would approve of.
At the end of the film, when Frank promises to “stand up with” his son and to “try and be
as strong as you want me to be,” it represents the hope that the domesticated, emasculated man
will be able to regain his lost masculinity. As such, he offers Jim a potential path to reintegration
into mainstream society. As a positive role model, Frank could offer a “proper” image of
manliness for Jim to emulate, in which masculinity is properly balanced within the self and
pointless violence is eschewed. After all, Jim was rebelling against the lack of masculinity in his
family; a manlier father would seem to be all that is necessary for him to be reclaimed by the
middle class.
Jim’s friend, Plato, offers a different image of male juvenile delinquency. Whereas Jim
was saddled with a wimpy father and an overbearing mother, Plato has no parents at all. His
father left the family when Plato was a child, and his mother is frequently absent from home,
leaving an African American housekeeper as his only parental figure. Plato is a scared,
indecisive, and feminine young man, but one who is also capable of frightening acts of violence:
he is first brought in to the juvenile division of the police station for shooting puppies. Plato is
depicted as a highly disturbed person whose problems are represented not as a reaction to an
insufficiently masculine father, but to the complete absence of masculine influence in his life.
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Recent interpretations of the film have frequently positioned Plato as a queer character,
based on textual evidence such as his seemingly erotic attraction to Jim and invitation that he
spend the night at his house, and the fact that he has a pin-up of male movie star Alan Ladd in his
locker at school.
70
This evidence would likely have been understandable to some audience
members in 1955. Indeed, this informs the film’s presentation of Plato’s delinquency. Peter and
Barbara Wyden, writing in 1968 about recent psychological study of homosexuality going back
to the 1950s, note that homosexuality and juvenile delinquency are frequently compared. They
write, “No parent sets out deliberately to produce a delinquent – or a homosexual. Yet it is
recognized today that delinquency and homosexuality are both rooted in the home.”
71
They write
that homosexuality and delinquency are both forms of “seduction,” and that vulnerability to this
“seduction” is “unknowingly created by the parent.”
72

Indeed, discussions of parental culpability in producing homosexuality bear a striking
similarity to the discourse of “momism” that surrounded delinquency. The Wydens write that
“the child who becomes a homosexual is usually overprotected and preferred by his mother. In
other cases he may be underprotected and rejected.” In Plato’s case, the latter appears to apply:
his mother’s frequent absences presumably engender the feeling that he has been rejected by her.
The Wydens furthermore write that “recent research has shown that fathers actually seem to have
an absolute veto power over the homosexual development of their sons.” Sons who are “able to
admire and identify with their fathers” will become “well-adjusted heterosexual males”
regardless of Mom’s influence.
73
Plato, however, has no father-figure in his life at all, not even a
deficient one, meaning that there is no one to “veto” the direction of his sexual development.
As previously stated, Jim is capable of being reclaimed by mainstream society because
his rebellion is, in fact, a call for a return to traditional ideals of masculinity. As a queer
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character, however, Plato is at odds with those same traditional ideals. Whereas Jim resembles
the type of rebel that Paul Goodman wrote about as challenging the shape of postwar society,
Plato represents the inverse: someone completely removed from traditional notions of what it
means to be a man because of his lack of any male role model, good or bad. Indeed, even if a
viewer does not read the clues that mark Plato as queer, he is “othered” in numerous ways: not
only by his neurotic behavior and femininity, but by his ambiguous ethnicity and connection to
the African American maid as his sole visible parental figure. Unlike Jim, Plato cannot be
reintegrated into white middle-class society, and he must therefore be killed at the end of the
film. As Peter Biskind writes, “Plato has to die” because he is too far outside the mainstream to
be assimilated into it.
74

Indeed, Plato dies because he is too afraid of society, as represented by the police force,
to surrender himself to it. Having shot another boy in self-defense, Plato fearfully takes refuge
inside the Griffith Observatory and is surrounded by police. Despite Jim’s efforts to convince
Plato to give himself up, and though Jim secretly takes the bullets out of the gun, Plato
nevertheless makes a panicked attempt to escape and is shot down by the cops. Ultimately, Plato
is too alienated, too disaffected, and too different to give himself up to the forces of society. His
destruction is suggested to be inevitable, as Frank Stark assures his son that the latter did
“everything a man could” to save Plato. Plato’s death does appear to provide Frank with the
resolve not to let the same thing happen to Jim, and to promise to be the father that Jim wants
him to be. Plato, the boy who seemingly cannot be salvaged by the mainstream, is symbolically
sacrificed to save Jim, the boy who can.
As for the film’s female delinquent, Judy, her problems do not involve getting in fights or
shooting puppies. Her transgressions are sexual in nature: she is brought into the juvenile
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division of the police station at the beginning of the movie for walking the streets at night, where
she was initially taken for a prostitute. She spends her time with the delinquent gang led by her
boyfriend Buzz (Corey Allen) and appears to enjoy the erotic appeal that she has for the boys.
Though relatively mild, her actions reflect the contemporary conception of female delinquency
as predominantly involving sexual status crimes.
Judy’s misbehavior is explicitly connected to her troubled relationship with her father.
According to Rachel Devlin, fathers were central to the psychological discourse surrounding
female delinquency at the time. She writes that “paternal failure” in the form of “emotional
distance, literal neglect or cruelty in the form of the removal of love and affection” was said to
have the effect of leaving the girl unable to progress into “a sexually mature young adult.”
75

Indeed, Judy’s situation bears a clear resemblance to the case study discussed by John C.
Coolidge. Just as “Anne’s” father forbid her to wear lipstick and discouraged her from
associating with boys, Judy claims that her father “doesn’t like my friends” and describes how,
when she dressed up to go out to a movie with her family, her father violently grabbed her and
attempted to rub off her lipstick with such force that she “thought he’d rub off my lips.” Officer
Ray suggests that Judy’s sexualized (if not sexual) misbehavior is a way to get back at her father
and force him to pay attention to her, and the film does nothing to contradict his supposition.
Coolidge further suggests that Anne’s dysfunctional relationship with her father is
informed by an unconscious sexual attraction. He writes that the father “had been expressing his
negative feelings with increasing intensity” due to his own increasing cognizance of his maturing
daughter’s growing sexual appeal, and that father and daughter “were frightened by their
mutually seductive feelings.”
76
Likewise, Judy’s father seems to be disturbed by his daughter’s
maturing sexual appeal. When she tries to kiss him, he rebuffs her, insisting that she’s “too old
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for that kind of stuff.” He recognizes that his daughter’s kisses have lost the innocence of
childhood, and obviously feels that a kiss from a sixteen-year-old girl cannot be separated from
its erotic meaning. When she persists in trying to kiss him, he slaps her face. Judy interprets this
as a rejection of her affection for him and as an accusation that she is a “tramp.”
However, whereas Coolidge claims that Anne reacts to her mutually seductive
relationship with her father by identifying with boys and taking on masculine traits, Judy reacts
by becoming more sexually feminine. Indeed, whereas most of the subsequent low-budget
teenpics discussed later in this chapter depict female delinquents who speak and act in a
masculine manner, even as most of their transgressions are sexual in nature, Judy remains quite
feminine in her conduct and appearance. This discrepancy can be attributed, in part, to the belief
that a teenage girl defying gender norms would have been too much for a film aimed at a general
middle-class audience. It can also be attributed to the fact that, in the world of Rebel Without a
Cause, Judy the female delinquent is defined in large part by her romantic relationship with the
male delinquent, Jim.
Judy meets up with Jim following the “Chickie Run” accident that claims the life of her
boyfriend, Buzz. The two of them commiserate over their shared frustrations with their parents
and with the adult world in general. Joined by Plato, the three of them resolve never to return to
their homes, and go off to an abandoned mansion in the Hollywood hills. There, they enact a
burlesque on adulthood, with Jim and Judy play-acting a newlywed couple with Plato as the
realtor trying to sell them the mansion. Soon, though, Plato regresses to childhood and Jim and
Judy become parent-figures to him, with Judy singing him to sleep with a lullaby. The trio’s
attempt to form a surrogate family affirms the essential conservatism underlying their rebellion.
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They are not rebelling against the structure of middle class society or the cult of domesticity per
se, but rather demanding an improved version of those same things.
Jim and Judy begin to talk about their feelings for each other, and Judy asks him if he
know what kind of person a girl wants. Jim responds simply, “a man,” but Judy adds that he has
to be “a man who can be gentle and sweet,” who “doesn’t run away when you want them. Like
being Plato’s friend when nobody else liked him. That’s being strong.” This statement
complicates Jim’s conservative notions about what manliness entails. Previously, he seemed to
associate manliness with bravery and aggression, but, as Leerom Medovoi, points out,
“conventionally feminine qualities – gentleness, sweetness, but especially nurturance – are
converted into masculine ones by Judy, who claims that they signal strength.”
77
In doing so, she
challenges conservative assumptions about masculinity and the role of men in society.
In this, Judy speaks to the appeal that both Jim Stark and James Dean had to young
women, especially in the middle class. In spite of his gender conservatism, Jim represented a
shift away from the conventionally masculine cinematic archetype to one that was more sensitive
and emotionally open. Indeed, Jim spends much of the film in tears over his family life or the
fate of his friend, Plato. As Medovoi writes, method actors like James Dean who came to
prominence in the mid-1950s typically projected “such qualities as emotional vulnerability,
disaffected inner isolation, and eroticized sensitivity.”
78
These men represented a challenge to the
ruggedly stoic model of manhood that had dominated the screen previously. Furthermore, Wini
Brines states that many young women were attracted to Dean’s “highly androgynous
sexuality.”
79
Dean’s androgyny, expressed in his appearance and attitude and in the highly
emotional and vulnerable characters he played, was enthralling to young women who themselves
felt constricted by gender expectations.
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Judy, by articulating those qualities which make Jim attractive to girls, becomes a
mouthpiece for the disaffected young women in the audience. She adds nuance to what is, in
many ways, a conservative view of gender roles being expressed by the film, avowing that
feminine qualities can signal strength as much as masculine qualities and affirming that both
should be part of the postwar male identity. However, in making herself into a lens through
which Jim can be examined, Judy gives up the potential to be examined in and of herself as a
female delinquent. Jim does not make any attempt to scrutinize Judy’s identity or to comment on
what it means to be a woman in postwar society. At the end of the film, the problems and
frustrations that Judy experience are eclipsed by those of the male delinquents, Jim and Plato.
It is noteworthy that in the final scene of the film, when Jim’s father is promising him
that he will change for the better and Plato’s housekeeper is crying over his body, Judy’s parents
are conspicuously absent. Indeed, whereas Plato is killed and Jim is offered the potential for
reintegration to middle-class society through his father, Judy is not given any sort of resolution.
It would seem as though the film feels no need to offer her closure. In the end, her identity has
been changed from “girl delinquent” to “girlfriend.” Medovoi writes that “by subordinating
herself to Jim’s heroism she is converted into the properly deferential girlfriend whom Jim can
publicly avow to his parents in the closing scene.”
80
Her identity is bound to Jim, so that when
the potential of reintegration is offered to him, it is also symbolically offered to her. The fact that
she is in love with Jim means that her relationship with her father is no longer an issue worth
noting. As in so much of the popular and sociological discourse surrounding delinquency, female
delinquency is rendered peripheral to male delinquency. For this reason, it is worthwhile to
examine some less-well-known films in which the female delinquent assumes center stage.

