YOUTH RUNS WILD (1944) B/W 67m dir: Mark Robson

w/Bonita Granville, Kent Smith, Jean Brooks, Glen Vernon, Vanessa Brown, Ben Bard, Mary Servoss, Arthur Shields, Lawrence Tierney, Dickie Moore, Johnny Walsh, Rod Rogers, Elizabeth Russell, Tessa Brind

In frustration, neglected adolescents strike back at their parents and the authorities. Their parents are so busy with the war effort that their offspring become casualties of WWII on the homefront. Yes, this is another Lewton-produced film, but its listing here is more for the interest of seeing a Lewton film that is rarely screened than in the excellence of the movie itself.

Quoting from Joel E. Siegel's The Reality of Terror: "James Agee wrote of YOUTH RUNS WILD: 'Not even its faults are the usual Hollywood kind: it is gawky, diffuse, rather boyscoutish in its social attitudes (but it does have attitudes); often as not its characters go wooden (but they never turn into ivory-soap sculpture); too often the photography goes velvety (but always in earnestly striving for a real, not a false, atmosphere and never striving for a sumptuous look). When the picture is good --- and its overall inadequacy flashes with good all through --- you are seeing pretty nearly the only writing and acting and directing and photography in Hollywood which is at all concerned with what happens inside real and particular people among real and particular objects --- not with how a generalised face can suggest a generalised emotion in a generalised light.'

"One can appreciate Agee's enthusiasm for YOUTH RUNS WILD. In the midst of Hollywood's wartime fantasies of heroism and romance, Lewton set about making a small, serious film about the effects of