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“The Things Most Girls Want:” Entering the Girls Reform School
The vast majority of the films which deal with female juvenile delinquency can be
divided into two categories, which will be designated the “girls reform school film” and the “girl
gang film.” The former category places the misbehaving young women into an all-female
environment under an authority which seeks to make “useful citizens” out of them. The latter
category examines the women in their “natural environment,” in which the women form their
own social structures in opposition to the adult patriarchal society. Both categories will be
examined in turn.
The girl’s reform school film bears a strong similarity to the women-in-prison film genre
which would later become ubiquitous in low-budget exploitation cinema, and it shares many of
the latter’s themes and concerns. Suzanna Danuta Walters notes that women-in-prison films
draw attention to the restrictions placed on women and their behavior: “marginalized by gender,
stigmatized by sexual preference, victimized by callous bureaucracies, physically isolated and
preyed upon – these women are most assuredly the marked other.”
81
As a location in which
women have been isolated from mainstream society – often unfairly – prison becomes the site of
a breakdown in traditional gender roles. Indeed, these women have often been condemned
precisely because they defied the socially proscribed model of feminine behavior. Now separated
from mainstream society, women are able to seek out new and different models of behavior.
As the name suggests, however, the reform school differs from prison not only in the age
of its inmates but in its emphasis on reformation. A prison functions to segregate those who have
transgressed against society’s laws. A reform school seeks to transform its inmates into
productive (that is to say, normal) citizens. As such, the reform school is a contradictory space in
that it enables transgression against gender norms at the same time that it exerts pressure on its
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inmates to conform to traditional codes of behavior. The reform school becomes an ideal
location for the working out of anxieties about female gender troubles, as it provides the
potential both for challenges to the notions of what it means to be a young woman in postwar
society, as well as for the creation of possible “solutions” to female delinquency.
One of the earliest films about girls in reform school was So Young, So Bad, released in
1950. Unlike the other films discussed in this section, So Young, So Bad predated the rise of the
teenpic; consequently, despite its low-budget status, it is directed at a general audience of both
adults and young people. Produced independently by Danziger Productions Ltd. and distributed
by United Artists, the film stars Paul Henreid as Dr. John H. Jason, a newly hired psychologist
working at the Elmview correctional institute. Dr. Jason takes a particular interest in four
troubled young women and attempts to help them each to discover their own paths to self-
fulfillment. He soon discovers that the headmaster of the institute is not interested in reforming
the girls but only in exploiting their labor, and that sadistic punishments are used to keep the girls
in line. Dr. Jason sets out to reform both the girls and the institute itself.
Mark Thomas McGee and R.J. Robertson note that the film draws on the structures
established by numerous older Warner Bros. films: “the sympathetic new authority figure
fighting the cruelty of the old regime.”
82
Indeed, So Young, So Bad bears a strong similarity to
the 1933 Warner Bros. juvenile delinquency film The Mayor of Hell. In the older film, racketeer
Patsy Gargan (James Cagney) is given the cushy job of deputy commissioner of a boys’ reform
school as a political reward. He discovers that the corrupt warden is scrimping on the boys’ food
and comforts and pocketing the extra money, and is using brutal tactics to keep the boys in line.
Gargan, seeing his own life mirrored in the boys, takes over the school and sets in place a system
to reform the boys by making them collectively responsible for their own conduct and discipline.
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The contrast between the warden and Gargan serves to provide both a negative figure of adult
authority to justify the youths’ grievances, as well as a positive figure of authority who models
the “correct” way to make them into proper citizens.
So Young, So Bad draws on previous films for its approach to delinquency, including its
assumption that delinquency is predominantly a working class issue, as all of the inmates in the
film come from impoverished backgrounds. However, it also differs from films like The Mayor
of Hell in both the sex of the delinquents and in its emphasis on psychology. As has already been
established, the majority of the scientific study of female delinquency was performed by
psychologists, and this is reflected in the film’s choice of protagonist. Whereas Gargan attempted
to reform his male delinquents by giving them authority and allowing them to run their own self-
sufficient society within the school, Dr. Jason does not feel that giving the girls power over their
own situations is a proper solution. Instead, he investigates the individual girls for psychological
trauma which, he feels, must be resolved before they can be reintegrated into society. The fact
that Dr. Jason is a man is significant, given the emphasis that contemporary psychologists like
John C. Coolidge placed on girls’ relationships to their fathers. Indeed, like Judy in Rebel
Without a Cause, each of the girls foregrounded in So Young, So Bad either lacks or has a
troubled relationship to her own father. Dr. Jason, in his role as a positive male authority figure,
is able to become a surrogate father to the girls, demonstrating that patriarchal guidance, rather
than self-sufficiency, is what is necessary for their reformation.
Of the young women that Dr. Jason attempts to reform in the film, the one who is given
the most attention is bad-girl Loretta (Anne Francis), whose “badness” is expressed by her
aggressive sexuality. Loretta lost her mother when she was 7 and was raised by her father, who
was an alcoholic and who neglected her until she “found out how to handle him.” The meaning
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of this phrase is left deliberately unclear, but it is implied that it relates to her openly sexual
behavior and aggressive pursuit of men. This connects Loretta to Coolidge’s patient, Anne, and
the “mutually seductive feelings” between the latter and her father. In Loretta’s case, it can be
assumed, her discovery of her maturing sexuality and its effect on her father did not lead to
conflict, but instead is what enabled her to “handle him.”
Loretta is aware of the power her sexuality gives her over men, but for her, sexuality is
intrinsically linked with her father. This is supported by the fact that she soon becomes
romantically infatuated with her new father figure: Dr. Jason. According to Leerom Medovoi, the
“bad girl” of the juvenile delinquency film is one who “refuses to be good by adopting an
antidomestic, sexualized femininity.”
83
In the film’s construction, this sexualization signifies
immaturity because it represents an infantilized desire for paternal affection. Dr. Jason endeavors
to displace Loretta’s affection for him onto her infant child, who was conceived during a brief
marriage to a “jerk,” and who was subsequently placed in the care of an adoption agency. This
would enable her to finally achieve proper “sexual maturity,” which in the film is signified by
motherhood.
Nevertheless, the film also implies that Loretta’s sexuality is more than just a child’s plea
for a father’s love. At one point in the film, Loretta attempts to effect an escape from the institute
by seducing a male truck driver. Climbing into the back of his truck and dangling her bare legs in
front of him, she coolly removes the phallic cigarette from his mouth and places it between her
own lips. Loretta displays her awareness of the power her feminine sexuality gives her over men,
at one point commenting that “men like me; women don’t.” Here, she uses that power by
deliberately constructing a seductive performance of female sexuality.
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In his analysis of the cinematic bad girl, Leerom Medovoi draws on Angela Carter’s
definition of the Sadean woman: a poor woman who realizes “that she cannot afford virtue” and
instead embraces her erotic appeal to men in order to “convert her sex into the coin of power and
wealth.”
84
Without money, a woman has little to gain from obeying the expectations of feminine
social etiquette, which largely derive from the middle class. In Loretta’s case, it can be assumed
that her difficult upbringing taught her that the “proper” feminine virtues of domesticity and
chastity bring no reward. As such, she sees no reason not to transgress societal expectations by
exploiting her sexual femininity in order to survive and thrive.
When the truck driver reneges on his promise to help her escape, however, her feminine
performance is dropped. Enraged, Loretta shouts curses at him and strikes him savagely with her
fists. The abrupt transformation from seductive femininity to wrathful masculinity represents a
stark challenge to the notion of separate gender roles. It is clear that Loretta has no use for
conventional gender roles beyond employing them as a tool for the cynical manipulation of
others. When not performing, Loretta has no interest in behaving in a “properly” feminine way,
implying that women who get no value from feminine codes of behavior will not bother to adopt
them uncritically. Thus, Loretta’s conduct denies that femininity is the “natural” mode of
conduct for women and raises questions about whether feminine codes of behavior can, or
should, be renounced entirely.
These questions, however, are dispelled by the end of the film. Loretta, who has
repeatedly insisted throughout the film that she doesn’t want to be saddled with a kid, is finally
put in a room alone with her infant son. Although she initially attempts to resist the “pest,” the
act of holding the child causes her maternal instincts to manifest as if by magic. By the end of the
scene, she has resolved to be a mother to the child. Indeed, so great is her newfound sense of
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responsibility that it gives her the strength to testify against the abuses of the corrupt headmaster,
allowing Dr. Jason to assume full control over the institute. Ultimately, although the film permits
Loretta to flaunt her defiance of feminine codes of behavior, and even gives her legitimate
motivations for doing so, it finally uses her to affirm that the maternal instinct is inherent to even
the most hardened rebel.
The other girls that Dr. Jason works with also have grievances against social constraints,
but likewise have their problems “resolved.” Dolores (Rita Moreno), a second-generation
Mexican-American, is ashamed of her status as a racial outsider. Although she is able to fit in
well with her predominantly white classmates, her father cannot speak English and embarrasses
her in front of them. He comes to represent for her the impossibility of her acceptance into white
society. Jane (Enid Pulver) had grown up never knowing her father, which left her with a weak
will. She forms a close relationship with tomboyish Jackie (Anne Jackson) that is coded as
lesbian. Dr. Jason, however, feels that feminine Jane is too dependent on masculine Jackie.
As with Loretta, Dr. Jason works to help them to fit in with society’s expectations for
them, and he is largely successful. Dolores is convinced to accept her family’s difference,
embracing Mexican culture and the Spanish language; in doing so, however, she seems to give
up on her hopes of acceptance into white society. Jackie is convinced by Dr. Jason that her
relationship with Jane is unhealthy, and they give up each other’s company. Dolores, Jane,
Jackie, and Loretta are all shown to be happy with the way their lives have changed. Their
respective desires for racial integration, a same-sex relationship, and freedom from motherhood
were shown to be products of their neuroses rather than reflective of what the girls truly wanted.
The challenges the young women present to social conditions regarding race, sexual freedom,
and motherhood for postwar women are considered, but ultimately dismissed.
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A useful comparison with So Young, So Bad is offered by the 1957 delinquency film
Reform School Girl. Whereas the former film was aimed at a general audience, the latter film
was produced by American International Pictures, the largest and most successful producer of
teenpics, and was aimed predominantly at a teenage audience. Nevertheless, Reform School Girl
resembles So Young, So Bad in several ways: first of all, in its reform school setting. The film’s
writer and director, Edward Bernds, was known for the special attention he paid to the realism of
his teenpics. In preparing to make Reform School Girl, he “did a bit of research at a couple of
reformatories” in order to properly capture the setting.
85
Indeed, despite its teenage audience, the
film resembles So Young, So Bad in the importance it places on finding a clinical solution to
female delinquency.
The film’s plot setup resembles that of the delinquency film Teen-Age Crime Wave
(Columbia, 1955), which was discussed in the previous chapter. In the older film, a middle-class
teen girl whose delinquency consisted of going out with “bad boys” is caught up in the crime
wave of two murderous, irredeemable delinquents and is mistakenly labeled as their accomplice.
In Reform School Girl, the female protagonist comes from an impoverished home and is
generally more defiant of authority, but is still basically a good girl who gets mixed up with a
bad crowd. Donna Price (Gloria Castillo) goes out joyriding with bad boy Vince (Edd Byrnes) in
a stolen car. They’re spotted by police, and while escaping Vince recklessly runs down a
pedestrian. Vince flees the car on foot, but Donna is caught and sent to reform school. There, she
catches the attention of David Lindsay (Ross Ford), a psychologist who takes a teaching job at
the school in order to study the girls. Although most of the students are written off as
unreformable, Lindsay believes that Donna is the one girl who can be remade into a responsible
citizen.
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Donna’s rebelliousness is portrayed as the result of a distrust of patriarchal authority.
This distrust originates with her home life; her mother died five years previously and she had
been living with her aunt and uncle. In the very first scene of the film, the uncle is introduced
while lecherously spying on Donna as she changes her clothes. Donna later claims that this sort
of behavior has been going since she was fourteen. The uncle comes on to her, which escalates
into a near-rape attempt, which is only prevented when Vince arrived and beats the uncle up.
Like Judy from Rebel and Loretta from So Young, So Bad, Donna’s delinquency comes from the
eroticism in her relationship with her father or father-figure. In Donna’s case, though, this leads
to a rejection of that father-figure. She prefers to call him her “aunt’s husband” rather than her
“uncle,” emphasizing the weak grounds for his patriarchal authority over her, and declares her
intention to get away from him as soon as possible.
The uncle’s treatment of Donna is compounded by Vince, who attempts to force himself
on her, implicates her in a manslaughter case, and threatens to kill her if she “squeals” on him.
These leave her with a distrust and aversion towards men. When Lindsay attempts to reach out to
her, she assumes that he intends to take advantage of her sexually. Lindsay states that her feeling
about patriarchal figures is understandable, given that “the men you’ve meet so far have been a
pretty sorry bunch.” Nevertheless, he recognizes that her feelings will prevent her from being
integrated into mainstream society, given that this necessitates her taking on the role of wife and
mother. Thus, for Lindsay, the work of “rehabilitating” Donna comes to consist of him trying to
convince her to like men again.
The all-girl environment of the reform school would seem to provide Donna with a haven
from male lechery and domination, but the film depicts the school’s female community as being
as oppressive as any patriarchal institution. The group’s strict code of conduct emphasizes
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loyalty to the insulated group; “squealing” is considered the worst possible transgression. When
Donna is falsely suspected of implicating another girl in a crime, she is ejected from the
community and terrorized, psychologically (snakes put in her bed) and physically (attempted
beatings). As the film’s teenage audience would have understood, rejection by one’s peer group
is a frightening prospect. It also makes it understandable that Donna would ultimately choose to
follow Lindsay into mainstream society, since at worst she was just trading in one system of
oppression for another.
Lindsay’s attempts to reach out to Donna are interesting in terms of their gender politics.
Despite being a paternal authority figure, he attempts to avoid exerting his masculine power over
his students. When the girls decide to give him “the business” on the first day of classes, talking
over him and responding to his questions with jokes, he opts to bend rather than forcefully assert
his authority. He states that the girls are free to choose whether they stay in class and invites
them to “walk – no hard feelings.” The entire class takes him up on his offer, but they return for
later classes and are better behaved.
Later, meeting with Donna and discussing her problems, Lindsay states his desire to be
“sensitive” to the girls’ situations. Donna responds that “sensitive” is “a funny thing for a man to
say… It’s the way girls talk. Guys always talk tough.” Donna expresses a belief in strict gender
essentialism: only women can be “sensitive,” while men are exclusively “tough.” Lindsay
challenges this essentialism by being sensitive and nurturing in his treatment of her. In doing so,
Lindsay is connected to postwar discourses about the domesticated male and the loss of
traditional standards of masculinity. In becoming a surrogate father to Donna, he exhibits
qualities traditionally associated with motherhood. It is these qualities, though, which allow him
to convince Donna to rethink her assumptions about the male sex. Like Judy in Rebel, Lindsay
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understands that young women want “men who can be gentle and sweet,” rather than those who
are merely “tough.” Male sensitivity is the quality which will allow Donna to be reclaimed for
the domestic ideal.
Although Lindsay defies gender essentialism himself, he nevertheless makes essentialist
assumptions when discussing Donna. He expresses his belief that, deep down, Donna “wants the
things most girls want: nice clothes, nice home, eventually a family.” Donna does not dispute his
belief, and indeed the end of the film suggests that he is completely right about her. Like Loretta
in So Young, So Bad, Donna is a surface rebel whose actual, natural desires neatly correspond to
mainstream, domestic assumptions about womanhood. Also like Loretta, she just needs to meet a
particular person in order to bring her “true” self out.
That person ends up being Jackie Dodd (Ralph Reed), a local farm boy who meets Donna
thanks to a flat tire that occurs as he’s passing by the reform school. Despite her initial
reluctance, Jackie convinces her to meet him for a “date” that night, which he will keep by
sneaking onto the grounds. Jackie represents a more “sensitive” model of masculinity, offering
Jackie his coat when she gets cold and getting her permission before putting his arms around her.
Lindsay finds about the rendezvous, but encourages Donna in the relationship. He eventually
suggests to the school’s headmistress that they host an official dance and invite some of the local
boys. This mirrors a scene in So Young, So Bad, in which Dr. Jason makes the same suggestion.
Jason and Lindsay both recognize that for a young woman to “reform” and enter domestic life,
they will require young men, provided that they are the “right kind.” Properly chaperoned by
responsible adult authority figures, a coed dance becomes not a cause for alarm but preparation
for adulthood. Though the headmistress expresses doubt to Lindsay that “the parents of
respectable boys will allow their sons to come here,” the dance is nevertheless heavily populated
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by young men. Clearly, the behavior restrictions on “respectable boys” are far laxer than those
on “respectable girls.”
Near the end of the film, Vince decides that the risk of Donna ratting on him is too great,
and he resolves to silence her. By coincidence, he kidnaps Jackie after hearing that he knows
how to sneak into the school. Like a good villain, Vince reveals his plan to Jackie, prompting
Jackie to attack and eventually overpower him. Jackie may be a sensitive young man, but the
film affirms that he also possesses a manly capacity for violence. The film suggests that the
optimal man represents a healthy mixture of masculine and feminine qualities. He should be
sweet and gentle to his girl, but also capable to defending her from homicidal male delinquents.
In the final scene of the film, Donna is dancing with Jackie at another school dance, while the
headmistress predicts that she will be “fine, just fine.” According to the film, a good boy is all
that is required.
Despite being targeted at a teenage audience, Reform School Girl is significant in its
similarities to So Young, So Bad. Both films must purge the delinquent tendencies from its main
female(s) and both films ultimately disavow the possibility of reading female delinquency as a
critique of society, rather than a corruption of a girl’s “true” nature. Although Reform School
Girl privileges the perspectives of the teenage girl characters over that of the adult male
psychologist, doing so largely works to affirm how unappealing a life outside of the domestic
ideal actually is for a young woman. Donna is bullied, harassed, and oppressed by her female
peers; only with Jackie, her implied future husband, does she find happiness. Whether it is
targeted at adults or at teenagers, the central message about female delinquency is largely the
same in both films.
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Another example of the female reform school film was 1959’s Girls Town, made by
Albert Zugsmith Productions and distributed by MGM. Among teenpic producers, Zugsmith was
known both for his use of controversial subject matter – previous teenpics had dealt with the
subjects of the high school drug trade and rape – and for the didactic moralism with which he
balanced the controversy. He stated that “all my pictures are moral essays… but you can’t make
a point for good unless you expose the evil.”
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For Girls Town, Zugsmith chose to tackle the subject of female juvenile delinquency. He
hired screenwriter Robert Hardy Andrews to write the screen story; Andrews had previously
worked on the screenplays for the male delinquency pictures Bad Boy (Allied Artists, 1949) and
The Kid from Texas (Universal, 1950), both of which depicted the delinquent as a violent
psychopath.
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Zugsmith also cast Mamie Van Doren in the lead role, after having put her in
supporting roles in several of his earlier films. Van Doren was one of a number of voluptuous
“blonde bombshells” who found success in the 1950s, but, as Barry Lowe observes, “she
resonated with popular youth culture of the era in a way that the more middle-brow Marilyn
Monroe and Jayne Mansfield did not.”
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Lowe attributes this to the fact that Van Doren “was the
sexual aggressor struggling against the streak of Puritanism that ran, and still runs, through
American movies and society.”
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Leerom Medovoi calls her “the most unabashedly explicit bad
girl of the Hollywood teenpic.” Her characters tended to be sexual rebels who challenged the
constraints put on them by mainstream society and who sought their own independence. In
addition to the prurient interest that she would have aroused in straight male viewers, Van Doren
epitomized rebellion against the status quo, making her an ideal protagonist for teenage viewers
of all types.
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Van Doren plays Silver Morgan, a rebellious teen who is called in for questioning when
her boyfriend, Chip, is found dead at the bottom of a cliff. Chip’s wealthy father is convinced
that Silver is responsible, basing his opinion simply on the fact that she is “bad.” His opinion
seems to have been informed by Silver’s working class origins, and by her sexual demeanor.
Silver, in fact, strongly resembles Loretta from So Young, So Bad in that she defies traditional
gender roles while using her sexuality for her own ends. When Chip’s father pressures the chief
of police into rescinding Silver’s probation (she had been in a fight with a teacher) and sentences
her to the Catholic reform school Girls Town, Silver refuses to accept the situation meekly. She
angrily tears into the chief for his obvious class discrimination, asking whether her crime was
really the fact that her “mom wasn’t in the social register.” Like Loretta, Silver’s life has been so
disadvantaged that she never saw the need to conform to gender roles; she can switch from
seductive femininity to masculine rage at any time. Furthermore, as Medovoi argues, Silver’s
expressions of defiance are “strongly endorsed as understandable responses to a travesty of
justice.”
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Silver has no reason to conform to the behavioral dictates of an adult male society that
treats her so shoddily.
As the film’s title suggests, it is modeled in part on MGM’s 1938 boy’s reform school
picture Boys Town. In that film, Father Flanagan (Spencer Tracy), following the credo that
“there’s no such thing as a bad boy,” opens the reform school Boys Town, where male
delinquents learn responsibility by running their own society within the school. Whitey Marsh
(Mickey Rooney) poses a special challenge, but is eventually reformed. In Girls Town, the
school is run by a group of nuns who stand in for Flanagan, while Silver takes the place of
Whitey. As Girls Town is a teenpic, however, focus of the film is placed squarely on the
teenagers themselves, with the adults relegated to a background role. Like Flanagan, the nuns
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attempt to foster a nurturing environment which gives the girls free reign to create their own
society within the town’s confines, but Silver wants nothing to do with it.
Much like in Reform School Girl, however, Silver discovers that the society created by
her fellow inmates has its own strictly enforced rules of behavior. Her repeated refusals to
conform to expected behavioral codes results in the girls putting Silver on “trial” for her
transgressions. Vida (Gloria Talbott), the mock prosecutor and the girls’ de facto leader, charges
Silver with a series of unladylike acts: Silver “sasses the sisters, smokes in her room, and last
night she breaks out and goes nightclubbing.” By doing so, Silver endangers the “pretty good
thing” that the young women have going at Girls Town. Although none of the other girls seem
any more “reformed” than Silver, they do seem to have reached the realization that obeying the
nuns’ expectations will result in better treatment. Silver’s continued rebellion is dangerous for
this reason. This scene becomes a study in conformity, as one person’s resistance makes things
harder on everyone. Despite their status as delinquents and their removal from the outside world,
the Girls Town society becomes a microcosm of the larger mainstream society in its enforcement
of “good girl” behavior.
That being said, the Girls Town society does not conform to the strict separation of
masculine and feminine behaviors. The girls are not above turning to highly masculine methods
in controlling Silver. At one point, Vida resolves to teacher Silver a lesson “the hard way” and
uses judo to toss her around the room like a rag doll. Vida has no qualms about performing
masculinity, rather than femininity, when it is in the service of her society. A further illustration
of the film’s take on traditional gender roles comes when Girls Town holds a dance hosted by
music star Jimmy Parlow (Paul Anka). As discussed previously, So Young, So Bad and Reform
School Girl both featured dances put on by the schools themselves, as Doctors Jason and Lindsay
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felt that fraternization with boys was necessary for the girls to integrate into mainstream society.
The Girls Town dance, however, is strictly female, and the girls are perfectly satisfied to dance
with one another.
Although it might be tempting to read lesbianism into this scene, the film’s general
depiction of the Girls Town society, to say nothing of its constant pro-religion subtext, instead
invite the viewer to read the girls’ behavior as denoting celibacy, and perhaps even asexuality.
As discussed previously, dominant psychological opinion tended to tie girls’ sexual development
to their fathers. It is, furthermore, the paternal figures inside the reform schools who encourage
the girls to form couples with boys in the previously discussed films. In Girls Town, however,
father figures are entirely absent. The only parental figures for the girls are mother figures; more
than that, they are celibate nuns. Whereas previous films tended to push potential matriarchal
figures aside in favor of male psychologists, in this film these nuns become the primary influence
on the girls and represent models of adulthood for them to emulate.
Rachel Devlin writes that numerous psychological studies of girls assert that those who
fail to be guided to sexual maturity by their fathers will regress “to a pre-Oedipal, infantile
relationship with their mothers.”
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In Girls Town, this seems to be regarded as a desirable goal.
At the beginning of the film, Silver refuses to address the nuns by their proper title of “Mother,”
declaring that “mother’s a dirty word to me.” At the beginning of the film, the police chief notes
that Silver’s father is in jail and that her mother’s whereabouts are entirely unknown. It is
implied that her mother abandoned the family and that she was raised by a deadbeat dad without
any maternal figure. By the end of the film, though, she has come to accept the nuns as mother
figures. When a new girl arrives at Girls Town in the final scene and repeats Silver’s line about
“mother” being a dirty word, Silver asserts to her that “you’ll learn.” The film valorizes a
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conception of motherhood that is linked with celibacy. As such, over the course of the film,
Silver’s growing respect for nuns as mother figures is linked to the eschewal of her earlier overt
sexuality. Silver, in effect, regresses to a state of childhood that is pre-sexuality.
This is also seen in the depiction of the film’s only significant male character: Jimmy
Parlow. Jimmy is a singer, but he does not perform any masculine rock’n’roll in the film;
instead, he sings tender but asexual ballads about loneliness. He has no romantic, much less
sexual, interest in any of the Girls Town inmates. In one of the film’s subplots, Silver’s friend
Serafina Garcia becomes sexually infatuated with him. Jimmy rebuffs Serafina’s advances and
tells her that rather than being a lover, he’d prefer to be a brother to her. Serafina accepts these
conditions, and sexual desire is transmuted into a nonsexual desire for familial bonds. By the end
of the film, she has rejected sexuality entirely and chosen to become a nun.
Medovoi claims that the sensitive, domesticated Jimmy is ultimately absorbed into the
Girls Town sisterhood.
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However, to simply say that he becomes “one of the girls” is to
overlook the ways that Girls Town is already somewhat masculine. It would be more accurate to
say that the infantile space of Girls Town is not merely pre-sexual, but pre-gender as well. In
effect, Jimmy is free to take on feminine qualities and Vida is free to take on masculine qualities
because infants are not expected to conform to gender-specific behaviors. Girls Town becomes a
place where boys and girls are freed from the constraints of adolescence and adulthood.
Girls Town offers its teenage viewers a fantasy of regression in which young women (and
a young man) achieve a measure of freedom from the rules of gender. This freedom, however, is
rendered nonthreatening because it is depicted as a return to childhood innocence and,
furthermore, infused with religious meaning. If adults yearned for their children to return to their
preteen years before all their pesky teenage problems began, this fantasy may have had some
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attraction to teens themselves. Yet regression comes with the loss of freedom, as the teens in
Girls Town must ultimately subjugate themselves to the authority of the church. Paradoxically, a
girl’s best option for escaping the demands of society is to become a nun.
Although Girl Town differs from So Young, So Bad and Reform School Girl in its
replacement of patriarchal psychology with matriarchal religion, it conveys a similar message. In
the two previous films, troubled girls must be brought to sexual and emotional maturity, at which
point they will be ready to take their roles as wives and mothers. In Girls Town, the troubled girls
must be regressed to an infantile state that precludes sexual misbehavior. In all the films, a
teenage girl is presented as a problem that must be solved, and the solution frequently involves a
turn to familial structures. Even though all of the troubled young women in the three films come
from the working class, the issues that they deal with appear to be aimed squarely at middle-class
anxieties about domesticity. The films address questions about what it means to be female in
postwar society, but inevitably affirm that the family is a necessary, and natural, way to control
female behavior.

“You Stepped Outta Your Class:” Girl Gangs on Screen
Unlike the girls reform school film, the girl gang film lacks the oppressive and pervasive
presence of patriarchal or matriarchal adults bent on curing the causes of female misbehavior.
Instead, groups of young women come together voluntarily to form their own social structures
that exist in opposition to the mainstream. The discourse of the film shifts from one of curing to
one of observing.
One striking difference between the two types of female delinquency film is their
respective class politics. In reform school films, the female inmates are drawn exclusively from
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the working class. This arguably reflects Benjamin Fine and Harrison Salisbury’s belief that
middle-class children are frequently shielded by their parents from having to take responsibility
for their crimes. As a result, the reform schools are populated by those who lack the protection of
money and class status. On the other hand, girl gang films frequently depict middle-class girls
who come into contact with delinquent girl gangs or even form such gangs themselves. Middle-
class female delinquency is depicted as something that is hidden from society and its official
systems of juvenile justice, but which these films nevertheless purport to uncover.
As with the girls reformatory films, the girl gang films tend to portray female
delinquency as informed either by the girl’s relationships to a father figure, or by the absence of
said father figure. In 1957, adolescent psychoanalyst Peter Blos argued that female delinquency
was due to “disappointment” with one’s father. This disappointment can be acted out in one of
two ways: one was by surmounting “in fantasy [her] oedipal impasse,” which is to say by sexual
promiscuity. The other was by herself assuming “the masculine role,” identifying with the
father’s role rather than the mother’s.
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Put another way, the female delinquent attempts to
replace the disappointing father, either with other men or by taking his role herself. Medovoi
further develops this idea, labeling the former case the “bad girl” and the latter case the
“tomboy.” The “bad girl,” as described earlier, is the one who “refused to be good by adopting
an antidomestic, sexualized femininity,” while the “tomboy” consolidated “a female masculinity
modeled upon the bad boy.”
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This division has its limits, which will be discussed later, but it is
useful for analyzing the girl gang picture Teenage Doll.
Released in 1957, Teenage Doll was directed by famed B-movie filmmaker Roger
Corman for Woolner Brothers Pictures and distributed by Allied Artists. Corman was a leading
producer and director of teenpics, although the majority were in the horror genre. The film’s plot
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centers on the members of the working class girl gang, The Black Widows, who pursue revenge
against middle-class Barbara Bonney (June Kenney) for the accidental killing of one of their
members. The Widows are exemplars of the “tomboy” type of delinquent, given their
desexualized masculinity and imitation of “bad boy” behavior. Their gang has an alliance with
the all-male gang The Tarantulas, and the girls carry themselves with the same tough-talking,
manly swagger that the boys do. In contrast to “bad girls” like Loretta and Silver, none of the
Widows are openly promiscuous; in fact, aside from the dead girl, none of them seem to have
any sexual interest in the boys at all, preferring to associate with them as kindred spirits rather
than as romantic or sexual partners. For these women, rebellion dictates that they not only take
on masculine qualities, but that they seek to do as much as possible to actually turn themselves
into men.
Early in the film, the Widows split up and return to their homes; the film follows each of
them and offers the viewer a glimpse of their family lives. Predictably, several of them have
difficult relationships with their fathers. For example, Helen (Fay Spain) has a weak-willed
father who is too lazy to work and who is supported by Helen’s mother. Much like the Stark
family in Rebel Without a Cause, the “proper” dynamic between husband and wife has been
inverted, though in this case it is the daughter who is disappointed in her father. Helen reacts to
her father in much the same way that Jim Stark does: she puts her father down and endeavors to
embody the model of masculinity she wishes he represented.
Another member, Lori (Sandra Smith), has a father who is “on the lam” but who sends
her all the money he can. Money is a poor substitute for fatherly affection, however, and Lori
ends up resenting him and, like Helen, trying to become the man who is missing from her life.
Her masculinity takes on a horrifying quality in the film through her treatment of her younger
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sister. Given that their father is on the run and their mother is absent without explanation, care of
the little sister falls to Lori; Lori, thus, is forced to take on a motherly role for the young girl.
Lori, however, treats her sister more like a pet than like a child. The girl is forced to subsist on
whatever food Lori literally throws at her, and she spends her days and nights locked up alone,
disheveled and dirty, in their equally disheveled and dirty one-room shack. Whereas Loretta
experiences motherly affection the moment a baby is placed in her arms, Lori is totally and
unfeelingly negligent in her material role. The tomboy, it would seem, is corrupt even beyond the
redemptive potential of biological essentialism. In completely abandoning her femininity, Lori
has also lost her capacity for motherhood, to horrifying effect.
As for middle-class Barbara, she also has a problematic relationship with her father.
Unlike the working class Widows whose fathers are neglectful or absent, however, she has the
opposite issue: her father is too much of a presence in her life. Her father chastises her when she
comes home a half hour after curfew and later barges into her room to dictate what classes she
will take in college. Stating that children are “made, not born,” her father believes that he can
force her into becoming a “good girl” who will go to college rather than hang around with boys.
He becomes angry when he discovers blood on her dress (the blood belonged to the girl she had
accidentally killed) but seems to lose interest when she assures him that it isn’t hers. Though not
stated explicitly, her father’s concern about curfew and his reaction to finding blood on her dress
imply that he is at least symbolically trying to suppress her sexuality. In this, he resembles Judy’s
father from Rebel Without a Cause, affirming the association between sexual repression and
middle-class fathers. The effect on Barbara is quite similar to the one on Judy: she flees the
house in order to go out with bad boys. There is an additional component to Barbara’s
delinquency, however. As John C. Coolidge writes in his case study of “Anne,” attempts by the
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father to suppress the daughter’s sexual maturity may result in fostering “ambivalency in her
sexual identification.” Teenage Doll sees Barbara exhibit masculine qualities that were not seen
in Judy.
Barbara’s sexual ambivalence plays out over the course of the film. In the tradition of the
“bad girl,” she seeks the masculine affection she doesn’t get from her father elsewhere, falling in
love with the Tarantula gang’s leader Eddie (John Brinkley). Her feminine desire puts her in
conflict with a member of the Black Widows who regards Eddie as her own; Barbara displays a
capacity for masculine violence when she fights the girl and accidentally pushes her off a
building. Gender ambivalence is also represented through costuming. Barbara starts out the film
wearing a feminine dress which contrasts with the masculine jackets-and-pants look of the Black
Widows. After she gets her victim’s blood on the outfit, though, she changes into a pair of pants,
giving her a more masculine appearance. The ambivalence is most strikingly represented in a
scene where, after Barbara goes to Eddie for help in hiding from the Widows, he leaves her alone
with his lieutenant, Wally (Jay Sayer). Wally, recognizing the trauma the night’s experiences
have left on Barbara, makes aggressive sexual advances towards her while encouraging her to
“go ahead and cry.” It seems as though Barbara, by giving into her feminine impulse to “cry,”
leaves herself open to sexual assault. Instead of submitting, though, Barbara breaks a whiskey
bottle over Wally’s head.
Interestingly, the film conflates Barbara’s destabilization of gender roles with her
challenges to her class status. When she tells Eddie that she never meant to do anything wrong,
he replies that she did “the worst thing anybody can ever do. You stepped outta your class.”
Eddie feels that in attempting to couple with a working-class bad boy, Barbara destabilized the
class division, which can only result in chaos (Judy, by contrast, had the good sense to couple
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with a middle-class bad boy). Barbara’s identity is destabilized in terms of both gender and class
identity, and the film suggests that this destabilization must be resolved. This is symbolized by a
stark choice offered to her by Eddie at the end of the film: run away with him or turn herself over
to the police. The film represents this as both a choice between masculine rebellion and feminine
submission to authority, and between a working-class existence with Eddie and an attempt to
return to the comforts of middle class. Barbara chooses the police, and her decision can be seen
as an affirmation of her middle-class privilege: given her class status, not to mention her
femininity, it is likely that the authorities will believe that her killing of the working-class
delinquent was self-defense.
The example of Barbara, along with those of Loretta and Silver, shows that the strict
separation between “bad girl” and “tomboy” is not truly reflective of how the cinema categorized
female delinquents. All three characters seem to epitomize “sexualized femininity,” but they also
take on masculine roles at specific moments in their respective films. These girls exist on the
boundary between genders, drawing on aspects of both. Ultimately, though, all the girls are
finally forced to make a choice, and all choose to be “good girls.” At the same time, Black
Widows Helen and Lori end the film as the same delinquents they began it. In the cinematic
world of the female delinquent, redemption is possible to those who choose to embrace
responsible, adult womanhood, but in order to do so they must have retained, and understood the
value of, their femininity.
An interesting parallel to Teenage Doll is offered by another girl gang picture released
the previous year. Produced and distributed by Headliner Productions in 1956, The Violent Years
is perhaps best known today because of its screenwriter, cult favorite Edward D. Wood, Jr.
Although a film such as this may seem to resist auteurist interpretation, it’s worth noting that
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Wood was, in real life, a heterosexual man who enjoyed wearing women’s clothing. As such,
Wood is someone who would have been well attuned to the constructed nature of gender norms,
as is reflected in the film’s take on female delinquency.
The girl gang in the film reaches a level of viciousness that goes far beyond the Black
Widows, which is noteworthy given that all of its members are represented as middle-class. The
girls hold up gas stations, wreck schoolhouses, and engage in bloody shootouts with the police.
They dress in masculine clothing and adopt “tough” speech patterns so that, when masked, their
victims cannot tell if they are men or women. This confusion seems to represent the apotheosis
of the concern around gender destabilization. Unlike the de-sexualized Widows, however, these
girls are also shown to have strong heterosexual appetites. They engage in group makeout
sessions with random men they pick up, which, the film implies, will eventually devolve into
wild orgies.
In one memorable scene, the girls discover a clean-cut young couple making out in a car
and proceed to rob them at gunpoint. However, they express an additional interest in the boy;
after making a number of objectifying remarks about his good looks, the girls force him into the
woods and, it is implied, rape him. In this scene, the feminine sexuality of the “bad girl” and the
masculine violence of the “tomboy” are combined to horrifying effect. In contrast to the films
previously discussed, the combination of masculinity and femininity does not exist to offer the
possibility of redemption, as it does in Barbara’s case. Instead, the girls in this film are
monstrous precisely because of the way they combine these qualities. The film takes masculine
femininity to its sensational, yet logical extreme: the inversion of sexual power between men and
women.
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As in some of the films previously discussed, the girls in The Violent Years are able to
make gender into a performance. To a greater extent than in those other films, though, this
performance itself is shown to be a threat to society. As previously stated, masculinity is used by
the girls as a disguise when committing their robberies. Furthermore, the gang’s leader Paula
(Jean Moorhead) performs femininity in order to manipulate her father (Art Millan). Her father
happens to be the chief of police, and Paula performs for him the role of the good, middle-class
daughter who is interested in learning about juvenile delinquency so that she can educate her
schoolmates and help prevent it. As such, she succeeds in manipulating him into giving her
inside information that will help her gang to avoid capture.
Gender is further performed through the girls’ self-conscious use of costuming.
Following their shoot-out with the police which leaves half their number dead, the surviving girls
are forced to go into hiding. Clad in leather jackets and pants, they conclude that their outfits
“are a dead giveaway” and change into a pair of fancy gowns. As they make their way down the
sidewalk in their finery, the camera lingers on an anonymous man who pauses to take a long look
at them as they pass by. From the context, however, it is clear that he views them not as suspects,
but as the objects of his sexual gaze. The women are able to manipulate the man by
performatively re-affirming the traditional hierarchy of sexual power.
In marked contrast with the films previously discussed, The Violent Years makes no
serious attempt to ascribe psychological motivation to its subjects. Paula does not seem to feel
any psychic trauma stemming from a difficult relationship with her father. He is not seen
attempting to suppress her sexuality as other middle-class fathers do, but then he is totally
unaware of the extent of her sexual appetite. Instead, the elderly judge who sentences her to life
in prison, and who represents the voice of authority in the film, blames her crimes on her being a
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“thrill seeker” because her parents did not teach her “the importance of self-restraint, self-
discipline, politeness, courtesy, the love for the mother and the father, the church, and their
country.”
The obvious insufficiency of this explanation to account for the extent of Paula’s
behavior seems, whether intentionally or not, to encourage the viewer to dismiss it completely.
The film’s half-hearted attempt to account for the gang’s delinquency reveals the basic fact that,
beneath the attempts at explaining female delinquency and accounting for how it can be repaired,
female delinquency films exist because violent, misbehaving women are fun to put on the screen.
Indeed, in its exaggeratingly thrilling depiction of female delinquency and its encouragement,
possibly unintentional, of an oppositional reading, The Violent Years resembles a sub-genre
discussed in the previous chapter: the teenage monster film. As such, it is worth examining one
instance of a female delinquent who is herself made into a literal monster.

“A Will of Her Own:” The Teen Girl as Monster
As discussed in the previous chapter, the teenage monster movie consisted of a brief
cycle of films released by AIP between 1957 and 1958. The first film in this cycle, I Was a
Teenage Werewolf, employed horror tropes in order to engage in a thoughtful discussion of the
issues and problems facing teenage boys at the time, and to mock parental fears about juvenile
delinquency through a monstrously exaggerated portrait of teen violence. Later films in the cycle
abandoned the first film’s emphasis on the teenage perspective, with the teen monster becoming
more of a novelty than a fleshed-out character. Notably, however, the second film in AIP’s teen
monster cycle, Blood of Dracula (1958), not only foregrounded the perspective of the teenage
monster, but made her a female as well.
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Many commentators, such as Mark Thomas McGee and R.J. Robertson, describe Bride of
Dracula as being essentially the same film as I Was a Teenage Werewolf with the sexes of the
main characters switched and the monster changed from werewolf to vampire.
95
Indeed, the plot
of the two films bear strong similarities: both center on a teenager with behavioral problems who
is hypnotized by a mad scientist who, while claiming to help them, is actually using them as part
of a dangerous experiment intended to “save” mankind from itself. However, as this chapter has
shown, male and female delinquency were viewed and treated as fundamentally different both in
the popular imagination and on screen, meaning that despite the plot similarities, Blood of
Dracula has unique implications regarding young women.
Indeed, the causes of the female delinquent’s behavior problems seem specifically
determined by the character’s sex. Nancy Perkins (Sandra Harrison) is an angry young woman
who, to no one’s surprise, has a strained relationship with her father. The strain is due to the fact
that her father has remarried just six weeks after the death of Nancy’s mother. The family is also
moving, disrupting all of Nancy’s social relationships, including the one with her boyfriend, and
discounting Nancy’s own feelings about the change. Nancy’s father and step-mother are
dropping her off at a boarding school, the Sherwood School for Girls, to get her out of the way
while they go on their honeymoon. Nancy seems more than naturally disturbed by her father’s
remarriage: in the first scene of the film, as the family drives along a cliff’s edge in the rain,
Nancy suddenly and impulsively seizes the wheel and attempts to drive the car off the cliff.
Nancy seems to feel that her family has become corrupt, and for that reason she becomes a threat
to its very survival. Nancy makes lewd comments about her father’s remarriage, at one point
quipping that they will stop at a motel on the way home, suggesting that she feels her father has
become a sexual delinquent. Given the prevalence of sexual tension between fathers and
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daughters in contemporary psychological literature and in other female delinquency films, it is
easy to read Nancy’s sexual mockery as reflecting her own frustrated sexual connection to her
father. The result of this, as in other such films, is sexual ambiguity: Nancy combines a feminine
appearance and attitude with flashes of masculine defiance and violence.
Nancy initially expresses a concern that she has been placed in a reform school, but the
headmistress assures her that the Sherwood School is not a correctional institute but a
preparatory school, and that “all our girls come from fine backgrounds,” which is to say, middle-
class backgrounds. Yet in spite of her assurances, the social environment of the Sherwood
School is indistinguishable from that of reform schools in films like Reform School Girl and
Girls Town. The other Sherwood girls immediately begin bullying Nancy, and warn her against
telling the adults, given their hatred of squealers. They hold Nancy to a strict conformist code of
behavior, telling her that if she wants to participate in the community, she’s “just gotta be one of
us” and warning her that “we can make life awfully miserable for oddballs.”
As the films previously discussed indicate, it was assumed that middle-class delinquents
could be shielded from the juvenile justice system by their parents’ money and class privilege. If
so, then Blood of Dracula indicates that the preparatory school is nothing more than the middle-
class equivalent of the reform school. Prep schools may be viewed by society as respectable and
laudable (the headmistress repeatedly emphasizes the need to protect the school’s reputation in
light of the mysterious murders that are going on), but they ultimately perform the same function
as reform schools: shaping teenage girls into properly conforming women. Indeed, the bad
behavior of the other girls at Sherwood suggests that they, like Nancy, were regarded as
problems by their parents. Had they come from working-class families they would likely have
ended up in reform school, but instead their class privilege lands them in prep school.
205

What is also emphasized is that Nancy is in a double bind when it comes to conformity.
On the one hand, the Sherwood school is expected to make Nancy behave as her parents desire,
to eliminate the independent feelings that, in her father’s words, “make no sense.” At the same
time, her own peer group demands that she attempt to fit in with their own codes of conduct,
threatening to ostracize her if she doesn’t. There exists no option for Nancy to create an identity
of her own.
The mad scientist of Blood of Dracula is Miss Branding (Louise Lewis), the school’s
chemistry teacher. Like the similarly-named Dr. Brandon from I Was a Teenage Werewolf,
Branding believes that humanity is in danger of destroying itself, and she explicitly mentions
nuclear weapons as the probable culprit. Branding feels that her own research is not taken
seriously because she is a woman, and that the men who recklessly seek to harness nuclear
power are in danger of destroying the world. Her response to this, however, is to adopt an even
more masculine posture: she seeks to unlock a source of destructive power “that would make the
split atom seem like a blessing.” She believes that this power exists, buried, inside of human
beings, and plans to prove her theory by transforming one of the girls into a monster and
unleashing her upon the student body. Although the film is sympathetic in its portrayal of
Branding’s feelings of sexual marginalization, it also depicts her masculine pursuit of destructive
power through science as dangerous and threatening. The evil in the film is shown to originate
from a woman who steps beyond the expectations of her sex.
Branding chooses Nancy for her experiment because Nancy, too, defies the expectations
of womanhood. Branding states that she needs “a special kind of girl” who possesses “a will of
her own.” This quality is what gives Nancy her monstrous potential. Through a combination of
chemistry, hypnosis, and an ancient Carpathian amulet, Branding succeeds in turning Nancy into
206

a vampire. Though it is unclear how this makes her more dangerous than an atomic bomb, she is
still deadly enough to murder three other teenagers. The independent, willful young woman
becomes a menace to society.
A notable aspect of Nancy’s monstrousness, though, consists of the creative choices that
went into her appearance. Ostensibly, all that one requires in order to convincingly portray a
vampire is a subtle set of fangs. With Nancy, however, the filmmakers seemingly went out of
their way to make her look ridiculous. Her fangs protrude so far out of her jaw that it appears
impossible for her to close her mouth. Her eyebrows transform into wild tufts of fur that give her
a perpetually surprised expression, while her hair explodes out of her head in a manner
reminiscent of the bride of Frankenstein. She is rendered as an utterly dehumanized, utterly silly-
looking monster.
Nancy’s absurd appearance as a vampire serves as strong evidence that her
monstrousness was not intended to be taken seriously. Indeed, just as the ridiculous image of a
werewolf clad in a high school varsity jacket in I Was a Teenage Werewolf symbolizes the
excesses of adult fears of out-of-control teenage boys, Nancy’s appearance seems to tacitly mock
the anxiety surrounding the willful, independent, and misbehaving young woman. Indeed, the
excesses of her delinquency mirror those of the girl gang in The Violent Years. Their delinquency
goes far beyond that of conventional female delinquency as represented in the other films
discussed in this chapter. Female delinquency is typically portrayed as having a bad attitude,
being sexually promiscuous, associating with bad boys, or, at worst, killing someone accidentally
or in self-defense. The delinquents in The Violent Years and Blood of Dracula, on the other hand,
are homicidal monsters who kill and destroy on an almost arbitrary basis. In both cases, their
excesses seem to verge on outright parody.
207

It is notable, though, that the monstrous girls in both films are drawn from the middle
class. In both cases, this choice seems to enhance the excesses of the films. Whereas this sort of
behavior is perhaps not beyond the pale for working-class girls, the notion of middle-class girls
as homicidal monsters is portrayed as totally absurd in appearance and deed. Yet, in constructing
what appears to be a humorous parody of concerns about female delinquency, the films also
touch on why female delinquency and, by extension, female rebellion, were not serious issues at
all. In The Violent Years, in particular, the failure of the film to provide an adequate explanation
for why these middle-class girls became ruthless criminals and rebels against society implies
that, as Goodman argued, girls had no good reason to rebel at all. Blood of Dracula provides its
protagonist with ample reason for being dissatisfied, but in ridiculing her monstrous
transformation, the film also tacitly ridicules the notion that a girl will fight back rather than
accept her situation.
When taken together, the films discussed in this chapter are striking both in their
consistency and in their variance. In keeping with dominant psychological opinion, almost all of
them posit female delinquency as the result of a girl’s neurotic relationship with her father. In
other ways, though, the films are quite contradictory. Some of the girls are delinquents because
they like men too much; others are delinquents because they hate men. Some girls put on
lipstick; others put on pants. Some of the films suggest that the conditions which produce female
delinquency seem to occur only in the working class; others suggest that middle-class girls deal
with many of the same problems.
Ultimately, though, all of the films question whether the female delinquent can, or will,
accept their expected role in the domestic sphere. This suggests that, though American society
was somewhat confused as to what female delinquency actually signified, and though female
208

delinquency films responded to this confusion with a variety of approaches, it was ultimately far
more certain about what it wanted its girls to become than it was about its boys. Indeed, whereas
Jim Stark ends Rebel Without a Cause in a position of hopeful ambiguity, the fates of the female
delinquents must be more definite. The young women are either reformed, imprisoned, or
destroyed; in all cases, their rebellion can be only a temporary escape before their subversion is
neutralized. Female rebellion, it seems, is a more potent brew than male rebellion, and it cannot
be allowed to survive beyond the end of the film.
The social concern over the destabilization of traditional gender roles was no doubt fed
by the ongoing fear regarding the Cold War. To a generation of adult who had just experienced
World War II, victory in the Cold War seemed to demand a united effort in which men and
women each performed the duties expected of them. Women had to ensure the strength of the
home, in which good American values could be passed on to the next generation. Men had to be
ready to fight against their Soviet counterparts in business, with technology, and – if it came to it
– on the battlefield. With juvenile delinquency as seeming evidence of the destabilization of
America’s young men, however, some doubted whether those young men were fit to fight. The
next chapter examines how the Hollywood cinema dealt with the relationship between the Cold
War and juvenile delinquency: it looked forward to the potential conflict with the Soviet Union
and, at the same time, looked backwards to the young man who had been the previous war’s
greatest hero.

1
Paul Goodman, Growing Up Absurd (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), 11.

2
Ibid., ix.

3
Ibid., xv.

4
Ibid., x.

5
Ibid., 50.
209

6
Ibid., 193.

7
Leerom Medovoi, Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity (Duke University Press: Durham, 2005),
172.

8
Ibid., 171.

9
Ibid., 177.

10
Goodman, 13.

11
Ibid., 13.

12
Clifford R. Shaw and Henry McKay. Juvenile Delinquency and Urban Areas. Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1942), 14.

13
Talcott Parsons, “Age and Sex in the Social Structure of the United States,” American Sociological Review 7.5
(Oct, 1942), 605.

14
Wini Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1992), 129.

15
Ibid., 130.

16
Rachel Devlin, “Female Juvenile Delinquency and the Problem of Sexual Authority in America, 1945-1965,” in
Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures, ed. Sherrie A. Inness (New York: New
York University Press, 1998), 85.

17
Ibid., 85.

18
Ibid., 88.

19
Medovoi, 171.

20
Sheldon Glueck and Eleanor Glueck, Delinquents in the Making: Paths to Prevention (New York: Harper &
Brothers, Publishers, 1952), viii.

21
Albert K. Cohen, Delinquent Boys: The Culture of the Gang (New York: The Free Press, 1955), 73.

22
Benjamin Fine, 1,000,000 Delinquents (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1955), 340.

23
Ibid., 99.

24
Harrison Salisbury, The Shook-Up Generation (New York: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1958), 116-7.

25
Fine, 265.

26
Salisbury, 109.

27
Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1942), 195-6.

28
Eric H. Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1950), 247.

29
Ibid., 254.
210

30
Ibid., 266.

31
Cohen, Delinquent Boys, 162.

32
Talcott Parsons, “Certain Primary Sources and Patterns of Aggression in the Social Structure of the Western
World,” Psychiatry 10.2 (May 1, 1947): 171.

33
Ibid., 171.

34
Ibid., 171.

35
Ibid., 171.

36
Ibid, 172.

37
Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1971), 89-90.

38
Ibid., 90.

39
Devlin, 87.

40
Ibid., 87.

41
James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950’s (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986), 32.

42
Cohen, Delinquent Boys, 144.

43
Ibid., 143.

44
S. Harvard Kaufman, “Aggression in the Girl Delinquent.” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 15.1 (Jan 1945):
167.

45
Ibid., 167.

46
Devlin, 84.

47
Ibid., 96.

48
John C. Coolidge, “Brother Identification in an Adolescent Girl,” The American Journal of Orthopsychiatry 24
(July 1, 1954): 616.

49
Ibid., 623.

50
Ibid., 642.

51
Ibid., 616.

52
Ibid., 616.

53
Ibid., 623.

54
Devlin, 89.

211

55
Lyn Mikel Brown, Meda Chesney-Lind, and Nan Stein, “Patriarchy Matters: Toward a Gendered Theory of Teen
Violence and Victimization” in Girls, Women, and Crime: Selected Readings, eds. Meda Chesney-Lind and Lisa
Pasko (Los Angeles: Sage, 2013), 22.

56
Breines, 129.

57
Ibid., 146.

58
Thomas Doherty, Teenagers & Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Boston: Unwin
Hyman, 1988), 106.

59
Ibid., 105-6.

60
Medovoi, 179.

61
Ibid., 179.

62
Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel, Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause (New
York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), viii.

63
Quoted in Frascella, 10.

64
Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965), 283.

65
Quoted in Frascella, 12.

66
Frascella, 12.

67
Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1983), 200.

68
Nina C. Leibman, Living Room Lectures: The Fifties Family in Film and Television (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1995), 79.

69
Ibid., 256.

70
Medovoi, 186.

71
Peter Wyden and Barbara Wyden, Growing Up Straight: What Every Thoughtful Parent Should Know About
Homosexuality (New York: Stein and Day, 1968), 48.

72
Ibid., 48.

73
Ibid., 60-61

74
Biskind, 210.

75
Devlin, 97.

76
Coolidge, 612, 623.

77
Medovoi, 185.

78
Ibid., 169.

212

79
Breines, 145.

80
Medovoi, 188.

81
Suzanna Danuta Walters, “Caged Heat: The (R)evolution of Women-In-Prison Films” in Reel Knockouts: Violent
Women in the Movies, eds. Martha McCaughey and Neal King (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), 106.

82
Mark Thomas McGee and R.J. Robertson, The J.D. Films: Juvenile Delinquency in the Movies. (McFarland &
Company, Inc.: Jefferson, 1982), 73.

83
Medovoi, 267.

84
Ibid., 273.

85
McGee and Robertson, 75.

86
Quoted in Richard Staehling, “From Rock Around the Clock to The Trip: The Truth About Teen Movies” in
Kings of the Bs: Working Within the Hollywood System: An Anthology of Film History and Criticism, eds. Todd
McCarthy and Charles Flynn (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1975), 223.

87
Both films will be discussed at length in the next chapter.

88
Lowe, Barry. Atomic Blonde: The Films of Mamie Van Doren. (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2008), 3.

89
Ibid., 5.

90
Medovoi, 272.

91
Devlin, 97.

92
Medovoi, 277.

93
Quoted in Devlin, 98.

94
Medovoi, 267.

95
McGee and Robertson, 95-6.
213

Chapter Four: From Soldier to Delinquent to Cowboy: Audie Murphy in Cold War-Era
Cinema

Introduction: Juvenile Delinquency and American National Security
On July 16, 1945, the cover of the new issue of Life magazine bore a picture of a young
man in a military officer’s uniform. The young man’s cherubic face bears a boyish, slightly
goofy smile; his hat is askew and his uniform seems a bit too large for his diminutive frame. The
only text on the cover, as if mocking the discrepancy between the man and his outfit, states
simply, “Most Decorated Soldier.” The young man was named Audie Murphy, and he had just
recently been awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor, the culmination of a military career
that saw him receive more decorations than any other soldier in World War II. He was officially
credited with the killing of 240 enemy combatants – all of them before his 20
th
birthday.
1
Years
later, Murphy would find additional fame as a Hollywood actor. The vast majority of his films
would be Westerns, with occasional portrayals of soldiers, including the role of himself in the
adaptation of his autobiography, To Hell and Back (Universal, 1955). His first leading role,
however, would be in a low-budget picture called Bad Boy (Allied Artists, 1949), in which the
most decorated solider of World War II would be called upon to portray a juvenile delinquent.
This chapter will examine the figure of Audie Murphy in terms of how he simultaneously
embodies the delinquent, the soldier, and the Westerner in his films. That his film career should
be defined by this particular combination is not surprising when one considers the period in
which he began that career. Postwar America was not only concerned about the internal threat of
juvenile delinquency, but about the external threat of the Cold War. The public was asking
questions about how American democracy was to survive the dangers of communism, and some
214

questioned whether it deserved to survive at all. Like anxieties about juvenile delinquency, Cold
War anxieties were frequently expressed in Hollywood cinema. Murphy’s films, though, brought
the two issues together in ways that were rarely seen elsewhere. The films speak to a deep
ambivalence towards youthful energy and violence as perceived by the American public;
whereas this energy and violence could express itself destructively in the form of delinquency, it
was also a necessary component of the defense of American society. In films like Bad Boy, The
Kid from Texas (Universal, 1950), and Kansas Raiders (Universal, 1950), the dividing line
between socially positive violence and negative, destructive behavior is examined and sometimes
questioned. As such, the films provide an important perspective on youth in the postwar era.
The connection to the Cold War was, in fact, a recurring theme in the literature on
juvenile delinquency. For some writers, delinquency put into question whether the younger
generation was fit to fight the good fight against Communism. Benjamin Fine wrote of the
struggle against delinquency:
No task, to my mind, can be more important to us today, when we are fighting an
ideological war, a war for men’s minds. The warped, unwholesome minds of delinquents
will not help the cause of democracy. Contrariwise, every child who is saved from
becoming delinquent, or who is rehabilitated, adds to the inherent strength of our
country.
2

For Fine, the delinquent was one who refused to be a part of the democratic consensus. In the
“war for men’s minds,” the delinquent’s refusal to accept the proper ideology was tantamount to
a refusal to serve. The delinquent was a potential asset to be used in the fight against
Communism, but one which was not being properly utilized.
Harrison Salisbury described the link between delinquency and the Cold War in even
more urgent terms. Emphasizing that the country was “going to need every young talent we
possess, whether it be one of manual dexterity or of mental agility,” Salisbury declares that
215

The most rapid possible liquidation of adolescent delinquency and institution of a
program to prevent its reoccurrence is thus becoming a matter of national security. If we
have not been interested in doing this job for moral reasons we are going to be compelled
to do it for the sheer sake of survival.
3

For Fine and Salisbury, every delinquent is a potential soldier in the war against Communism.
The delinquent’s greatest crime, it seems, is not destruction of life and property or the abrogation
of familial responsibility; it is the refusal to take part in the country’s nationalistic and
ideological warfare.
The connection between delinquency and the military had been explored onscreen even
before the official outbreak of the Cold War. On Dress Parade (1939) was the last film made
with the Dead End Kids by Warner Bros. Slip Duncan (Leo Gorcey) is a tough-talking, violent
young man from the impoverished inner city who happens to be the long-lost son of a
distinguished World War I hero. To fulfil the father’s dying wish, Colonel Michael Riker (John
Litel) enrolls Slip in the Washington Military Academy, which Riker runs. There, Riker and the
other cadets attempt to reform Slip from a juvenile delinquent into a good soldier.
On Dress Parade is a notable departure from the established Dead End Kids formula. In
all six of their previous features, the five “Kids” played the members of a delinquent gang who
stuck together in their resistance to adult reformation efforts. In On Dress Parade, Gorcey – who
typically played the toughest and least-redeemable member of the gang – is isolated from the
others, who all play well-behaved cadets who want to see Slip reform. Indeed, the film seems
closer to the formula of MGM’s Boys Town, released the previous year, in which Mickey
Rooney played the lone delinquent resisting the efforts of both adults and his peers. In On Dress
Parade, this setup is used to emphasize the delinquent’s alienation from his “respectable” peers,
who in this case have been rendered “respectable” by their acceptance of military discipline.
Slip, on the other hand, disdains military discipline and disrespects the academy’s statue of
216

Nathan Hale, which the other cadets revere as if it were a religious idol. Yet, deprived of his
usual allies, Slip comes off looking like an oddball and misfit, and he soon begins to crave the
approval of his conformist peers.
Part of Slip’s challenge is that he must learn to control his violence. Riker initially
convinces him to enroll in the academy by getting a trumped up warrant issued against Slip, who
decides that military school is a lesser evil than reform school. Notably, the “crime” that Slip is
accused of is fighting; by accepting his enrollment, he symbolically signals an understanding that
fighting is forbidden by non-military society, but is acceptable and desirable in the context of the
military. Even still, his irresponsible use of violence gets him into trouble. At one point, when
Slip is attempting to leave the school after finding out that the warrant was phony, a group of
cadets attempt to entice him to stay by playing a game of keep-away with his suitcase. Slip
violently retrieves his suitcase from ringleader Cadet Major Rollins (Billy Halop), but in doing
so accidentally pushes Rollins out a second-story window, badly injuring the boy.
Slip is immediately shunned by all of his fellow cadets. Slip, having learned the
alienating effect of undisciplined violence, endeavors to become a model student. He becomes
adept in military strategy and performs admirably in wargames. Yet he does not regain the
approval of his peers until he rushes into a burning ammunition storeroom to save a fellow cadet.
Slip displays the same toughness and impetuousness that made him a compulsive brawler in his
old neighborhood, but here he uses these qualities in the spirit of selfless sacrifice embodied by
Nathan Hale that is valorized by the other cadets. His peers nominate him as the new Cadet
Major, signifying the social approval that came with his embrace of military ideology. The
juvenile delinquent had been molded into a good soldier ready to fight in the next World War
then on the horizon.
217

The notion of the military having a redeeming effect on juvenile delinquents continued
into the years of the war itself. RKO’s 1944 film Youth Runs Wild focuses on the delinquency
that emerges as a result of wartime disruptions to civilian life. When a trio of boys are arrested
for a traffic violation, the elderly judge plans to send them to reform school; however, when
returning soldier Danny Coates (Kent Smith), the brother-in-law of one of the boys, arrives, the
judge takes one look at his uniform and decides to parole the boys into his custody. The justice
system and the military are shown here to be allies in the fight to rehabilitate wayward youth.
Coates reforms the boys by directing their energies into controlled but manly activities such as
carpentry and self-defense. Coates’ military service seems to have made him into an ideal
influence and role model for young men. The film argues that the men whose absences were
partially responsible for the upheaval experienced by American society must now turn to the task
of molding the younger generation into proper men – a task that the military has made them
eminently qualified for.
Danny Coates bears a resemblance to Richard Dadier, the hero teacher of Blackboard
Jungle. Like Coates, Dadier is a war veteran; although not stated explicitly, it can be inferred that
Dadier’s resolve and perseverance are the result of his military experience. Indeed, his service in
the war can be seen as going hand-in-hand with his service as an inner-city high school teacher:
having already fought to make the world safe for democracy, he now fights to make the school
safe for the forces of education and civilization. In trying to impart his values to the students,
Dadier is not merely trying to “reform” them, but also working to create a generation willing to
take up arms in defense of their country, just as he himself did.
In this view, the supreme crime committed by uber-delinquent Artie West, is not his
physical attack on Dadier, but his attack on the military ideology he represents. At one point in
218

the film, Dadier warns West that the latter’s behavior will land him in jail; in an inversion of the
decision made by Slip in On Dress Parade, West proudly retorts that jail will keep him out of the
draft: “Well, with a record, maybe the army won’t want Artie West.” According to Peter
Biskind, this is the moment when it becomes clear that West cannot be assimilated into society
and must be destroyed.
4
Indeed, West is ultimately removed from Dadier’s class by force: he is
the irredeemable delinquent who is scapegoated so that the other delinquents can be reformed
into productive citizens. As such, Gregory Miller’s decision to side with Dadier represents not
merely an embrace of mainstream, middle-class values, but a tacit acceptance of the fact that he
may someday be called upon to defend those values. In assimilating the wayward delinquents to
the dominant society, Dadier endures that they will not shirk their duty when the time comes.
Another version of this idea appears at the end of Universal’s The Unguarded Moment
(1956). Leonard Bennett (John Saxon) is a seemingly respectable high school student who
attempts to rape his teacher, Lois Conway (Esther Williams), as a result of conditioning by his
pathologically woman-hating father (Edward Andrews). The father eventually dies of a heart
attack and Leonard repents his crimes. The question of what to do with an unstable, violent,
misogynistic young man is solved rather simply: send him to the army. At the end of the film,
Lois looks approvingly at a photo of a smiling Leonard in uniform. Presented without further
commentary, the image suggests that the military is a place of reformation and regeneration for
the youth. Merely by virtue of enlisting, Leonard’s story is implied to have received a happy
resolution, with the former sex criminal transforming into a disciplined, upstanding young man
ready to defend his country. The army has an almost magical effect in transmuting delinquents
into soldiers, just as long as they’re willing to make the effort.
219

It should be noted that the link between delinquency and the military seemed only to be
explored in films that were ostensibly marketed to adults. Teenpics tended not to depict the
military at all, much less as a laudable or desirable path for young men. Military discipline and
service did not appeal to teenagers who did not feel that there was anything wrong with their
behavior in the first place. When the Cold War was alluded to in teenpics such as I Was a
Teenage Werewolf, it was discussed as a problem that was created by adults; most teens
themselves wanted no part of it. Nevertheless, writers like Fine and Salisbury felt that youth
needed to be a part of the Cold War, and they remained heavily invested in the question of
whether the delinquent-infested younger generation was up to the challenge.

“What It Means to Be a Man:” Youth and the Postwar Western
At this point, an explanation of the Western genre’s relevance to juvenile delinquency
and national security is necessary in order to provide context for the analysis of the Audie
Murphy Westerns that follow. It should be noted that the link between the juvenile delinquent
and the soldier was strongly connected to the country’s conception of itself during the Cold War,
and, at the same time, America’s Cold War anxieties were also being expressed through the
figure of the Westerner. As previous scholars have shown, Westerns of the period frequently
provided settings for the working out of national crises as they pertained to issues of violence
and masculinity, which accounts for why Murphy was so strongly associated with the genre.
5

With America seeking to define itself in opposition to its Cold War enemies, the Western worked
to re-present and re-define the myth of America’s creation. Richard Slotkin writes that the appeal
of the Western is based partly on belief “that frontier environments have played a dominant role
in shaping American institutions and national character.”
6
This myth was frequently concerned
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with the question of when and how violence became justifiable. Slotkin writes that “the Western
portrays violent force as the essential element in the social contract… the Western narrative
makes it clear that moral suasion without violent force to back it is incapable of achieving its
civilizing ends.” At the same time, however, this use of violence cannot be indiscriminate: “To
be justifiable, the violence must be redemptive: it must produce a transformation in human
affairs that is clearly ‘progressive’ in some sense.”
7
Put another way, socially acceptable
violence must benefit the larger community, because “The moral tension at the heart of the
Western’s violence comes from the opposition between purely individualistic or selfish motives,
and motives which are (in effect) the expression through an individual of social or community
values and needs.”
8
By transposing the contrast between the delinquent and soldier into the
mythic West, the relationship between the two is recast in generic terms. The delinquent
becomes the self-interested individual who employs violence immorally, while the soldier
becomes the cowboy hero who wields violence in defense of the community. Furthermore, given
that the Western had a precedent of protagonists like Wade Hatton in Dodge City (Warner Bros.,
1939) and Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine (20
th
Century Fox, 1946) who discover their
sense of social responsibility over the course of the film, this conception provides a path to
redemption for the self-interested delinquent, who may learn to put their violence to more
productive use.
This path is complicated, however, by the transformations that the Western underwent in
the postwar era. John H. Lenihan argues that, in many 1950s Westerns, “the problem of personal
reconciliation with society related directly to, or accompanied failings within, the society itself.
If the hero needed redeeming, so also did the community toward which he must aspire.”
9
As will
be demonstrated shortly, many of Murphy’s Westerns traffic in ambiguity regarding whether the
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youthful protagonist or the society he is in conflict with is more flawed. This ambiguity
undermines the strict separation between the self-interested villain and the society-serving hero,
allowing the films to question the morality of violence. In the Westerns of the 1950s, the
outsider/outlaw figure is able to represent not merely a threat to American society, but an
implicit criticism of that society.
The parallel between the violent Westerner and the juvenile delinquent was evident
enough at the time that it was acknowledged by multiple delinquency experts. Criminologists
Sheldon and Eleanor Gluck, regarded as the preeminent delinquency experts of their time,
suggested that the contemporary upsurge in delinquency was partly to blame on the fact that
acceptable spaces for youthful aggression no longer existed in the modern world. Noting that
“[t]he days of ‘winning the West,’ of the whaling ship, and of other fields of action for energetic,
adventure-hungry youth are no more,” they argue that those violent young men who in previous
generations would have “gone west” now have no socially acceptable outlets for their behavior,
and turn instead to delinquency.
10
The implication is that behavior seen as destructive when
perpetrated within society’s boundaries becomes acceptable and even desirable when moved to
society’s frontiers.
In his study of a youthful psychopath, Rebel Without a Cause, psychologist Robert
Lindner states bluntly that “[b]ehaviorally regarded, the psychopath’s performance is of the
frontier type.” Lindner notes that
it is both a psychological and sociological fact amply demonstrated in literature and
history that frontiers and outposts are scenes of behavior that is typically unsocial and
psychopathic. Our own West has won world renown as the theatre of crime and vice,
outlawry and drunkenness, and every other type of conduct opposed to the standards of
the rest of the country.
11

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The Wild West represented a space where violent and unrestrained behavior came to be
considered the norm; in other words, it was a place where a juvenile delinquent could flourish.
Like the Gluecks, Lindner argues that the closing of the frontier, to which antisocial types had
once been “flung… by centrifugal action,” meant that antisocial behavior “now works itself out
in a harmful manner in the culture itself.”
12
Based on Glueck and Lindner’s claims, it is clear that
the antisocial Westerner of Hollywood cinema is someone who once was, or still is, a juvenile
delinquent. Nevertheless, when Hollywood Westerns did deal directly with issues of juvenile
delinquency, they tended to attribute it not to psychosis but to upbringing.
The Hollywood Western was strongly invested in issues regarding youth at the time the
American public was concerned with juvenile delinquency and teen culture generally. As Lee
Clark Mitchell argues, one of the Western genre’s primary concerns is “the problem of what it
means to be a man.”
13
As such, the genre was particularly well suited to representing the
struggles of growing up (for young boys, at least). Films like Shane (Paramount, 1953) and
Hondo (Warner Bros., 1953) feature young boys receiving an education in the harshness of the
world through surrogate father-figures. A perverse variation on this theme is seen in 20
th
Century
Fox’s The Gunfighter (1950), in which young punk Hunt Bromley (Skip Homeier) embarks on
an oedipal quest to kill and supplant legendary gunfighter Jimmy Ringo (Gregory Peck). Too
late, Ringo teaches Bromley the true cost of his quest: by killing Ringo, Bromley takes on the
burden of being a target for every aspiring gunfighter until the time of his own inevitable demise.
Mitchell claims that the interest in education “suggests a larger cultural anxiety about
parenting emergent in the early 1950s – about instilling character and civic ideals, about defining
proper gender roles, about the larger project of raising children into capable men and women.”
14

In other words, the theme of educations suggests an interest in exploring how children can be
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brought up to conform with the values of mainstream society and not turn into antisocial
delinquents. Unfortunately, many young men in Hollywood Westerns did turn into delinquents.
Lenihan writes, “Many postwar Westerns involved the problems of broken families and
disturbed youth in troubled, violent times.”
15
Films like Duel in the Sun (Selznick, 1946), Broken
Lance (20
th
Century Fox, 1954), Run for Cover (Paramount, 1955), The Man from Laramie
(Columbia, 1955), and The True Story of Jesse James (20
th
Century Fox, 1957) depict sons who
go bad (even if a few of them are too old to be considered juveniles). In most cases, these men
were the products of flawed parenting, often by fathers who spoil the son, are overly rigid with
him, or are absent entirely.
16
Fathers who fail to instill “proper” values in their children end up
with sons who cannot function within civilized society.
At the same time, some Westerns of the period represent rebellious sons sympathetically,
or even positively. In Red River (United Artists, 1948), the adoptive son’s overthrow of his father
as head of a cattle drive represents a necessary victory over the father’s outdated values. In The
Left-Handed Gun (Warner Bros., 1958), Billy the Kid’s series of brutal murders is motivated by
the previous murder of Billy’s employer/father-figure by corrupt lawmen. Although Billy is
killed, as he must be, his crimes are represented as the product of perverted adult authority. The
misbehavior of young men in postwar Westerns often carried an implicit criticism of the adult
world that the young men were rejecting.
The Westerns that deal with rebellious young men, if not outright delinquents, can
generally be divided into two distinct groups. One type casts the youth in a supporting role to an
older, worldlier man, often a father-figure or an older brother. As Edward Buscombe states, the
Western “had always been a genre dominated by maturity and experience.”
17
In addition to the
practical concern of maintaining generic conventions, not to mention allowing the films to draw
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on the genre’s ageing stable of leading men, this arrangement allowed the older man to play the
educator role to the wayward youngster. His successes or failures in controlling the younger man
served as commentaries both on what is necessary to integrate rebellious youngsters into
mainstream society and on whether the older generation is even fit to accomplish the task. In
some cases, these films end with reconciliation between the men, as in Red River; in other cases,
as in Saddle the Wind (MGM, 1958), the youngster proves irredeemable and must be destroyed.
The second type of film foregrounds the wayward youth himself as a protagonist. Though
the main character may be a criminal, his plight is generally depicted with some sympathy, as he
has been wronged in some way by adult society. As previously stated, the Billy the Kid of The
Left Handed Gun is given motivations that, if they do not necessarily justify his murder spree, at
least make his actions understandable. Although the films often end with the outlaw’s death, they
do so after demonstrating the failings of the society that destroys them.
A useful pair of examples for analysis of the juvenile delinquency western is provided by
Run for Cover (Paramount, 1955) and The True Story of Jesse James (Twentieth Century Fox,
1957). Both films were directed by Nicholas Ray, who had also directed two of the most notable
postwar films dealing with juvenile delinquency: Knock on Any Door and Rebel Without a
Cause. In the Westerns, Ray continues his sympathetic examinations of the problems of
wayward youth. Indeed, Run for Cover strongly resembles Knock on Any Door, including casting
the same actor, John Derek, as the young delinquent. The film stars James Cagney as Matt Dow,
a wandering gunslinger who befriends young Davey Bishop (Derek). Dow and Bishop are
mistaken for train robbers and a trigger-happy posse opens fire on them, injuring Bishop’s leg
and leaving him permanently handicapped. Worried that Bishop will give up on himself, Dow
does everything he can to restore the younger man’s self-respect, which leads him to take the job
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of town sheriff and appoint Bishop as his deputy. Like Nick Romano in the earlier films,
however, Bishop has come to resent the society that wronged him so terribly. He misuses the
authority that Dow invested in him to help a gang of criminals to rob the town’s bank.
The film focuses on Dow’s attempts, and ultimate failure, to reintegrate Bishop into the
society that had driven him away. Dow believes that investing in Bishop the authority of the law,
making him into a defender of civilization, is a way to bring him back into that civilization. But
soldierhood cannot be forced on him simply by giving him a badge; Bishop has already
witnessed the abuse of the very power now invested in him in the shooting incident that
handicapped him. Furthermore, Bishop’s authority is undermined when he fails to prevent the
townspeople from lynching a prisoner that was under his protection. Dow, who was off chasing
another criminal, fails as a guardian not only to Bishop, but to the town itself, since he is unable
to police its worst instincts. For Bishop, having twice witnessed the town’s failure to live up to
its own principles of law and order, there would seem to be no reason to adhere to these
principles himself. It was the deficiencies of adult society that drive him to become a delinquent.
Bishop is ultimately destroyed, but the film offers him a glimmer of redemption in the
process. Dow, having discovered Bishop’s treachery when the latter tried to kill him, now has
Bishop held at gunpoint. When Bishop appears to draw on him, Dow shoots him dead, only to
discover that Bishop was actually killing evil Ernest Borgnine, who was about to shoot Dow in
the back. Having already failed as a parent in his naïve attempts to turn Bishop into a solider,
Dow now fails yet again by judging Bishop too harshly. Prior to shooting him, Dow accuses
Bishop of having no good in him at all, which belies all the events that caused Bishop to become
what he became. The film does partly ascribe Bishop’s turn to crime to defects in his character,
since credence is given to Dow’s insistence that not everyone who gets a bad break in life goes
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bad themselves. But the fact that Bishop’s final act is to destroy one of society’s enemies implies
that he might have become a good soldier after all had he not been driven away from society.
Ray’s other delinquency Western, The True Story of Jesse James, largely follows the plot
of Twentieth Century Fox’s 1939 film, Jesse James. Ray’s film, however, diverges from the
earlier picture in a number of ways that relate to the post-World War II era. For example, the
1939 film depicts Jesse and his brother Frank turning to outlawry because of their family’s
exploitation by ruthless railroad capitalists. In the 1957 film, the railroad is hardly featured at all.
Instead, Jesse and Frank rebel due to their grievances with post-Civil War society. Despite
attempting to live peacefully, the James family is harassed by Northern sympathizers due to the
brothers’ having fought for the South in the Civil War – this coming after Jesse was shot by
Union soldiers while trying to surrender. Like Davey Bishop, the James brothers are the victims
of the misuse of adult power. Although Jesse had once been a good soldier for the Confederacy,
society now refuses to treat him fairly. As a result, he and his brother turn against that society.
Jesse’s turn to crime was also motivated by the greed and materialism of the adult world.
When Jesse wants to marry his sweetheart Zee, her adult brother-in-law and legal guardian
refuses to allow it until Jesse has proved that he can make money. After several successful
robberies, Jesse exchanges a bag of coins for Zee; the brother-in-law has no qualms about
accepting stolen money and seems undisturbed by the mercenary nature of the transaction.
Although the film also emphasizes Jesse’s violence and brutality, it attempts to show his
actions as a response to the wrongs done to him by the adult world. Yet Jesse still aspires to take
his place within that adult world. When Jesse is not going on raids, he and Zee masquerade as
respectable middle-class citizens, buying a fancy home and concealing the true nature of Jesse’s
work from friends and neighbors. Jesse assures Zee that once he has made enough money he will
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retire and settle down with her to raise a family. Lenihan writes, “As with Ray’s Rebel without a
Cause, the alienated youth rebels not against middle-class values but against the failure of adults
to live honestly by those values.”
18
Unlike Jim Stark, though, Jesse pays for his transgressions
against society with his life.
Ray’s films are evidence of the Western genre’s amenability to the problem of juvenile
delinquency. Westerns such as these are able to deal with the social concerns and anxieties
surrounding delinquency, but in a way that is removed from the concrete realities of the postwar
era. These films were able to play into the public’s fears and uncertainties while avoiding the
kind of sensational controversy attracted by films like Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a
Cause. Yet in their inherent connection to America’s mythology of itself, they also manage to
create thematic meaning that is unique among films dealing with delinquency. And, indeed, this
uniqueness is expressed in the films of Audie Murphy.

I Was a Teenage War Hero: Audie Murphy on Screen
Though characters played by the likes of Marlon Brando and Vic Morrow are generally
remembered as the symbols of dangerous youth in the postwar era, it was Audie Murphy, with
his 240 credited kills in World War II, who has arguably the best claim to being the most
dangerous teenager who ever lived. Born June 20, 1925 in Kingston, Texas, Murphy enrolled in
the U.S. Army at age seventeen with the help of a forged birth certificate. He won a total of 33
awards and decorations from the United States, making him the most decorated soldier of World
War II.
19

Murphy’s public persona was, and would continue to be, defined in part by the contrast
between his war record and his youthful appearance. His appearance on the July 16, 1945 cover
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of Life magazine, the image that is credited with bringing him to national attention, was
seemingly designed to bring these contrasting aspects into harmony. According to Murphy
biographer Don Graham, Murphy’s smiling image on that cover was meant to symbolize “the
American GI who had endured combat and returned home unscathed by it all.” Murphy was the
“wholesome kid” who could kill and yet remain “psychologically innocent.”
20
Put another way,
this image of Murphy makes him into the antithesis of the juvenile delinquent: a young man
adept in the ways of violence but who uses it only for the good of society, and who at the same
time remains within the wholesome ideal of childhood innocence that delinquency and teen
culture generally were challenging.
How, then, does one get from this image of Murphy in 1945 to the young man who
portrays a juvenile delinquent in his first starring move role in 1949? In part, the image of
Murphy as untainted innocent was difficult to maintain because it was so far from reality.
Privately, Murphy exhibited throughout the remainder of his life signs that he suffered from
post-traumatic stress disorder. Graham’s biography depicts a man who always slept with a gun
under his pillow, suffered intense recurring nightmares, and who was prone to uncontrolled
outbursts of violence.
21
Although the full extent of Murphy’s trauma was concealing from the
public during his film career, the war’s mental cost was alluded to in his 1949 autobiography, To
Hell and Back. The book describes Murphy’s feelings on learning of the German surrender: “I
return to my room. But I cannot sleep. My mind still whirls. When I was a child, I was told that
men were branded by war. Had the brand been put on me? Have the years of blood and ruin
stripped me of all decency? Of all belief?” Although the book ends with Murphy resolving that
“I may be branded by war, but I will not be defeated by it,” his words nevertheless contradict the
notion that one can go to war and expect to be unchanged by it.
22
Murphy’s first several starring
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film roles would depict him as characters whose capacities for violence were tied to past
traumas.
Correspondingly, Murphy’s nature made him better suited to playing traumatized, rather
than innocent, characters. Murphy brought a “sense of quiet danger and menace to the screen,”
which had been born out of his real-life experiences with violence.
23
In his study of Western film
actors, Robert Nott argue that Murphy should be regarded as the only Western Method actor,
because “he used his life experiences to color his film performances. Nobody needed to show
him how to use a gun.”
24
In fact, particularly in his early roles, Murphy’s “Method” was
synonymous with his “total lack of dramatic ability.”
25
Murphy could not do anything but act
like himself on screen because he lacked the training and experience to convincingly portray
anyone else. As such, the line between Audie Murphy the solider and the characters he played
was always tenuous, both for Murphy and for audiences. Audiences “knew what he’d done and
what he was capable of.”
26
Murphy brought the baggage of his war record to every role he
played, and the roles written for him had to be aware of this. It was up to Hollywood to find a
type of role that he could play on screen that would benefit from his natural performance style as
well as employing his war record in ways that would gratify audiences. Initially, Hollywood
found that role, unlikely as it may seem, in the juvenile delinquent.
Produced independently by Paul Short and distributed by Allied Artists in 1949, Bad Boy
appeared near the beginning of the post-World War II resurgence of juvenile delinquency in the
cinema, though years before mid-50s explosion. As we shall see, Bad Boy was a film that
attempted to distinguish itself from the films dealing with delinquency that came before it. This
is apparent from the first scene of the film, in which Murphy’s character, Danny Lester, is
introduced wearing a hotel bellhop uniform and meticulously combing his hair in a locker-room.
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The voice of the narrator announces that “Danny’s no dead end kid. As you can see, Danny is as
clean-cut and likeable as any boy from your own neighborhood or mine.” The narrator’s words
are a clear reference to the Dead End Kids, the group of young actors who played urban juvenile
delinquents in a number of Hollywood films in the 1930s and 1940s. The Dead End Kids were
representative of the paradigm, common in 1930s Hollywood, that delinquency was the result of
environmental causes, specifically inner-city poverty. Bad Boy’s narrator immediately makes it
clear that this is not of those films: addressing the middle-class spectator, he announces that
Danny could have come from their own neighborhood. Indeed, Danny is later revealed to have
come from a comfortable, middle-class suburban home.
Danny also differs from the Dead End Kids in the kind of threat that he poses. Although
the Dead End Kids might commit petty crimes and occasionally rough up another kid, the main
concern of their films was the boys’ idealization of violent gangsters, played by the likes of
Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney, and the possibility that the kids might grow up to be just
like them. Danny, on the other hand, is already a violent threat himself. While combing his hair,
Danny is interrupted by another, older bellhop, who has found out that Danny wrote his own
references and fires him on the spot. When Danny protests, the older man becomes curt, ordering
him to leave “now, son.” Abruptly and without warning, Danny launches into a vicious beating
of the man, knocking him to the ground, picking him up to hit him again, stuffing him into a
locker, and gratuitously punching him one last time for good measure. He pulls a revolver from
another locker and exits the locker room on his way to rob a group of wealthy businessmen in a
room upstairs, pausing only once to finish fixing his hair.
Danny’s capacity for violence combined with his background sets him apart from most
other cinematic delinquents. Although Universal International’s City Across the River was
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released the same year and featured violent delinquents, the latter film’s youths came from
impoverished inner-city backgrounds similar to the earlier Dead End Kids films and the later
Blackboard Jungle. Danny is something unusual in the pre-and-post-war Hollywood delinquency
film: a middle-class youth who becomes a violent criminal. As such, Danny symbolizes the fear
that was growing among the middle class in the postwar era that delinquency was “creeping from
the wrong side of the tracks to the right side.”
27

It is worth examining this formulation in light of Audie Murphy’s portrayal. On the one
hand, Murphy plays the attack on the older bellhop very well – it is one of the few authentic-
looking moment in his performance. Robert Nott’s notion of Murphy as a Method actor seems to
have credence here, as Murphy clearly draws on his wartime experiences to convincingly render
his character’s violent rage.
28
Indeed, this seems to partly explain the casting choice, as a
juvenile delinquent would seem to represent one of the few opportunities for a young man to
play a violent maniac – the role that Murphy was best suited to. On the other hand, the
character’s outburst runs counter to the kind of disciplined violence the public would have
associated with the military. The film’s depiction of Danny’s violence is shocking because it
undermines the idealized view of a soldier’s violence as represented in the Life magazine cover.
Audie Murphy’s ability to convincingly play a juvenile delinquent, in fact, implies that there is
little difference between a delinquent and a soldier. At the same time, the film’s implied link
between the solider and the delinquent can also be interpreted reassuringly. Danny Lester has the
face of not just any solider, but of the war’s most decorated soldier. This is accentuated by
Danny’s preoccupation with his hair and, by extension, his appearance. Just as Danny the
delinquent’s appearance as a respectable bellboy allows him access to the hotel, Danny’s
appearance as Audie Murphy allows him access to the viewer’s sympathies. Indeed, Murphy’s
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casting is arguably what makes the violence of the middle-class delinquent palatable. As Bob
Larkins and Boyd Magers claim in their study of Murphy’s film career, audiences would have
been “anxious to identify with the young hero whose innocent appearance belied his lethal
achievements on the battlefield.”
29
No matter what crimes Danny commits, he still has the face
of the young man who employed violence in the most socially redeeming way possible: in
defense of civilization. Murphy’s casting gives viewers confidence that things will work out in
the end and that Danny and his violence will be redeemed by the end of the film, as indeed they
are.
Danny’s path to redemption begins when he is captured during the hotel robbery and sent
to the Variety Club Ranch for rehabilitation.
30
The Ranch attempts to provide troubled boys with
an opportunity to form their own community and learn responsibility through self-governance.
Although Bad Boy is not a Western, the ranch setting does provide the film with a thematic
connection to the genre: the ranch represents a community on the outskirts of civilized society
where young men can build up their own private society, and themselves, by working the land.
Building off the Lindner and the Glueck’s hypotheses that the frontier was the proper
environment for juvenile delinquents, the Variety Club seems to believe that frontier living is the
way to transform wayward boys into responsible men.
One key different from the Wild West, however, is that at the Variety Club Ranch the
young men live under the supervision of benevolent patriarch Marshall Brown (Lloyd Nolan).
Brown is revealed to have been the narrator who introduced the audience to Danny Lester in the
opening scene, which lends him a sense of omnipresence that enhances his paternal authority.
This may be Danny’s story, but Brown is the one who decides how it will go.
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By this point, it is clear that Bad Boy’s basic plot is modeled on MGM’s 1938 film Boys
Town. The earlier film starred Spencer Tracy as Father Flanagan, a real-life figure who founded
the community of Boys Town to reform juvenile delinquents by providing them opportunities for
self-governance. The “bad boy” of the earlier film is Whitey Marsh (Mickey Rooney), a
seemingly unreformable delinquent who idolizes his criminal older brother and threatens to
follow him into a life of crime. Like Murphy, Mickey Rooney was a baby-faced actor whose
history seemed to set him at odds with the role of a juvenile delinquent: Rooney was known for
playing good middle-class boy Andy Hardy in a lengthy series of films for MGM. Unlike Danny
Lester, however, Whitey comes from an impoverished urban background; the film implies that
the only difference between Andy Hardy and Whitey Marsh is the class that they were born into.
Once Whitey is placed in the stable, supportive environment of Boys Town, he gradually
transforms into a pillar of the community, proving Flanagan’s mantra that “there’s no such thing
as a bad boy.”
For Danny Lester, however, the environment of the Variety Club Ranch can only be a
part of the solution. This is because Danny’s problem is not one of environment – as he had a
middle-class upbringing – but of psychology. There is some trauma in Danny’s past that keeps
him from assimilating into proper society. Marshall Brown must play detective in order to find
out the nature of this trauma. What he discovers is that, prior to becoming a criminal, Danny had
been working at a drug store while caring for his ill mother. Danny’s step-father is depicted as
cold, aloof, and emotionally abusive toward both his wife and Danny. The step-father accuses his
wife of fabricating her illness in her mind and refuses to allow Danny to buy her medicine.
Though Danny’s family is portraying as having a relatively comfortable middle-class existence,
they are clearly fractured. The family symbolizes the middle-class fear of its own familial
234

stability: the fear, as Harrison Salisbury expresses it, that “[b]ehind an apparent façade of
normality many a suburban home conceals just as broken a home as the [working class] family
from which the father has long since vanished.”
31

Danny’s step-father represents a dark parody of the proper role of the natural father in his
lack of support or regard for his family. As a result, Danny must step into the role of caregiver to
his mother, thereby occupying a tenuous space between adult and child. His attempts at being a
caregiver are, however, an ultimate failure. Forbidden from buying medicine, Danny instead
steals it from the drug store at which he works. He’s unsure about the dosage he should give his
mother; as a result, when she dies soon after, it’s easy for him to blame the medicine for killing
her. Compounding the guilt of believing himself responsible for the death of his own mother is
the fact that he is, symbolically, a failure as a caregiver and as a man. This failure, the film
implies, is what prevents Danny from progressing naturally into manhood.
Danny’s failure is only half of the equation, however; the other half is Danny’s step-
father. When he see what has happened, the step-father, with his customary sensitivity,
immediately brands Danny “a murderer… a boy I took into my home and called my son.” The
step-father’s use of the word “son” here is a rejection of Danny at the same time that it is a
reminder of his fatherly authority over him. The hypocrisy is clear to both Danny and the
audience: the step-father asserts his paternal authority, yet in all ways he has abrogated his
responsibilities as a father and as a husband. Danny responds by flying to a rage, beating his
step-father with his characteristic savagery. In multiple instances in the film, starting with the
incident involving the older bellhop, the viewer has seen Danny fly into a rage at an older man
who referred to him as “son.” These attacks represent extensions of the original attack on the
step-father. This symbolizes an exaggerated rejection of fatherly authority, as Danny feels he
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must assert physical domination over anyone who he sees as asserting patriarchal mastery.
Because of the step-father’s perversion of paternal authority, Danny now violently rejects all
forms of paternal authority. This, the film suggest, prevents him from bonding with a positive
male role model, which further impedes his progression towards proper manhood.
Marshall Brown’s detective work, however, reveals that Danny’s mother actually
succumbed to her illness, rather than to the medicine that Danny gave her. This provides Brown
with the ammunition he needs to begin Danny’s reformation. Danny, meanwhile, has been
sneaking out of the Ranch at night to commit crimes. Eventually, he is caught in the act and ends
up in a shoot-out with the police. Brown arrives to talk him down, and explains that Danny
wasn’t really responsible for killing his mother. Instantly, Danny’s anger evaporates and he
passes out, falling into Brown’s arms. Immediately afterwards, Danny’s attitude is changes, and
he expresses willingness to work with the people who are trying to help him. In its simplified
way, the film argues for the importance of psychology in dealing with delinquency. Only when
the psychological block has been lifted can the Ranch begin to do its work of molding Danny
into a proper man.
At this point, it bears mentioning that the film’s depiction of Danny’s psychological
progression bears a striking similarity to that of the case study discussed in Lindner’s Rebel
Without a Cause. In fact, Bad Boy has a much stronger similarity to Lindner’s book than does the
1955 Warner Bros. film that bears its title. As suggested by its subtitle, Hypnoanalysis of a
Criminal Psychopath, Lindner’s book concerns his work with a violent young criminal whom
Lindner refers to as “Harold.” Harold had a highly strained relationship with his father, and
Lindner concludes that much of Harold’s violence was motivated by his subconscious desire to
kill his father.
32
Lindner also discovers that a key aspect of Harold’s neurosis came from the
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trauma he felt after accidentally killing a man.
33
Lindner’s own investigation of the matter,
however, found that the man Harold though he’d killed had, in fact, survived and fully
recovered.
34
This, combined with Harold’s continued therapy with Lindner, resulted in a man
who “sees better, feels better, behaves better.” Harold improves, Lindner says, because “[h]e
knows that he was a psychopath: he knows why he was a psychopath: he knows that he needs to
be a psychopath no more.”
35

The similarities between Lindner’s book and Bad Boy seem too strong to be coincidental.
Like Harold, Danny Lester hates his (step-)father and displaces that anger onto his victims. Like
Harold, Danny also falsely believes himself responsible for a killing, and he improves after
discovering he had not killed after all. In its simplified way, the film also suggests that
understanding of his psychopathy is key to Danny’s rehabilitation, as he improves as soon as he
finds out the truth about his mother. From these similarities, it is easy to surmise that the film
used Lindner as a model for the introduction of psychology into the juvenile delinquency film.
Through its references to the Dead End Kids and Boys Town, the film represents a deliberate
break with the previous, environment-focused Hollywood films that had dealt with delinquency.
Harold had come from a less privileged background that Danny did, but making Danny middle-
class was a logical extension of the focus on psychology over environment: juvenile delinquents
could come from anywhere, even the middle class.
It is interesting, in this light, that the film would depict Danny’s mistaken murder as the
accidental poisoning of his mother, rather than the killing of another man in a fight. On the one
hand, this choice ties Danny’s trauma to the literal destruction of his family. It allows Danny to
think that he has failed as a caregiver, impeding his progress into manhood. At the same time, the
filmmakers’ decision suggests that having Audie Murphy’s character appear to kill someone in a
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rage, even if this proves not to be the case, would have been too much for audiences. Although
Danny’s violent attacks on men throughout the film are disturbing in their intensity, one never
gets the feelings that the victims’ lives are in danger. Danny may be out of control, but at the
same time he retains enough control to keep from killing anyone. In this, Danny does not stray
overly far from the disciplined, controlled violence associated with Audie Murphy the war hero.
Murphy’s character may misuse violence in the film, but, like Murphy himself, he does not kill
unless it is in the best interests of his country.
Indeed, the film cannot end until it not has not only redeemed Danny, but redeemed his
violence as well. This is accomplished by the use of a surrogate mother-figure: Marshall
Brown’s wife, Maud. Danny had previously bonded with Mrs. Brown during his time at the
ranch, taking the job of housework assistant in order to be close to her. The same Danny who
snuck out at night to commit robberies and attacked other boys for questioning his masculinity
was also cheerfully helping Mrs. Brown with kitchen duties, such as clipping magazine articles
titled “Helpful Secrets for Housewives.” The film suggests that Danny’s masculinity is deficient
in multiple ways: not only is he unable to control his masculine violence, but he also risks
feminizing himself through housework. The film conflates femininity with childishness, as
Danny does housework because he desires Mrs. Brown as a surrogate mother-figure to replace
the one he believed he had killed. Because Danny cannot become a proper man, he is left
oscillating chaotically between masculinity and femininity.
The solution to this comes when Mrs. Brown comes to visit Danny, who is recuperating
from injuries sustained in his shoot-out with the police, in the hospital. They are unexpectedly
joined by a formal criminal accomplice of Danny’s, who has come to break him out. When the
accomplice threatens Mrs. Brown, Danny attacks him and beats him savagely. What is notable
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about this attack is that is does not appear much different from Danny’s earlier attacks on the
bellhop or on his other victims: Danny is still his same, brutal self. Yet the context has changed,
as Danny is now defending his surrogate mother. For this attack, Danny wins the praise of Mr.
and Mrs. Brown, and of all the others who had attempted to curb his brutal tendencies. The
attack is even cited in the decision to give Danny a second chance at the Ranch, rather than
sending him to prison.
What the film ultimately suggests is that context is the key difference between
delinquency and heroism. The nature of Danny’s violence does not change, but the targets and
reasons do. In directing his violence against an enemy of society, and using it in defense of
motherhood, Danny’s violence changes from destructive to socially redeeming. Danny’s
rehabilitation does not consist of stripping him of his violence, but simply of teaching him to use
his violence in the “right” way. The film implies that delinquents are harmful not because they
are violent, but because they aim their violence at the wrong targets.
Once again, the film’s message is modified by Audie Murphy’s casting. In contrast to
Murphy’s image as a smiling innocent on the cover of Life magazine, the film suggests that the
soldier is not so different from a delinquent. For all the seeming distance between them, both rely
on brutal violence to accomplish their goals. At the same time, however, the film is also
suggesting that the delinquent is not so different from the soldier. This is seen in the film’s final
scene, where Danny’s redemption is completed through his enrollment in the ROTC program at
Texas A&M. The last shot of the film depicts Danny in full military uniform, marching in unison
with his fellow boys. In the end, the personas of Danny Lester and Audie Murphy have merged
seamlessly. Danny, the film implies, is now ready to go out and use his violence to defend his
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country from enemies, just as Audie Murphy did. Instead of jail time, Danny’s violence will now
earn him awards and decorations.
The film’s ending operates on multiple levels. For one thing, it restores the audience’s
faith in the figure of Audie Murphy. Audiences had been able to catch a glimpse of the “real”
Audie Murphy in his portrayal of Danny Lester: a disturbed, traumatized man with a monstrous
capacity for violence. Indeed, the “real” Murphy made for good cinema, as his best moments in
the film come when his character is exhibiting these qualities. Yet, ultimately, his character ends
up back on the path towards military heroism. The film is able to have it both ways: Murphy
shows off his disturbing yet engrossing capacity for violence onscreen, but ends up reassuring
audiences that his violence is being put to socially acceptable ends. Nevertheless, the film does
work to undermine the image of Murphy as smiling innocent. In depicting the disturbing origins
of Danny Lester the soldier, the film speaks, however tentatively, to the ugly and brutal nature of
violence even when wielded “responsibly” in the military. Finally, the film modifies the
concerns of writers like Fine and Salisbury that delinquency posed a threat to America’s ability
to win the Cold War. Indeed, the film seems to suggest that the violence of the delinquent is
precisely what the country needs. All that is required is to find ways to redirect the delinquent’s
violent towards the proper’s targets. After all, today’s delinquent could end up becoming the next
Audie Murphy.
Although Bad Boy was not an enormous commercial hit, it did well enough to get
Universal International interested in Murphy as an actor. Murphy was soon cast in the first of 26
films he would make for the studio between 1949 and 1966 – 23 of them Westerns. Don Graham
described Murphy’s career at Universal thus:
Where Audie figured in studio plans was in medium-level Technicolor westerns that
would outclass television’s small screen black-and-white shoot-em-ups, supply small-
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town audiences with plenty of action and traditional plot lines, and satisfy the still steady
appetite for B westerns.
36

This use of Murphy would soon prove to be a successful strategy. “His modest little movies were
proven dollar-earners, and he became a favorite son at Universal, one of the studio’s ‘Big Four’
box-office draws (along with Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis and Jeff Chandler).”
37

Like the decision to cast Murphy as a juvenile delinquent, the plan to the turn the war
hero into a Western hero on screen was ostensibly strange but belied a perceptive logic. In this
case, the casting choice was related to the changing nature of heroism in the postwar world.
According to Leo Braudy, the development of new technology and the increasing
bureaucratization of the military were causing the realities of warfare to become increasingly
distant from traditional ideals of the heroic individual: “Here was a central problem of
democratic war: the disparity between the public image needed to inspire the troops – and the
civilians at home – gets further and further separated from what is needed to win.”
38
The figure
of the soldier was increasingly being seen as an anonymous, interchangeable cog in a larger
bureaucratic and technological machine. The result, Braudy argues, is that the culture turned
even more so towards an individualistic model of heroism in its entertainment: “it was the lonely
hero – especially the cowboy and the detective – who furnished an image of stolid male heroism
to counteract the fears of both anonymous atomic destruction and submersion in the totalitarian
mass.”
39

Murphy’s personal narrative, however, ran counter to these perceptions of the soldier.
Murphy was not merely a soldier, but a hero, which elevated him above the otherwise
anonymous masses. In fact, Murphy’s acts of heroism were typically ones in which he
distinguished himself alone. In his most famous exploit, which earned him the Medal of Honor,
Murphy’s company was attempting to hold a piece of woodland against a German attack. With
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the German infantry advancing on the company’s position, Murphy mounted a burning tank
which was in danger of exploding and turned the tank’s machine gun on the enemy, single-
handedly killing some 50 Germany soldiers and receiving significant wounds in the process.
These sorts of individual heroics were not in keeping with the postwar view of military
action. Instead, as Murphy’s handlers at Universal understood, they linked him with the figure of
the solitary Westerner, who committed single-handed acts of violence in defense of civilization.
This would seem to account for why Murphy portrayed Westerners rather than soldiers for most
of his career, in spite of the fact that To Hell and Back (Universal, 1955), the film based on his
autobiography and which cast Murphy as himself, was Universal’s biggest moneymaker to
date.
40
Following the film’s phenomenal success, Murphy soon went back to playing the same
Western roles he had beforehand. Aside from the innocuous and uncharacteristic military
comedy Joe Butterfly (Universal, 1957), Murphy would never again play a soldier in
contemporary times.
41
Furthermore, with the exception of To Hell and Back, Murphy’s non-
Westerns did not perform as well at the box office as his Westerns.
42
This seemingly reflected
the fact that contemporary warfare did not offer many opportunities for individual heroism. For
the studio, the only soldier role that could properly showcase Audie Murphy was that of Audie
Murphy.
Murphy’s Western career did not start out with him playing heroes, though. Instead, his
Westerns picked up where Bad Boy left off: Murphy’s first Western, The Kid from Texas, had
him playing Billy the Kid as a juvenile delinquent transposed into the old West. In fact,
Murphy’s first four Westerns all had him playing youthful criminals. Paul Short, who produced
both Bad Boy and The Kid from Texas, was asked in an interview prior to the release of the latter
film about why he “made a heavy of the hero of heroes in World War II?” One of the reasons
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Short gave was that “such roles did not require sophisticated acting skills, which Audie had yet
to develop.”
43
Ostensibly, this explanation is insufficient, since a hero doesn’t necessarily require
more acting skill than a heavy. Yet it seems close to an admission that Murphy, with his real-life
trauma and violent tendencies, is more naturally able to embody characters onscreen who are
conventionally portrayed as villains. Indeed, Murphy’s Western characters seem to follow an arc
of moral improvement over time that corresponds to the improvement of Murphy’s acting. As
Murphy’s ability to portray characters who were unlike himself grew, he was given roles that
came off as more conventionally heroic. His earliest films, though, in which he portrays
irrationally violent, mentally traumatized outlaws, are of the most interest in terms of how they
employ both Murphy’s military background and the iconography of juvenile delinquency.
Murphy’s first Western, The Kid from Texas, and his third Western, Kansas Raiders (Universal
International, 1950), are particularly worthy of examination.
That The Kid from Texas was intended to conflate the figures of Audie Murphy and
William Bonney, known to history by his nickname “Billy the Kid,” is clear from the title alone.
Bonney was born in New York, and he spent most of his life there, in Kansas, and in New
Mexico. It was Audie Murphy who was born and raised in Texas. Murphy himself admitted to
feeling a kinship with Bonney, stating in an interview after the film’s release that “[w]hen I was
a youngster, I might have become another Billy the Kid if I hadn’t had wonderful neighbors who
pitched in and gave me jobs and helped me in numerous ways.”
44
Harkening back to Bad Boy,
Murphy seems to admit that the line between war hero and criminal is a thin one.
Indeed, The Kid from Texas shares many of the same thematic concerns as Bad Boy,
which is not surprising given that the two films share the same producer, director, and
screenwriters. Like the earlier film, The Kid from Texas is interested in the line between
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acceptable and unacceptable violence, though the latter film is ultimately more ambiguous on
that point. Also like the earlier film, it clear that The Kid from Texas is concerned with juvenile
delinquency: producer Paul Short referred to Billy the Kid on set as “the original juvenile
delinquent,” and Murphy portrayed the character accordingly.
45

Indeed, the first part of The Kid from Texas has obvious parallels to the plot of Bad Boy.
Billy the Kid is a wild young man prone to violence. He comes from a dysfunctional family and,
like Danny Lester, had a dysfunctional step father, one who was “drunk all the time.” Billy left
home after committing a murder, killing a man who bad-mouthed his mother. After years of
wandering the American Southwest, Billy takes a job at a New Mexico ranch owned by
Alexander Kain (Albert Dekker) and Roger Jameson (Shepperd Strudwick). Jameson is a clear
stand-in for Marshall Brown of Bad Boy: a benevolent patriarch who is committed to reforming
Billy by providing him with a stable surrogate family, with himself as father-figure, on the ranch.
He inquires into Billy’s past, hoping to find the cause of the youth’s violence. Jameson
convinces Billy to give up his guns and assures him that “we’ll end up making a model citizen of
you.”
Indeed, Jameson might have succeeded in doing what Brown did with Danny Lester, but
circumstances instead send the film in another direction. Gunmen hired by a rival rancher, Major
Harper, ride onto Jameson’s property and shoot him down in cold blood. Billy, having lost the
surrogate father who promised him his one chance at redemption, retrieves his guns and vows
revenge on Jameson’s killers. As in later delinquent-centric Westerns like The True Story of
Jesse James, a young man is set upon a path of violence by the cruelty of adults.
Ostensibly, Billy’s violence is potentially redeemable because he is targeting cold-
blooded killers: the enemies of civilization. Yet the film is ambiguous as to exactly what kind of
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civilization exists in its world, and about what kinds of violence are justified in its “defense.”
Early in the film, a group of armed deputies barge into Alexander Kain’s office in Lincoln and
attempt to place him under arrest for murder. Kain responds that the men he’d lynched had been
caught red-handed rustling his cattle, and accuses the deputies of working for a corrupt sheriff
who abuses the power of the law to “run errands for Major Harper.” Besides, Kain says, the men
are out of their jurisdiction, as Lincoln now has its own sheriff – one who, it is implied, is in
Kain’s own employ and who sanctions the killings of Kain’s enemies. The gunmen threaten to
kill Kain for “resisting arrest,” but are driven away by Billy’s intervention.
It quickly becomes clear that that law, as it exists in Lincoln County, New Mexico, is in
the employ of the wealthy ranch owners, who use the law to empower gunmen to take action
against one another. The film suggests an adult world in which money is king and the law is at its
mercy, in which two sides wage a pointless and destructive battle against one another for their
own enrichment. Indeed, it’s easy to read this as a cynical commentary on the Cold War. Indeed,
like the Cold War, the struggle between Kain and Harper was a war that was not really a war.
Though many characters in the film refer to the conflict as a “war,” each side claims that they are
only protecting themselves against the aggression of the other. Kain, in particular, is seen
attempting to win over hearts and minds, so to speak, condemning the savagery of the Harper
group and claiming that he himself is only interested in justice and self-preservation.
The film depicts Kain as a hypocrite, one who condones violence yet attempts to remain
morally above it. Following Jameson’s murder, Kain, aware of Billy’s violent tendencies and of
his desire to avenge Jameson’s death, asks Billy to remain on the ranch. Kain later has Billy
deputized into the posse sent to capture Jameson’s killers, knowing that Billy’s violence would
be an asset to the group. When Billy shoots two of the killers in the back as they attempt to
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escape on horseback, however, Kain worries that the act will undercut his claim for moral
superiority over Harper. He therefore disavows responsibility for Billy’s action, claiming that he
never wanted bloodshed and calling Billy a “murdering little fool.” Only when Billy reminds
Kain that he’d been legally deputized with Kain’s blessing that the rancher relents and agrees to
give Billy the benefit of the doubt.
Later in the film, a group of Harper’s men rustle cattle from Kain’s ranch and kill several
of Kain’s men in the process. Kain puts Billy in charge of a party sent to retrieve the cattle,
explicitly giving Billy permission to fire on anyone who tries to stop them. The resulting gun
battle is so deadly that the territorial governor, General Lew Wallace, intervenes, summoning
Kain and Harper to account for it. Kain once again denies personal responsibility. With most of
the blame falling onto “that murdering kid,” Kain claims that Billy disobeyed his orders to avoid
bloodshed. Calling Billy “no responsibility of mine,” Kain even offers to help put up a reward
for his capture.
Kain’s treatment of Billy seems to make concrete the duality between the soldier and the
juvenile delinquent that Bad Boy only alludes to. When Billy is deputized into Kain’s posse, he is
symbolically inducted into an army prepared to fight in Kain’s war with Harper. Yet what makes
Billy so appealing to Kain as a soldier is his past as a juvenile delinquent. Kain knows that
Billy’s capacity for brutal violence is an asset in his war, so long as that violence is directed
against the enemy. Indeed, the film is deliberately unclear about whether Billy’s actions on
Kain’s behalf are more like those of a soldier or those of a juvenile delinquent. Prior to sending
out the posse, Kain admonishes the men to commit “no uncalled-for violence.” But the definition
of what kind of violence is “called for” is necessarily subjective. Apparently, capturing the men
is the action of a solider, but shooting two of them as they try to escape is the action of a
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criminal. Critically, Billy’s killing of the two men or horseback is clearly modeled on an incident
from Audie Murphy’s wartime experience: Murphy shot two unarmed Italian officers in the back
as they attempted to escape from his platoon on horseback.
46
By drawing on Murphy’s real-life
experiences, the film questions the line between justified and unjustified violence.
In doing so, the film undermines the moral mandate for violence that is inherent to the
idea of the both the soldier and the Westerner. The soldier and the Westerner both fight to
preserve civilization against its enemies, but The Kid from Texas confuses this issue. Kain and
Harper are each trying to build a civilization out of the wilderness, but Kain’s claims for moral
superiority are just a pose, as he is just as corrupt as his opponent. There is nothing appealing
about the adult society that Billy is confronted with in Lincoln County. Although the film offers
Roger Jameson and the General Wallace as positive examples of adult authority, Jameson is
killed and Wallace is removed from the reality that Billy experiences firsthand. It is fully
understandable that Billy would reject the adult world of the film.
Kain’s hypocrisy seems to speak, on a fundamental level, to a broader failure to see the
soldier and the juvenile delinquent as two sides of the same coin. In the American heroic ideal,
as embodied in the Westerner, the hero is someone who is in calm control of their violence. Leo
Braudy writes that the image of the Western hero “is often not outwardly aggressive (usually the
characteristic of the villain) but a judicious mixture of the aggressive with the stoic.”
47
The
smiling image of Audie Murphy on the Life magazine cover is a variation of this notion: the
essential innocence and goodness of the soldier keeps his violence in check and ensures that it is
used justly. As Murphy’s own life demonstrates, however, this ideal is far from reality, and Kain
exploits the ideal in order to cover up his own crimes. Kain sends Billy into situations where
bloodshed is inevitable, and blames the violence on Billy being out of control and refusing to
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follow orders. The very qualities that make Billy effective as a soldier for Kain’s cause make it
easy for Kain to scapegoat him as a juvenile delinquent. Kain’s hypocrisy suggests that the
public itself is hypocritical when it comes to violence, praising the soldier and condemning the
delinquent when it should be recognizing the fundamental similarity between them.
The film cannot end on such a radical notion, however, opting instead to restore order to
the world. Kain and Billy both die for their sins: Kain is killed by Billy, and Billy is in turn killed
by Sheriff Pat Garrett. Garrett had been appointed by General Wallace to replace the corrupt
sheriffs working for Kain and Harper, and his link to the general symbolizes the fact that it is the
military that has brought peace to Lincoln County. Though it is too late for Billy, the film
implies that the positive military patriarch Wallace will help New Mexico to grow and mature
into statehood. Though the film ultimately reaffirms the goodness and necessity of the military,
the fact remains that it also went out of its way to offer an unnerving picture of soldierhood,
delinquency, and the relationship between them.
Murphy’s next Western for Universal and second of 1950, Sierra, had him play a young
man, Ring Hassard, whose father was falsely accused of a murder and went on the run when
Ring was a child. Consequently, Ring grew up hiding in the wilderness, far removed from
civilization. Though Ring is embittered against society, and is unfairly ostracized because of his
parentage, he lacks the violent, traumatized nature of Danny Lester or Billy the Kid. In part, this
can be seen as the beginning of an effort on Universal’s part to create a more conventionally
heroic persona for Murphy on screen. Murphy would, however, play one more violent,
traumatized outlaw: the infamous Jesse James.
Kansas Raiders was Murphy’s third Western for Universal released in 1950. Unlike
Fox’s 1939 Jesse James or its 1957 The True Story of Jesse James, Kansas Raiders does not
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attempt to tell the full story of Jesse’s outlaw career. Instead, the film focuses on a previously
neglected chapter of Jesse’s life, in which he rode with William Quantrill’s Confederate guerillas
during the Civil War. As with The Kid from Texas, Murphy plays the real-life outlaw as a
“frontier delinquent.”
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The film’s depiction of Jesse James is once again heavily determined by the casting of
Audie Murphy. At one point, one of Younger brothers says to the other youths that “riding with a
man like Quantrill, we’re all liable to be famous one day.” This comment is not only an ironic
foreshadowing of the infamy that Jesse and the other young men will one day attain in history,
but also a clear reference to the fame that Audie Murphy attained for his feats on the battlefield.
The film creates a tension between Murphy’s reputation as a good soldier and Jesse James’s
reputation as a ruthless outlaw. The film can ultimately be read as a commentary on how a young
man who might have become Audie Murphy instead becomes Jesse James.
Like Danny and Billy, Jesse suffers from mental trauma as the result of a broken home,
though for Jesse the breakage is quite literal. Jesse describes coming home one day with his
brother Frank and “found the house burning. Ma with her arm shot off. My Pa hangin’ in the tree
in the front yard.” This had been done, he said, by Redlegs – guerillas fighting for the Union.
Jesse resolved to “kill any man who would do a thing like that.” To that end, he traveled to
Kansas with his brother, Frank, and three other future outlaws – Cole Younger, James Young,
and Kit Dalton – to join the famous Confederate guerilla, Colonel William Clarke Quantrill
(Brian Donlevy).
Jesse is motivated by the failure of adults to abide by the rules of civilized warfare. As a
result, he chooses to become a guerilla for the South. Unlike Danny and Billy, though, Jesse does
not choose to drop out of society altogether. In riding for Quantrill, he still sees himself as a
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soldier, albeit an unconventional one. Nevertheless, like those previous roles, Jesse is still prone
to outbursts of extreme violence. Shortly after being accepted into Quantrill’s Raiders, Quantrill
sends one of his lieutenants, Rudolph Tate, to pick a fight with Jesse to “test his mettle.” After
just a few snide remarks from Tate, Jesse challenges Tate to a knife fight to the death, which the
older man reluctantly accepts. Jesse wins the fight and, despite having his opponent disarmed
and helpless, coldly stabs Tate to death.
Quantrill immediately recognizes the value of Jesse’s violence and gives him Tate’s
former position. Quantrill also takes a personal liking to Jesse, and he begins to treat the youth as
a surrogate son. Quantrill, however, is no Marshall Brown or Roger Jameson. He endeavors to
cultivate Jesse’s capacity for violence. Quantrill values violence because he sees himself as the
savior of the Confederacy. At this point in history, the Confederacy was nearing defeat, which
Quantrill himself admits. However, as he explains to Jesse, he believes that the war will
ultimately be won through control of the West. Quantrill is seen consuming prodigious amounts
of alcohol as he drunkenly describes his dream of becoming “second-in-command to Lee
himself” and of leading “the great counter-attack that will drive the Union army into the sea.”
That Jesse is taken in by Quantrill’s grand yet foolhardy ambitions is reflective of a
particular strain of though in discussions of juvenile delinquency at the time: the link between
delinquency and totalitarianism. The Gluecks write of their concern that “some of the more
striking traits that mark delinquents are similar to the characteristic traits of Nazi, Fascist, or
Communist leaders.”
49
Robert Lindner further claims that the delinquent psychopath
is not only a criminal; he is the embryonic Storm-Trooper; he is the disinherited, betrayed
antagonist whose aggression can be mobilized on the instant at which the properly-aimed
and frustration-evoking formula is communicated by that Leader under whose tinseled
aegis license becomes law, secret and primitive desires become virtuous ambitions
readily attained, and compulsive behavior formerly deemed punishable becomes the
order of the day.
50

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If Bad Boy based its plot on the whole of Lindner’s Rebel Without a Cause, then the plot
of Kansas Raiders might well have been inspired by that one passage. Jesse and his gang are
indeed drawn to Quantrill because he encourages the sort of behavior that a delinquent might
crave: looting, stealing, and violent revenge on those who have wronged them. Jesse idolizes
Quantrill, insisting that he is a “great man” despite all evidence to the contrary. In this, Kansas
Raiders recognizes a peculiar element of American society’s anxiety about the juvenile
delinquent: the recognition that a link does exist between the delinquent and the soldier, but that
the delinquent threatens to become a soldier for the wrong side. Though this fear, as expressed
by Lindner, may come off as naïve given that the storm-trooper is perhaps better associated with
cold discipline rather than hedonistic abandon, it nevertheless represents an admission that
delinquents could end up using their violence in a military capacity. Nevertheless, it also
represents a stubborn refusal to believe that a delinquent could ever be one of our soldiers.
Though Jesse starts out believing in the righteousness of Quantrill’s cause, however, it
doesn’t take long for the reality of what Quantrill is doing to become obvious. Jesse’s first
mission for the Colonel is to help lead a raid against a farmhouse, where Quantrill claims a
number of Union soldiers are being garrisoned. Jesse rides in expecting a battle, but instead
witnesses the frenzied spectacle of Quantrill’s men looting, burning, and shooting down unarmed
men. When Jesse angrily asks another raider about the Union soldiers Quantrill promised, the
other man laughs and replies, “grow up. Quantrill tells us that before every raid. Makes him feel
like a real colonel.” Clearly, Quantrill’s men are merely criminals masquerading under the
pretense of being soldiers. Commitment to a military cause becomes a pretext for robbery and
indiscriminate murder. Though they are fully grown, Quantrill’s men resemble nothing so much
as a bunch of juvenile delinquents.
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Jesse, however, refuses to join in with them. He maintains his commitment to the military
ideology that the adults have discarded. The youth is given a level a moral superiority over the
adults, as he alone remains true to the ideology that they all espouse. Yet Jesse can only answer
the violence with more violence. When Jesse sees two raiders shoot an unarmed man in the back
and laugh about it, he marches up to them and declares, to their confusion, “I’m gonna kill you
for that,” and then does. Jesse’s violence is impulsive and arbitrary, given that the men were only
doing what all the other men were doing. It is the angry lashing out of a child, albeit a child
proficient in the use of a gun. Jesse is able to recognize that the brutal violence of the men is
wrong, yet the young delinquent-in-the-making is only able to respond to this wrong with more
brutal violence, because this is the only behavior that has been modeled for him.
After the raid, Jesse expresses the desire to leave Quantrill’s band, and he is supported in
this by Quantrill’s girlfriend, Kate (Marguerite Chapman). As a woman, Kate is thematically
associated with the forces of morality and civilization in the Western convention. She also serves
as a mother figure to Jesse in the surrogate family that they share with Quantrill. In the process
of trying to convince him to leave Quantrill, however, she and Jesse become lovers as well. The
Oedipal nature of this relationship symbolizes several things, starting with the basic perversity
and instability of Jesse and Quantrill’s family structure. It also indicates Jesse’s destiny to
replace and thereby become Quantrill, foreshadowing the former’s eventual life of crime.
Finally, it infantilizes Jesse. Even after they become lovers, Kate refers to Jesse in front of
Quantrill as “just a boy” and mentions Quantrill’s “winning way with children.” Indeed, her
decision to become Jesse’s lover suggests a maternal desire to protect, since she uses their
relationship to better persuade him to leave. Jesse’s simultaneous status as son and lover suggests
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that he, like Danny Lester, perversely occupies a space between boyhood and manhood – indeed,
the quality of the teenager that most disturbed middle-class parents.
Ultimately, what this means is that Jesse is old enough to fight but not mature enough to
truly understand the morality of war. Jesse is persuaded quite easily by Quantrill to stay with the
group. Quantrill deflects blame for the atrocities onto his men, claiming that he only tolerates
“that rabble” because they are ultimately serving the greater good. He insists that “General Lee
needs me. And, through me, he needs you.” Jesse is convinced, asking only for a promise that
there will not be a repeat of what happened on the first raid.
At the beginning of the film, Jesse was certain about the line between acceptable and
unacceptable violence in warfare. Killing people like his parents who “didn’t have no chance”
was wrong, and he was resolved to punish anyone who carried out such an action. In this, Jesse
resembles Alexander Kain from The Kid from Texas: some violence is “called for” and some
isn’t, and the difference between them is clear. Yet while Kain’s attitude is revealed as self-
serving hypocrisy, Kanas Raiders implies that the loss of Jesse’s Manichean view of violence
signals his corruption. Quantrill confuses Jesse as to where the line between acceptable and
unacceptable violence is, convincing him that some transgressions could be accepted if it
ultimately benefitted the larger cause. As such, Jesse loses sight of the difference between a
soldier and a criminal. His moral certainty was, previously, the only thing keeping his savage
nature under control. Without it, he was destined to become the violent outlaw of legend.
Indeed, the film suggests that it is very easy for an angry young man to fall into crime.
Having been driven from their homes by Union atrocities, Jesse and his young friends share a
contempt for “civilized” ways of living. Kit Dalton repeatedly mentions how much better his life
with Quantrill is compared to “walking behind a plow.”
51
Unlike farming, robbery provides the
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kind of instant gratification that youth supposedly craves. “This is the life,” Dalton proclaims.
“Plenty money, shootin’, gamblin’, sleepin’.” As such, it becomes easy for Jesse and the others
to rationalize their reasons for staying with Quantrill and enjoying their lives of crime.
In spite of Quantrill’s promise to the contrary, the group’s following raid on Lawrence,
Kansas predictably goes the same way as the first raid. Quantrill’s men loot, burn, and murder
unarmed civilians. Jesse again becomes angry and kills one of his own compatriots. Quantrill
himself, like a conquering monarch, collects tributes from the defeated citizens, thanking them
for their “contributions” to his cause and proclaiming unconvincingly that “the day will come
when the favor of Quantrill will be worth a king’s ransom.” Once again Jesse objects to the
group’s conduct and once again he is convinced to stay with it.
In spite of Jesse’s continued objections, he and his young band remain with Quantrill
even after the Confederacy surrenders and the rest of the band deserts. When Quantrill is blinded
by a Union attack, Jesse increasingly takes command of the group. Ultimately, the band is
cornered in an abandoned shack, and Quantrill sacrifices himself to provide cover while the
young men escape. Saying goodbye to Kate, who realizes that she cannot be both mother and
lover to Jesse, the group rides off, the narrator says, “into the pages of crime history… Five
whose warped lives were to be a heritage from their teacher, William Clarke Quantrill.”
In the end, the narrator lays the blame for Jesse James’ life of crime at the feet of
Quantrill and his bad parenting. Yet the film itself does not treat Quantrill so harshly. The
Colonel sacrifices himself heroically to save his surrogate son. Furthermore, the film makes clear
that atrocities were being committed on both sides of the war. Although the film sets up Quantrill
as an easy scapegoat, it also allows for Quantrill to be seen as a deluded but honorable man who
was merely one facet of the larger corruption caused by war. His influence on Jesse could be
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seen as corrupting, or it could be seen as revealing to Jesse the emptiness of military ideology.
As Quantrill modeled it, military ideology was simply an empty dream used to justify violence
committed for self-serving reasons.
John Lenihan writes that Kansas Raiders is one of a small number of early-fifties
Westerns “unique… because their alienated outlaw figures are neither killed nor totally won over
to the ways of social respectability.”
52
In part, this can be attributed to the fact that audiences can
be expected to know about Jesse James’ history and ultimate fate, being shot down by one of his
own men. At the same time, there is something fulfilling about being able to watch Jesse and his
gang riding away free at the end of the film. Jesse’s dissatisfaction with the flaws and
hypocrisies of the civilized adult world surely have resonated with many in the audience, who
nevertheless could feel secure knowing that Jesse would eventually die for his crimes. Yet for the
time being, the viewer can appreciate Jesse’s rebellion and sympathize with why he did what he
did.
Following Kansas Raiders, Murphy’s career increasingly moved away from
psychologically-traumatized outlaws. His next film saw him loaned out to MGM to star in John
Huston’s adaptation, The Red Badge of Courage (1951), based on Stephen Crane’s Civil War
novel about a young soldier who turns coward and runs from combat, yet returns later and
distinguishes himself with a furious charge on the battlefield. This film was the first time that
Murphy played a soldier onscreen. The significance of the casting, however, was open to
different interpretations. According to Guerric DeBona, Huston cast Murphy in the lead role of
The Youth because he wanted to “demythologize the American soldier.”
53
Murphy represented
the contradictions of warfare; in Huston’s words, he was a “gentle little killer.”
54
The Youth is
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presented as “a bewildered boy” whose fear and vulnerability undermine the masculine ideal of
soldierhood.
55

An alternative interpretation of Murphy’s casting is offered by gossip columnist Hedda
Hopper. Hopper praises the fact that
we’ll have a real soldier playing a real soldier on screen. It couldn’t happen at a better
time. The Stephen Crane classic is antiwar only in the sense that all war stories must be
antiwar. It’s about a youth who develops courage under fire. With so many untried youths
going to Korea, we can do with this kind of story.”
56

In Hopper’s interpretation, Murphy’s casting as a boyish coward is not a subversive choice, but
an opportunity to show “untried youths” fighting in present conflicts in the real world that they,
too, could become another Audie Murphy. Murphy, for her, represents an affirmation of
America’s Cold War aims.
This ambivalence concerning Murphy’s significance can be seen as informing the film’s
climactic scene, in which The Youth, having previously run from combat, now charges
recklessly into it. Huston’s original screenplay included a number of preceding scenes seemingly
designed to show the psychological toll that his experience of war was taking on him. For
example, after an encounter with a dying soldier, The Youth is describing sitting down “on a
tree-stump, utterly crushed. He is a lost soul.”
57
Scenes like these build the case that The Youth’s
outburst of violence at the end of the film is less a heroic discovery of courage than a self-
destructive expression of madness brought on by wartime trauma. This interpretation serves to
connect the film to Murphy’s previous films, which linked the soldier with the delinquent.
Indeed, Murphy’s expressions of rage as The Youth are identical to the ones he used to play
Danny Lester, Billy the Kid, and Jesse James. The same qualities that make for a good soldier
are found to be the ones that make for a bad delinquent.
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It is not surprising, then, that scenes like the one on the tree-stump were cut from the final
film. According to DeBona, the studio’s trimming of the two-hour film down to just a 69 minute
running time demonstrated a deliberate attempt to strip the film “of its psychologically
disturbing, documentary texture.”
58
Much of the moral ambiguity was lost, and the result was
that it became easier to interpret the film in line with Hedda Hopper’s uplifting view of war: the
young soldier is inspired to heroism, rather than being psychologically beaten and traumatized
into it. Although a subversive reading of the film remains possible, the studio succeeded in
creating a film in which Murphy is more of a positive symbol of what young Americans can
achieve on the battlefield, rather than a warning about what war can to do a young mind.
Whether in spite of or because of the cuts, The Red Badge of Courage failed at the box
office, and as a result Murphy went back to making medium-budget Westerns at Universal. His
next film, The Cimmaron Kid (1952), was his third film in which he played a youthful outlaw
from history. By this point in his career, audiences and critics had already become cognizant of
the odd choice to consistently cast the veteran in outlaw roles. Even before the film was
announced, The Christian Science Monitor quipped that “[i]t wouldn’t be at all surprising to see
Audie Murphy as Joaquin Murietta one of these days, since Hollywood apparently has a
predilection for casting the young actor in desperado roles.”
59
This role differed from Murphy’s
previous Westerns, however, in that the character was motivated solely by social rejection, rather
than by psychological trauma. Murphy’s character, the real-life outlaw Bill Doolin, is not a
criminal by nature but is judged as such because of his friendship with the outlaw Dalton Gang.
In an unfortunate coincidence, a train that Doolin is riding on is robbed by the Daltons, one of
whom recognizes Doolin and calls him by name. Though Doolin protests his innocence, he is
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judged guilty by association and must flee from the law, joining up with the Daltons due to lack
of any alternative.
One reviewer describes the film as one that is “peopled with a bunch of clean-cut
youngsters who just happened to take up banditry as any one [sic] else might have chosen
bookkeeping or wrestling as a career.”
60
Although the film, in fact, provides the young outlaws
with plenty of reason for taking up banditry, the reviewer nevertheless captures the relatively
innocuous and likeable way that the characters are presented. The film does rely on Murphy’s
ability to convey anger, but it does not contain any shocking or unnerving outbursts of violence
from his character. Bill Doolin is not a criminal by nature; rather, he is a good boy who goes bad
because of society’s unfair judgment of him.
Although the film’s script called for Doolin’s death, mirroring that of the historical
Doolin, “director Boetticher felt Audie’s fans would reject this ending, so he rewrote the script to
have Audie captured.”
61
Thus, the film changes history to send Doolin to jail, with the hopeful
promise that a domestic life with his girl will be waiting for him when he gets out. Though it is
not shown explicitly, this is the first time a film suggests that a Murphy character can be
integrated into domestic, non-military society. This is indicative of an attempt to transform
Murphy’s persona from that of an alienated, traumatized figure to one who is in concord with the
forces of civilization.
Beginning with his next film, The Duel at Silver Creek (Universal, 1952), Murphy began
playing characters who were allied with the forces of law and civilization. His characters still had
a violent edge to them – Duel’s Silver Kid is looking to avenge the death of his father – but this
is mitigated by the fact that his characters are frequently deputized, as the Silver Kid is, or hold
law-abiding jobs, such as the railroad surveyor of Ride Clear of Diablo (Universal, 1954).
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Murphy’s characters were now able to hold their violence under control, fighting and killing only
when absolutely necessary. His characters consistently end up “getting the girl,” signifying a
potential domestic future.
The shift in Murphy’s persona can be attributed to more than one cause. One was
Murphy’s improving acting abilities, which enabled him to go beyond playing the
psychologically damaged, violent young men who so resembled Murphy himself. Another was,
likely, the fact that Murphy’s handlers realized that casting America’s most decorated soldier as
a series of criminals was perhaps ill-advised given the political climate. The House Un-American
Activities committee, having launched an investigation of Hollywood in 1947, launched a second
one in 1951, coinciding with Murphy’s rising stardom. Given that any perceived criticism of
American society was potential grounds for blacklisting, Universal presumably decided that it
would be safer to cast Murphy in more conventionally heroic roles. Murphy’s post-1951 films
are largely devoid of references to juvenile delinquency and, as such, are also largely devoid of
the subtle criticism of Cold War-era militarism implied by Bad Boy, The Kid from Texas, and
Kansas Raiders in their linking of the soldier and the delinquent.
Bob Larkins and Boyd Magers argue that “The Audie Murphy western… has become as
much a part of the pop culture of the ‘50s as Elvis Presley or James Dean.”
62
Although they
probably overstate their case a bit, it is nevertheless true that, like those better-remembered
young men, Murphy represents an important image of postwar youth. He was the epitome of
youthful heroism at a time when the young men of America were being look to as future soldiers
in the Cold War. He was also, privately, an exemplar of the psychological cost wrought by war
on the young mind – a cost that sometimes, in subtle ways, made itself known on the screen.
Throughout his film career, Murphy had to walk the tightrope between the idealized image of the
259

soldier that he embodied, and the disturbing yet thrilling reality of violence that he was capable
of conveying through his performance. For a brief time, at least, Murphy’s films were able to
draw on this duality to ask questions about how American society felt about the violence of its
young men and about what its fears of the Cold War and of juvenile delinquency might say about
each other. A disturbed young man with a gun: Audie Murphy was simultaneously America’s
greatest hero and its worst nightmare.

Elvis Presley: A Comparative Study
On March 3, 1960, fifteen years after Murphy’s appearance on the cover of Life
magazine, another young man in a soldier’s uniform captured the nation’s attention. In what Life
called “possibly the most heavily reported Army homecoming since General MacArthur’s,”
Elvis Presley returned to the United States from Germany after two years of Army service. As
the country’s most iconic performer of rock ‘n’ roll music, Presley was a controversial figure
blamed by parents for corrupting their children’s morals and enabling juvenile delinquency. Yet,
thanks to his time in the military, that had begun to change. For his press conferences that day,
Presley wore a nonissue uniform specially made for the occasion – with such haste, in fact, that it
bore one too many stripes on its sleeves.
63
A day later, Senator Estes Kefauver, who had
previously led Congressional inquiries into juvenile delinquency, congratulated him for “a job
well done, Soldier.”
64
Later that month, Presley appeared in a special homecoming show on
ABC hosted by Frank Sinatra, who had previously referred to Presley’s music as “deplorable, a
rancid-smelling aphrodisiac.”
65
Soon after, Presley would resume his interrupted film career. His
first post-Army picture, G.I. Blues (Paramount, 1960), had him play a soldier who, like Presley,
260

was stationed in Germany. His next film, Flaming Star (20
th
Century Fox, 1960), would return
him to the genre in which he had made his cinematic debut: the Western.
Although Audie Murphy and Elvis Presley would not seem to have much in common,
Presley in fact embodies the same combination of soldier, delinquent, and Westerner that
Murphy did. Though Presley’s peacetime military service was very different from Murphy’s, that
service nevertheless similarly came to symbolize the notion that whatever destructive potential
existed in a young man’s body could be contained, even redeemed, by the nationalistic structure
of the military. Presley’s time in the army would represent a major step in the effort to redeem
the performer’s image in the eyes of the adults who considered him a dangerous influence on
their children. At the same time, Presley was associated with juvenile delinquency not only
through his rock ‘n’ roll music, but, as discussed in Chapter 2, through the delinquent-type
characters he played onscreen. Given the striking ways in which Presley’s image paralleled
Murphy’s, a brief discussion of the former’s army service seems warranted.
If Murphy was America’s most famous solider at the dawn of the 1950s, then Presley was
the country’s most famous soldier at the end of the decade. Drafted into the Army in 1958,
Presley was then at the peak of his popularity, “easily the biggest name in American
entertainment,” with a plethora of best-selling records, several successful television appearances,
and four hit films released in the previous two years.
66
For some, the timing with which the idol
of the rebellious teenagers of America was conscripted was suspicious. Dave Marsh claims that
“[m]ilitary conscription was an effective weapon against uppity new celebrities” and that “there
was nothing to prevent the draft from being used as a weapon to put [Presley] back in his
place.”
67
Yet for Presley’s handlers (headed by Col. Tom Parker, who was not an actual colonel),
the draft did not represent a threat to the star’s rebellious image, but a chance to reform it. As
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discussed in Chapter 2, an effort was already underway to soften the performer’s reputation and
render him palatable to disapproving parents. Presley’s two years in the army would become part
of that effort to turn Presley, purveyor of the music that supposedly spread juvenile delinquency,
into a wholesome boy who could appeal to all age groups. In a reversal of the process Audie
Murphy underwent to star in Bad Boy, Presley was to be turned from a juvenile delinquent into a
soldier.
This effort is seen in the strategy that his handlers employed when choosing the type of
military service that Presley would perform. For months prior to the official draft notice, army
and navy personnel attempted to court Presley for voluntary enlistment, promising him “special
enlistment opportunities” such as the formation of an “Elvis Presley Company.” Presley turned
these offers down.
68
After the draft notice arrived, Presley was then offered a place in Special
Services, where he would spend his enlistment period entertaining the troops and living in
priority housing – a position that soldiers and veterans referred to as “the celebrity wimp-out.”
Again, Presley declined.
69

These refusals represented Col. Tom Parker’s recognition “that if Elvis carried a rifle and
drove a truck for two years, rather than sing, the adult acceptance for Elvis would multiply
vastly.”
70
The army was a space in which Presley’s rebellious image could be transformed into
something acceptable to the dominant culture. Like Danny Lester, Presley had to prove that the
bad boy was capable of becoming a soldier. This was not something that Presley could
accomplish by singing or otherwise being treated as a celebrity; in that case, he would simply
remain himself, just transposed into a different setting. Presley had to become a real soldier,
meaning that he had to perform the same duties as any other soldier. Unlike Murphy, who found
distinction through wartime feats that elevated him above his peers, Presley needed to lose
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himself among his fellows. For Presley, the bureaucracy of the military was a positive aspect, as
it enabled him to become part of an undifferentiated mass of men. It was only by shedding his
distinctive individuality that Presley could attain mainstream acceptance.
Of course, Presley’s individuality could never truly be lost in the army, because he was
still Elvis Presley the famed entertainer. Even as he performed the same duties as other soldiers,
he continued to be recognized as a celebrity. Over the course of the two years that Presley was
unable to record any new music, Parker gradually released a large backlog of songs that the
performer had recorded just before his induction, with the intention of keeping Presley’s music
current.
71
Transforming his image required that Presley paradoxically embody both an individual
and an undifferentiated army grunt at the same time. He had to be someone whose fame and
distinctive image followed him around while he was simply trying to do the same work as any
other soldier. His ability to serve humbly in the army demonstrated his ability to assimilate with
the expectations of the dominant culture, while his music continued to assert that he was a star.
Presley’s career after his return from Germany, where he had been stationed following
basic training, continued the work of transforming Presley’s career. “The people who expected
Elvis to return to the image of greasy-haired, hip-shaking arrogance and the blaring rock ‘n’ roll
beat were disappointed.”
72
Presley instead worked to cultivate a “sanitized, family-friendly
image.”
73
This image is clearly seen in the first of Presley’s post-army films, G.I. Blues
(Paramount, 1960). The title alone makes clear the fact that the film was contrived to exploit
Presley’s new soldier image and the publicity surrounding his homecoming.
74
Presley plays
Army Specialist Tulsa McLean, who, like Presley himself, was stationed in Germany and served
as a tank crewman. Tulsa aspires to begin a singing career after his discharge, and he hopes to
raise enough money to for himself and his friends to open up their own nightclub. Variety
263

referred to the film as one that “seems to have been left over from the frivolous filmusicals [sic]
of World War II.”
75
The reviewer was presumably referring to films like Anchors Aweigh
(MGM, 1945) and On the Town (MGM, 1949), which depicted the comical hijinks of military
personnel on leave. Both films, incidentally, co-starred Frank Sinatra, the singer whose film
career helped him to attain broader popularity and mass culture respectability, and whom Presley
was undoubtedly trying to emulate.
The softening is Presley’s image is apparent as early as the first musical number, in
which Tulsa and his band are performing at a German nightclub. His performance here is almost
completely stationary, with virtually no wiggling of the hips. The Los Angeles Times writes,
“Gone are the snake-hips gyrations, fish-eye look and sullen attitude. Elvis Presley, late of the
U.S. Army and back on the screen, is the smiling all-American Boy.”
76
Variety quips that Presley
sings “as a slightly subdued pelvis.”
77
At the same time, the music that Presley performs tends to
be much slower-paced and less frenetic than the music he recorded in the 1950s. One
commentator stated that “most of the songs sounded as if their roots were in Tin Pan Alley rather
than in country blues.”
78
Presley was moving away not only from his bad boy image but from the
controversial musical style of rock ‘n’ roll.
The film, interestingly, does show itself to be cognizant of the change. In one remarkably
self-reflexive scene, Tulsa is performing the somber ballad “Doin’ the Best I Can” when one
servicemen in the audience is seen looking bored. The serviceman goes to the jukebox and starts
up a song labeled “Blue Suede Shoes” by “Elvis Presley.” “Blue Suede Shoes” was a fast-paced
rock ‘n’ roll song that Presley had released back in 1956. When several of the other patrons
complain about his playing music while Tulsa is performing, the serviceman replies that he
264

“want[s] to hear the original.” Tulsa’s response to the serviceman is to punch him, starting an all-
out brawl among all the servicemen in the nightclub.
The scene self-reflexively anticipates the potential backlash regarding the change in
Presley’s musical style. Tulsa’s violent reaction to the serviceman who prefers the “original”
Elvis Presley operates on multiple levels. On one level, it is a reassurance that despite the change
in music, Presley has not lost his “edge.” Presley retains enough of the bad boy inside to respond
to the challenge issued against him. On another level, the brawl, which is accompanied by the
continued playing of “Blue Suede Shoes,” represents the aspect of his image that Presley is
trying to get away from. The nightclub brawl is un-soldier-like, as it represents the men’s lack of
discipline and self-control. The brawl is a cathartic moment in the film, as it is the only time that
Tulsa loses control. The scene is contained by the rigorous self-control that Tulsa exercises
throughout the rest of the film. The brawl exists as a reminder that a part of the old Presley still
exists, but ultimately the film works to assure the viewer that the new Presley is more controlled
and more responsible.
Indeed, despite being a soldier Tulsa rarely has to deal with real violence. At the
beginning of the film, Tulsa is seen running through drills as a tank gunner. The scene affirms
both Tulsa’s individual skill in firing the gun and his ability to work as part of a group, since
several men are needed to operate the tank. Yet, since they are targeting inanimate objects, the
scene does not suggest that Tulsa has any great capacity for violence. Indeed, as a serviceman
during peacetime, Tulsa, like Presley himself, is a soldier who avoids violence. Presley and Tulsa
are able to obtain the benefits of military achievement while avoiding the danger of the mental
trauma that is explored in Audie Murphy’s films. In fact, Presley is arguably better able to
embody the innocent ideal represented in Murphy’s Life magazine cover than Murphy is himself:
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Presley is able to serve his country in the military and yet retain his innocence because he never
experiences actual combat. Whereas Murphy’s experiences in the military left him well suited to
play disturbed juvenile delinquents, Presley’s association with the military enables him to further
distance himself from delinquency.
Since his character has little contact with violence, Presley’s self-control is affirmed
through Tulsa’s mastery of his own sexuality. Presley is allowed to lose control of his violence
onscreen just once, but he cannot lose control of his sexuality at all. The bulk of the film’s plot
concerns Tulsa’s attempt to earn the money he needs to open his nightclub by winning a bet that
he can’t spend a full night with Lili (Juliet Prowse), a beautiful dancer who is considered
unconquerable by American G.I.s. Tulsa, who enters the bet reluctantly since it represents his
only chance at earning the money he needs, declares that he will win Lili’s affections by
“play[ing] it my way: nice, clean, wholesome.” Of course, “nice,” “clean,” and “wholesome” are
far from the professional image that Presley was known for. Yet they represented the way that
Presley’s career was moving. Though Tulsa predictably falls in love with Lili, he continues to
behave in a way that is nice, clean, and wholesome, and just as he maintained control over his
body during his musical performance he also retains control over his sexual behavior throughout
their courtship. Tulsa does eventually win his bet, but it is ironically in the context of
domesticity: Lili spends the night helping Tulsa baby-sit for a fellow G.I. The film ends by
suggesting that the army has helped Tulsa – and, by extension, Presley – to become a man. Yet it
does so by preparing him not for combat, but for a respectable family life. The military has
turned Presley into an upright young man, one who no longer poses a threat to middle-class
families.
266

Elvis’ films after G.I. Blues would predominantly follow the same formula: light
comedies that mostly featured ballads and pop music rather than rock. Although Presley would
return to rock ‘n’ roll in his famous 1968 comeback, in 1960 the push to sanitize and broaden his
image required him to move away from a musical style that was a problematic blend of racial
and class-based influences. No longer would Presley represent a threat to white, middle-class
parents by inducing their children to test the barriers that separated them from the Other. He
would instead be the “nice, clean, wholesome” white boy that those parents wanted him to be,
and he was rewarded with increasing success at the box office. That he had to make that
comeback in 1968 is evidence enough of how uncool this would make him in the meantime.
At the same time that Presley’s film career was on the rise, Audie Murphy’s was
approaching its end. Murphy had spent the middle and end of the decade playing lawmen,
cavalry officers, and, on occasion, outlaws with hearts of gold. Murphy and Presley’s careers
actually seemed to follow a similar trajectory: they began with a handful of interesting, if
variable-quality, films that often played off the subversive aspects of their star’s public persona,
before transitioning into a series of predominantly upbeat, largely-indistinguishable pictures.
79

What these parallel career trajectories suggest is a recognition of the fact that there is much in the
personas of Audie Murphy and Elvis Presley that can aid in scrutinizing and critiquing
America’s attitude towards its young men, followed by a realization that this is not the safest, or
the most profitable, way of exploiting either of the two stars. Nevertheless, they both ultimately
show, through the many different aspects of themselves they revealed onscreen, the conflicting
pressures, expectations, and anxieties that youth was up against in the midst of the Cold War.

1
Don Graham, No Name on the Bullet: A Biography of Audie Murphy (Viking: New York, 1989), 102.

2
Benjamin Fine, 1,000,000 Delinquents (The World Publishing Company: Cleveland, 1955), 352.

267

3
Harrison Salisbury, The Shook-Up Generation (Harper & Brothers, Publishers: New York, 1958), 233.

4
Peter Biskind, Seeing is Believing: How Hollywood Taught Us to Stop Worrying and Love the Fifties (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1983), 207.

5
See Stanley Corkin, Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 2004); Michael Coyne, The Crowded Prairie: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western (New
York: I.B. Tauris, Publishers, 1997); John H. Lenihan, Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western
Film (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980); Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in
Twentieth-Century America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992).

6
Richard Slotkin, “Violence.” The BFI Companion to the Western. Richard Buscombe, Ed. (New York: Athenium,
1988), 232-3.

7
Ibid., 234.

8
Ibid., 234.

9
John H. Lenihan, Showdown: Confronting Modern America in the Western Film (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1980), 115.

10
Sheldon Glueck and Eleanor Glueck, Delinquents in the Making: Paths to Prevention (New York: Harper &
Brothers, Publishers, 1952), 195.

11
Robert Lindner, Rebel Without a Cause: The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath (New York: Grune &
Stratton, 1944), 13.

12
Ibid., 13.

13
Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1996), 3.

14
Ibid., 191.

15
Lenihan, 138.

16
Ibid., 138-9.

17
Edward Buscombe, “The Western: A Short History,” The BFI Companion to the Western, ed. Edward Buscombe
(New York: Athenium, 1988), 53.

18
Lenihan, 141.

19
“Biography,” Audie L. Murphy Memorial Website, Audie Murphy Research Foundation, 1996, Web, accessed 23
June 2015.

20
Graham, 120.

21
For additional anecdotes regarding Murphy’s PTSD see Bob Larkins and Boyd Magers, The Films of Audie
Murphy (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2004) and Sue Gossett, The Films and Career of Audie
Murphy (Madison: Empire Publishing, Inc., 1996).

22
Audie Murphy, To Hell and Back (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1949), 273.

268

23
Bob Larkins and Boyd Magers, The Films of Audie Murphy (Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers,
2004), 8.

24
Robert Nott, Last of the Cowboy Heroes: The Westerns of Randolph Scott, Joel McCrea, and Audie Murphy
(Jefferson: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers, 2000), 6.

25
Larkins, 10.

26
Ibid., 8.

27
Fine, 28.

28
James Best, who appeared with Murphy in the film Kansas Raiders (Universal International, 1950), recalls the
filming of a scene in which Murphy’s character kills another character played by actor Scott Brady this way: “I saw
a man who went through World War II and had killed a lot of guys. He was killing Scott Brady. His looks chilled
me. The hair on the back of my neck stood up because I saw a man who enjoyed killing.” Johnny D Boggs, Jesse
James and the Movies (McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers: Jefferson, 2011), 125.

29
Larkins, 28.

30
The film was, in fact, partly funded by the real-life Variety Club in order to help publicize the organization’s
efforts at combating juvenile delinquency. Graham, 161-2.

31
Salisbury, 116.

32
Lindner 244.

33
Ibid. 209.

34
Ibid. 284.

35
Lindner 287-8.

36
Graham, 177.

37
Larkins, 13.

38
Leo Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism: War and the Changing Nature of Masculinity (New York: Vintage
Books, 2003), 495.

39
Ibid., 495.

40
Graham, 248.

41
The closest Murphy would come was by playing a cavalry officer in the old West, which he did on four occasions
in his career. The frontier setting gave Murphy’s characters ample opportunity to engage in individual heroism.
Furthermore, Murphy was able to assert his individuality by defying corrupt or incompetent superior officers, which
would likely have been much more controversial in a contemporary military setting.

42
Nott, 43.

43
Graham, 179.

44
Ibid., 179.

269

45
Sue Gossett, The Films and Career of Audie Murphy (Madison: Empire Publishing, Inc., 1996), 30.

46
Graham, 40.

47
Braudy, From Chivalry to Terrorism, 497.

48
Donald Kirkley, “Glorified Guerilla,” The Sun [Baltimore, Maryland], 29 Nov 1950: 12.

49
Glueck, 7.

50
Lindner, 14.

51
This arguably references a scene in Boys Town, in which Whitey accuses Father Flanagan of trying to making him
into a “plow jockey.”

52
Lenihan, 104.

53
Guerric DeBona, “Masculinity on the Front: John Huston’s ‘The Red Badge of Courage’ (1951) Revised,”
Cinema Journal 42.2 (Winter 2003), 60.

54
Larkins, 11

55
DeBona, 72.

56
Hedda Hopper, “ ‘Red Badge of Courage’ to Star Audie Murphy,” Los Angeles Times [Los Angeles, California],
04 Aug. 1950, a6.

57
DeBona, 69.

58
Ibid., 76.

59
“ ‘Kansas Raiders’ in Color.” The Christian Science Monitor [Boston, Massachusetts]. 05 Jan 1951, 5.

60
Alex Harris, “On the Screen,” The Globe and Mail [Toronto, Ontario], 13 February 1952, 23.

61
Larkins, 59.

62
Ibid., 12-13.

63
Peter Harry Brown and Pat H. Broeske, Down at the End of Lonely Street: The Life and Death of Elvis Presley,
(New York: Dutton, 1997), 214.

64
Peter Guralnick and Ernst Jorgensen, Elvis Day by Day: The Definitive Record of His Life and Music (New York:
Ballantine Books, 1999), 145.

65
Brown and Broeske, 128.

66
Dave Marsh, Elvis (New York: Straight Arrow Publishers, Inc., 1982), 122.

67
Ibid., 122.

68
Zmijewsky, 50.

69
Brown and Broeske, 134.

270

70
Zmijewsky, 52.

71
Brown and Broeske, 145.

72
Zmijewsky, 62.

73
James L. Neibauer, The Elvis Movies (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), XIII.

74
This was not the last time this would happen. Of Presley’s next five films, two began with his character returning
from the army and a third made mention that his character had served there in the past.

75
“Film Review: G.I. Blues,” Variety 220.8 (Oct 19, 1960), 6.

76
John L. Scott, “New Elvis Presley Stars in ‘G.I. Blues,’” Los Angeles Times [Los Angeles, California], 16 Nov.
1960, C8.

77
“Film Review: G.I. Blues,” 6.

78
Zmijewsky, 64.

79
Murphy would make a few additional films that traded on his persona in interesting ways, such as The Quiet
American (United Artists, 1958) and No Name on the Bullet (Universal, 1959), but since they have little or nothing
to do with juvenile delinquency, they are beyond the scope of this project.
271

Conclusion: Delinquency and Youth Culture in the 1960’s

“Beach Party Tonight!:” The Decline of the Delinquency Film
As the 1950s gave way to the 1960s, a significant shift began to take place on the big
screen. The release of delinquency pictures by teenpic producers like AIP went into decline,
while the major studios began making more overt ventures into the subject. Both developments
suggested that the delinquency subject was losing its aura of controversy: for the majors, it was
now safe enough to discuss directly once again, while for the teenpics it was no longer relevant
enough to bother with. The era of the delinquency panic was coming to an end, and cinematic
delinquency was changing as a result.
The year 1961 saw the release of two hard-hitting delinquency films of note that were
released by a major studio, United Artists. The first, The Young Savages, was virtually a
throwback to the late 40s, based on a very similar premise to Knock on Any Door (Columbia
Pictures) from 1949. Based on the novel by Evan Hunter, who had also written the book that
provided the basis for Blackboard Jungle, the film concerns a group of impoverished Italian-
American adolescents who are accused of murder and a conscience-stricken attorney, Hank Bell
(Burt Lancaster), who had himself grown up in the same neighborhoods. Unlike Bogart’s
Andrew Morton from Knock on Any Door, Bell is a prosecuting attorney, yet he parallels Morton
in investigating the social and environmental conditions that made the accused boys into what
they became, and in asking the jury for clemency on those grounds. Unlike Knock on Any Door,
the boys’ victim was not an adult policeman, but a teenage member of a rival Puerto Rican street
gang. Perhaps taking a lesson from the teenpics, The Young Savages suggests that the delinquent
is less of a threat to adult society than to other young people. The film also acknowledges racial
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conflict, yet it does little to explore the root causes of this conflict, depicting it merely as the
inevitable result of slum life. As such, the film implicitly suggests that racism is only a problem
among the poor.
Later that same year, United Artists released an adaptation of the stage musical West Side
Story. Modeled on William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, it concerns the gang war between
the white ethnic Jets and Puerto Rican Sharks and the romance between former Jet Tony
(Richard Beymer) and Maria (Natalie Wood), the sister of the Sharks’ leader. Between songs the
Jets and Sharks fight and kill one another, and the film, like Shakespeare’s original, ends in a
tragedy that puts an end to the gang strife. West Side Story was the most commercially successful
delinquency-themed film since 1955, but what set it apart was the extent to which it was
embraced by the industry as a whole. The film swept the Academy Awards, winning ten Oscars
including Best Picture. By comparison, Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause each
received nominations but not a single win between them. The industry’s acclamation of the film
and willingness to crown it as the best of the year suggests that it no longer feared being
associated with the delinquency subject. Indeed, the film’s commercial success can probably be
attributed more to the fact that it was based on a successful stage play than the fact that it had a
delinquency theme. Delinquency on its own was no longer controversial enough to pull in
audiences, but nor was it controversial enough to dissuade a major studio from mounting a big-
budget, high-profile film dealing with the subject.
Like The Young Savages, West Side Story deals with violence that occurs between
racially segregated gangs in an impoverished neighborhood. Also like the earlier film, West Side
Story does not deeply explore the racial aspect of the gangs’ animosity. The similarity in subject
matter is also striking in its suggestion that Hollywood was turning back toward
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environmentally-focused explorations of working class delinquency after flirting with
psychology and middle class delinquency in Rebel Without a Cause. One implication may be
that working class delinquency was perceived as a safer subject for the movies. At the same time,
another implication is that middle class delinquency was no longer being perceived as a pressing
issue. Indeed, the fear of middle class delinquency was primarily fueled by fear of teen culture,
and by the early 1960s teen culture was losing its power to scare adults.
James Gilbert notes that the prevalence of popular discourses concerning juvenile
delinquency began to decline around 1958 and continued to do so into the early sixties.
“Surprisingly,” he writes, “juvenile delinquency as a criminal problem did not decline. In fact
statistics measuring adolescent criminality increased after 1960.”
1
The nation’s loss of interest in
delinquency had nothing to do with actual crime rates. Indeed, delinquency discourses had never
paid much attention to actual statistics in the first place. Instead, it was adult perceptions of
teenage culture that were changing. Gilbert writes that “gradually, the overtones of criminality
and suspicion were erased from youth culture until the early 1960s. By then, the styles and
behavior of young people were less frequently denounced than they were emulated.”
2

With the youth demographic continuing to grow, and more money to be made from
teenage audiences, more and more cultural purveyors were embracing teen culture. As this
happened, what had once been an oppositional culture slowly became more and more a part of
the mainstream. In keeping with its mainstream status, that culture began cleaning up its image.
Rock ‘n’ roll, for instance, worked to become more family-friendly. Elvis Presley’s post-army
transformation from rebel to responsible young man (in persona, at least) was symptomatic of
this change. A new generation of young singers “like Bobby Darin, Frankie Avalon, and Fabian
sported a much cleaner-cut appearance, their music less raunchy.”
3

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With suspicion of teen culture on the decline due to efforts such as these, the delinquency
panic was losing its primary source of fuel. Despite the fact that actual delinquency rates were, if
anything, going up, the subject was no longer a topic of urgent conversation. As such, the studios
had little reason to fear a parental outcry over a film like West Side Story. It should not be
surprising, though, that as delinquency ceased to be a topic of controversy for adults, it also
ceased to be a topic of interest for teenagers. After all, it was adult suspicions of teen culture that
had helped to make delinquency a hot topic for teens themselves. Films like Don’t Knock the
Rock (Columbia, 1956) and I Was a Teenage Werewolf (AIP, 1957) exploited teenage
resentments toward the adults who branded all adolescents as potential hoodlums. With adult
culture seemingly relaxing its attitudes toward teen culture, the desire to experience such overt,
showy forms of rebellion declined.
A key cinematic example of this shift is AIP’s 1963 film Beach Party. The film was born
out of director William Asher’s belief “that teenagers were bored with juvenile delinquency and
welcomed clean sex.”
4
The premise was likely inspired by Columbia’s Gidget, in which a
teenage girl experiences a sexual awakening while hanging out with surfers one summer. Beach
Party dispenses with the former film’s melodrama in favor of frivolous comedy, exploring the
(unconsummated) sexual exploits of a group of beach-dwelling teenagers.
A notable aspect of Beach Party is the total absence of parental figures. The beach
represents a true oasis of teen culture, in which the kids can play rock ‘n’ roll music, dance, and
make out to their hearts’ content. In contrast to earlier rock ‘n’ roll films, in which responsible
adults were always around to make sure the kids behaved themselves, Beach Party almost
flaunts its lack of adult supervision, suggesting a growing confidence in teen culture’s
independence and a declining concern regarding adult efforts to undermine or destroy it.
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Nevertheless, the conduct of the film’s teenagers does not stray too far from what adults would
have deemed acceptable. Although much of the film concerns the efforts of Frankie (Frankie
Avalon) to persuade his girlfriend Dolores (Annette Funicello) to have sex, Dolores is steadfast
in her refusal.
5
Unlike the female delinquents of the 1950s, Dolores represents the traditional
female role as guardian of parochial sexual mores. As such, the film suggests that teenagers are
more than capable of policing their own morality without the aid of adults.
The film does depict the generational divide, but does so in way that is distinct from
much of what came before. Bob Cummings plays Professor R.O. Sutwell, an anthropologist who
comes to the beach to study the mating habits of the teenage subculture. Sutwell compares the
teens’ rock ‘n’ roll dancing to various native rites, connecting to the invocation of African tribal
dances by the racist adult moralists of earlier teenpics, but his reaction is fascination rather than
disgust. His desire to partake in the culture results in his becoming involved in a love triangle
with Frankie and Dolores. In this film, teen culture is presented as alluring rather than repulsive
to the adult observer, whose only desire is to become a participant.
Perhaps the most notable symbol of change in the film, however, is the character of Eric
Von Zipper (Harvey Lembeck). Von Zipper is the leader of the motorcycle gang The Rats,
whose purpose in the film is generally to ruin the fun of the teenage beach-dwellers. In
costuming and behavior, Von Zipper is a clear parody of Marlon Brando’s character Johnny
Strabler from The Wild One (Columbia, 1953) – the formative image of juvenile delinquency
from the previous decade. Von Zipper, however, is portrayed as an incompetent moron – he is
clumsy, stupid, arrogant, and mindlessly destructive. He is “Marlon Brando played as a stuttering
cretin.”
6

276

Although he surrounds himself with youthful confederates, Von Zipper himself – played
by the middle-aged Lembeck – seems too old to be considered a juvenile delinquent. Yet this
may be part of the joke, as Von Zipper is, as McGee and Robertson call him, “a symbol of an
outdated rebellion.”
7
The angry, nihilistic biker-rebel of the 1950s no longer seemed relevant to a
teen culture that adults wanted to join up with rather than tear down. The beach teens reject the
confrontational style of the bikers because they don’t feel that they need it – as masters of their
own domain, they have nothing to rebel against. In a moment of optimistic confidence in teen
culture, teenagers did not fear adult authority because teen culture had seemed to take on an
authority of its own. Johnny Strabler no longer had a place in this world, except as an absurd
villain.
The optimism of Beach Party paid dividends at the box office. According to Alan
Betrock, “in many cases house records were set, and new AIP gross records were also secured.”
8

The film spawned four beach-party-themed sequels released between 1964 and 1965, as well as
spin-offs like Pajama Party (1964) and Ski Party (1965). The film had struck a chord with
teenage viewers that continued to resonate through the middle of the decade. As the decade
continued, though, changes in the culture and political climate began to cause onscreen youth
culture to once again take on a dark aspect, and for the motorcycle-riding rebel to return more
vicious than ever.

“The Shape of Things to Come:” Vietnam, Bikers, and the Political Turn
In 1966, one year after discontinuing their Beach Party series, AIP released the outlaw
biker picture The Wild Angels. Inspired by a newspaper account of the funeral of the member of
the Hell’s Angels motorcycle club that had been seen by writer/producer/director Roger Corman,
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the film details the exploits of the violent, antisocial motorcycle gang somewhat obviously called
the Angels. Led by Heavenly Blues (Peter Fonda), the gang embarks on a string of fights, sexual
assaults, and robberies that leads to Blues’ friend, the Loser (Bruce Dern) being shot and
captured by the police. The Angels abduct Loser from the hospital, but deprived of medical care
he almost immediately dies. The Angels hold a funeral for Loser who devolves into a “party” in
which gang members trash the church, display Loser’s body, and rape his widow. In the end,
Blues buries Loser alone and resigns himself to being captured by the police.
The film was a significant commercial success, and it spawned an explosion of pictures
about outlaw biker gangs by AIP and other studios alike that continued through the end of the
decade. Most followed the formula established in The Wild Angels, with a group of angry young
men who violently demonstrate their opposition to the dominant culture, only to end on a
downbeat note of defeat.
The bikers in these films probably stretch even the most permissive definition of
“juvenile delinquent.” Although their members tend to be fairly young (Fonda was 26 when The
Wild Angels was released), they are generally not defined by their youth, and their conflict with
the establishment is primarily framed in terms of cultural, rather than generational, differences.
Their form of rebellion is also rather distant from the increasingly mainstream teenage culture.
Nevertheless, the ideas and iconography of these films represent the evolution of ideas that
helped set the terms of the delinquency debate a decade earlier, and are therefore worth a brief
discussion.
One aspect that many of the biker films had in common was an implicit connection to the
Vietnam War. The United States had been involved in Vietnam for over a decade beforehand,
but in the 1960s the acceleration of the war had brought it to the public’s attention. The war was
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extremely divisive, with the opponents – many of whom were college-aged or younger – feeling
that it proved the corruption and inhumanity of the political and social establishment. According
to McGee and Robertson, the biker films “acknowledged that the Vietnam war was somehow
integrated into the actions of their protagonists.”
9
In The Wild Angels, for instance, the gang is
seen listening to a casualty report on the radio before going on the rampage. McGee and
Robertson write that the film suggests that “what is going on here is just a dress rehearsal for the
wholesale slaughter over there.”
10
In some films, such as Angels from Hell (AIP, 1968), outlaw
bikers are seen coming back from combat in Vietnam angrier and more violent than they were
when they left.
While the adults of the 1950s worried about whether the delinquent-infested youth
generation was fit to fight should the Cold War become hot, many 1960s films depicted young
people questioning whether the American establishment was worth fighting for. The outlaw
bikers’ rebellion against society is, at least partially, justified by the atrocities committed in that
society’s name overseas. That the bikers themselves commit acts of senseless violence merely
shows that atrocity begets more atrocity. Though criticism of the mainstream adult world
appeared in the juvenile delinquency films of the postwar years, the outlaw biker films take this
criticism to a new and more visceral level. They question whether gangs who fight, rape, and kill
are really morally inferior to a society that sends its young men off to die in a jungle, or that uses
napalm to wipe out whole villages of human beings.
Probably the most important and enduring film to be inspired by the outlaw biker cycle
was Easy Rider (Columbia, 1969). Although the bikers in the film are not a violent gang, the
movie nevertheless closely resembles an outlaw biker picture that has had its sensationalism
toned down. As such, it represents an attempt to bring the outlaw biker cycle into the
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mainstream. The film follows two motorcyclists, Wyatt (Peter Fonda again) and Billy (Dennis
Hopper, who also directed) who go out on the road in order to escape the establishment. After
making some money smuggling cocaine, the duo travel to New Orleans for Mardi Gras, meeting
an assortment of other misfits and social outcasts on the way, and sharing their drugs. They make
it to Mardi Gras, but only Billy seems satisfied by their trip. The film ends on an appropriately
downbeat note when the two are gunned down by pair of rednecks who are offended by the
rebellion that the two symbolize.
Easy Rider was a major commercial hit, as well as a critical success. The film is
indicative of the declining divide between the teenage and mainstream audiences. Indeed, the
film seems contrived to appeal to both. Thomas Doherty writes that it “resembles nothing so
much as an over-the-hill teenpic featuring actors adolescent in attitude only.”
11
The film
acknowledges the desirability of the rebellious, antisocial lifestyle that had previously been
associated primarily with youth. In its ability to make an AIP-type premise palatable to general
audiences, Easy Rider anticipates the developments that the film industry would undergo over
the next decade, in which teenpics would become “an industry staple, if not the dominant
production strategy for theatrical movies.”
12

Another notable aspect of Easy Rider is how its depiction of drugs contrasts with that of
the teenpic a decade earlier. For most of the postwar era, teenage drug use had been the exclusive
field of the exploitation industry. Films like The Flaming Teen-Age (1956) and Hooked! (1957)
took their cues from classical exploitation films like Reefer Madness (1936) in depicting even
mild drugs like marijuana as dangerous corruptors which destroyed anyone who came in contact
with them. By 1958, however, teenpics like Albert Zugsmith’s High School Confidential
(distributed by MGM) and AIP’s The Cool and the Crazy began dealing with teen drug use as
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well. Though less graphic than the exploitation films, these teenpics shared the former’s didactic
moralism and insistence that all illegal drugs were a dangerous threat to teenage minds and
bodies.
Easy Rider, in contrast, embraces the rampant drug use of its protagonists. Marijuana,
cocaine, and LSD are depicted not as threats, but as the enablers of youthful rebellion. Their drug
use helps to mark Wyatt and Billy as nonconformists who refuse to accept the constraints placed
on them by the so-called establishment. Indeed, drugs literally facilitate their rebellion, as their
sale of cocaine is what finances their road trip. That a film that so openly condones drug use
should achieve such critical and commercial success shows how much the taboos against drug
use had eroded within just a decade’s time, and it indicates that ways that even the seemingly
unsavory aspects of youth culture were gaining a degree of mainstream acceptance.
Although The Wild Angels is generally credited with inspiring the outlaw biker cycle, it
was preceded into theaters by almost a year by another biker film with a very overt connection to
Vietnam. Russ Meyer’s Motorpsycho (Eve Productions, 1965) is not typically considered to be a
teenpic, as it has its origins in the exploitation industry proper. Towards the end of the 1950s,
classical exploitation had transitioned into a new, modern exploitation industry frequently
referred to as “sexploitation” for its emphasis on sex and nudity. Indeed, Meyer – who wrote,
produced, and directed Motorpsycho and released it through his own company – is credited with
helping to spearhead the change. His film The Immoral Mr. Tease (Pad-Ram Enterprises, 1959)
created the “nudie-cutie” genre, discarding the pretense of educational value in favor of brazen
and unapologetic sexual content.
13
With Motorpsycho, Meyer chose to emphasize violence
instead of sex, but the film was still aimed at the same “mature” audiences as his sexploitation
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films. Still, Motorpsycho bears a strong resemblance to the outlaw biker films that followed it – a
further indication of the breakdown of age barriers in film at the time.
The film’s titular “psycho” is a motorcycle-riding punk known only as the Brahmin
(Steve Oliver) who, with his three-man gang, roams the countryside beating, robbing, and raping
those he encounters. The Brahmin is stated to have been a veteran of the Vietnam War, and his
brutality is implied to be a result of his experiences. The gang is eventually pursued into the
desert by Corey Maddox (Alex Rocco) and Ruby Bonner (Haji), the vengeful spouses of two of
their victims. As the stress of the chase mounts, the Brahmin seemingly loses his grip on reality,
believing himself back in Vietnam and killing one of his own followers for allegedly trying to
desert. Eventually, the Brahmin uses a rifle to pin Corey and Ruby down on a hillside. He refers
to the location as a “rice paddy” and addresses the protagonists as “commies,” suggesting they
send their faulty weaponry “back to Peking” and speaking in mock pidgin-English. He
approaches the pair accompanied by militaristic drum music on the soundtrack, but Corey
manages to blow him up with dynamite.
Motorpsycho makes for a striking contrast with the delinquency films of the previous
decade, particularly those starring Audie Murphy. The Murphy films had used casting to draw an
implicit connection between the delinquent and soldier. Although this was done in part to raise
questions about the dividing line between heroism and delinquency, Murphy’s casting was also
intended to reassure audiences about the delinquent’s conduct. As long as he was played by the
greatest hero of World War II, the onscreen delinquent was perceived as having redeeming
qualities regardless of his crimes.
In Motorpsycho, on the other hand, the figures of the delinquent and the soldier are
overtly combined in order to make the character even more horrifying. Critically, the Brahmin
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menaces the film’s heroes while under the impression that they are enemy combatants and he is
doing his soldierly duty. The youthful criminal is rendered threatening because, not in spite of,
the fact that he resembles a soldier. Indeed, he is a threat to the very home that he was
supposedly defending in the war, and must be completely destroyed.
The Brahmin demonstrates how much attitudes towards soldiers had changed between
World War II and the Vietnam War. Whereas the Murphy films had been able to count on the
redemptive power of the soldier image, the Brahmin is not expected to receive any such
redemption. Whereas the Murphy films had to subtly question whether the delinquent and the
soldier were two sides of the same coin, Motorpsycho draws a clear connection, and equivalence,
between them. Whereas Murphy had concealed the effects of his PTSD, the Brahmin is depicted
as a disturbed, insane monster as if that was the natural result of sending a young man off to
Vietnam. For many Americans, the Vietnam War was a monstrous, corrupting influence on the
boys that fought it, erasing whatever distinction there might have been between soldier and
delinquent.
The division over the Vietnam War was a defining issue through the rest of the decade,
and it helped to set the new terms for generational division. Though Americans of all age groups
opposed the war, it was young people who were seemingly the most vocal in their criticism of an
establishment that would perpetuate such an atrocity. Combined with liberal positions on issues
like civil rights and women’s rights, young people were now perceived as agitating not merely
for cultural autonomy, but for political power.
This political conflict made its way into a range of movies, but none more extreme and
sensational than AIP’s Wild in the Streets (1968). Released the same year as the contentious and
violent Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Wild in the Streets imagines a fantastical
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turn of events by which youth becomes the dominant power in the country. Christopher Jones
stars as Max Flatow, a middle-class boy whose teenage family life resembles an exaggerated
version of Jim Stark’s from Rebel Without a Cause (Warner Bros., 1955); indeed, Jones was
likely cast because of his resemblance to James Dean. Max’s father is a spineless wimp, while
his mother (Shelley Winters) is a domineering harpy of a woman. Instead of becoming a rebel
without a cause, however, Max runs away from home, changes his name to Max Frost, and
becomes a rock ‘n’ roll singer with a massive, cult-like following among teenagers. Max is
disillusioned with the older generation, feeling that they are to blame for the country’s troubles,
particularly Vietnam. Declaring that he doesn’t want to live to be thirty, he declares, “the only
thing that blows your mind when you’re thirty is getting guys to kill other guys, only in another
city in another country where you don’t see it.” Mustering his multitude of loyal young
followers, Max stages a series of violent protests in order to force Congress to lower the voting
age, and the age requirement for all government offices, to fourteen years old. Max succeeds
after dosing all of Congress with LSD and, naturally, is subsequently elected president. He
institutes a policy of mandatory retirement at thirty, with everyone over thirty-five sent to
concentrations camps where they are kept perpetually high on LSD; that way, “they’re not gonna
hurt you, and they’re not gonna hurt me.” For the film’s young revolutionaries, LSD becomes a
literal weapon to employ against the adult establishment. The film, though, ends with a group of
pre-adolescent boys resolving to “put everybody over ten outta business.”
Wild in the Streets, once again, shows how much things had changed since the previous
decade. In the 1950s, juvenile delinquents were a potential threat to safety, morality, domesticity,
and national security. In the 1960s, youth seemingly threatened to usurp the power of the
establishment itself. Despite the carefree optimism of the Beach Party series, generational
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conflict had not disappeared, only changed. It was now being fought primarily in the political
arena, rather than the cultural one. Of course, young people did continue to be criticized on
cultural grounds, but no longer was youth’s right to a culture of its own being disputed. In a
sense, juvenile delinquency had been the byproduct of growing pains, as adolescents searched
for their own independent identity. Now that the teenage identity had been established, youth
was seeking to change the world rather than simply carve out its own piece of it. Compared to
the vision conjured by Wild in the Streets, the threat of juvenile delinquency seemed almost
quaint.

“Live Fast, Die Young, and Have a Good-Looking Corpse:” Final Thoughts
Although the rebellion that they represented would eventually be supplanted, the postwar
juvenile delinquents remain an important part in the development of the youth identity in the 20
th

century, and the cinema played a critical role in the formation and development of the delinquent
image. As this project has shown, the postwar delinquency films were a more diverse and
complicated body of work than they are often credited with being. Although the major studio
pictures like The Wild One (Columbia, 1953), Blackboard Jungle (MGM, 1955), and Rebel
Without a Cause (Warner Bros., 1955) examined delinquency with more overt artistry, it was the
small-time teenpic producers and studios who picked up the torch when the majors were afraid to
push the subject any further. Whereas the earlier films’ appeals to teenagers had been almost
incidental, the teenpics refined the strategies pioneered by the majors into a laser-like focus
aimed directly at teenagers themselves. Teens had been drawn to films like Blackboard and
Rebel because, in the films’ attempts to expose the problems and dangers of unbridled, out-of-
control youth, they finally gave real-life teens a depiction of teenage life that they could relate to.
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Virtually all the teenpics, whether they painted their teenagers as monsters or as misunderstood,
took their cues from these earlier onscreen delinquents. The teenpics, in turn, provided the major
studios with strategies for tapping into the teenage market, as in the case of the Elvis Presley
pictures; eventually, teen-directed films would come to dominate the industry. The juvenile
delinquency film, then, can be said to have played an essential role in Hollywood’s transition
from the classical, studio-dominated era to the modern blockbuster era.
The delinquency films are often thought of as schlocky and exploitative, apart perhaps
from a small handful of “canonical” films like Wild One, Blackboard, and Rebel. Yet, as this
project has attempted to show, despite their general tendency to avoid taking risks, delinquency
films can still be the site of artistry – or, at least, of interesting thinking. Films like I Was the
Teenage Werewolf (AIP, 1957) and the early Audie Murphy films for Allied Artists and
Universal ask real, complicated questions about youth’s relationship to contentious problems
facing them and the nation as a whole. They question societal notions of simplistic binaries like
good boy vs. bad boy and delinquent vs. soldier. In doing so, they somewhat subversively make
a case for the complexities of American youth. Furthermore, while films like So Young, So Bad
(United Artists, 1950), Teenage Doll (Allied Artists, 1957), and Girls Town (MGM, 1959) end
with a return to the adult mainstream’s version of the status quo, they do so only after asking
questions about the restrictions and demands that are forced on teenage girls.
Indeed, as this project has attempted to show, juvenile delinquency films are valuable
because they go beyond simple depictions of misbehavior and crime to engage with some of the
most fundamental issues of the postwar period. Delinquency was a symptom, the adult
mainstream seemed to argue, of a teen culture that was warping young minds and taking the
place of traditional, parental forms of authority; of a destabilization of gender roles that left boys
286

weak and effeminate, and girls wild and indecent; of a failure of the nationalistic, patriotic spirit
that was so sorely needed in the fight against Communism. In all cases, the problem came down
to the fact that teenagers were not becoming what adults expected them to be. Yet from their own
perspectives, teenagers were doing nothing so radical or dangerous: they merely wanted a
culture, and a music, that allowed them to express their independence and unique identities; they
wanted to push against the old constraints on what boys and girls were allowed to do and not do;
they wanted to resist having to risk or sacrifice themselves in a Cold War that they had no part in
starting and which many failed to see the justice in. Like the Jets in West Side Story who make
fun of adult efforts to explain and classify them in the song “Gee, Officer Krupke,” postwar
teenagers chafed under the adult attempts to define who they were and where they were going.
Teens tried to resist these definitions; those who tried to hard were labeled juvenile delinquents.
On some level, the Hollywood filmmakers of the period understood that the delinquency
panic was defined by these two conflicting viewpoints. Although their methods and approaches
may have differed wildly, all the delinquency films ultimately strove to somehow bring these
viewpoints together. After all, though Blackboard Jungle ends with the adult authority figure
successfully converting the high school delinquents to his way of thinking, he can do so only
after studying their problems and motivations. Likewise, though Don’t Knock the Rock
(Columbia, 1956) ends with the teenagers and their allies triumphing over the adults’ anti-rock
prejudices, they do so by crafting a rhetorical appeal contrived to speak to the adult sensibility.
Tony Rivers may die at the end of I Was a Teenage Werewolf, but teenage and adult viewers
alike can come away with an understanding of both what motivated him, and how he went
wrong. Juvenile delinquency was a controversial subject, but by acknowledging both adult and
287

teenage perspectives, the filmmakers could be confident that everyone would come away at least
partially satisfied.
As I hope this project has shown, the juvenile delinquency film was a critical part of both
the culture and the film industry during the postwar era. It was the generational divide over
onscreen delinquency that helped the film industry to begin to understand the teenage market,
which in turn saw teenage tastes being catered to onscreen for the first time. The delinquency
film became a setting for the working out of some of the most contentious issues facing youth in
the postwar era, and it helped set the terms by which teenagers and adults looked at and
understood one another during this unstable period. Though they might have played it safe for
the most part, delinquency films were willing to ask questions about culture, class, race, gender,
and war that often went unacknowledged in the cinema of the time. They remain an invaluable
resource for understanding the problems and conflicts that confronted the culture, and the film
industry, at the time they were made. And, for all their sensationalism and unreality, they provide
a glimpse of what it was like to grow up in a time when rebellion was a cause all to itself.

1
James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1986), 14.

2
Ibid., 14.

3
Mark Thomas McGee and R.J. Robertson, The J.D. Films: Juvenile Delinquency in the Movies (Jefferson:
McFarland & Company, Inc., 1982), 97.

4
Ibid., 99.

5
McGee and Robertson refer to the film as “more or less a teenage version of Pillow Talk (1959),” McGee and
Robertson, 99.

6
Jim Morton, “Beach Party Films,” in Incredibly Strange Films, eds. V. Vale and Andrea Juno (San Francisco:
Re/Search Publications, 1986), 147.

7
McGee and Robertson, 99.

8
Alan Betrock, The I Was a Teenage Juvenile Delinquent Rock ‘n’ Roll Horror Beach Party Movie Book: A
Complete Guide to the Teen Exploitation Film, 1954-1969 (St. Martin’s Press: New York, 1986), 102.

288

9
McGee and Robertson, 127.

10
Ibid., 127.

11
Thomas Doherty, Teenagers & Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Boston: Unwin
Hyman, 1988), 234.

12
Ibid., 231.

13
Mike Quarles, Down and Dirty: Hollywood’s Exploitation Filmmakers and Their Movies (Jefferson: McFarland &
Company, Inc., 1993), 43-45.
289

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Asset Metadata

Creator Ashmore, Robert J. (author)

Core Title Bad boys, reform school girls, and teenage werewolves: the juvenile delinquency film in postwar America

School School of Cinematic Arts

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinematic Arts (Critical Studies)

Publication Date 07/21/2016

Defense Date 06/08/2016

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Audie Murphy,Hollywood studio system,juvenile delinquency,OAI-PMH Harvest,postwar teen culture,rock and roll,teenpic

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Jewell, Richard B. (committee chair), Braudy, Leo (committee member), Casper, Drew (committee member)

Creator Email rashmore@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c40-271564

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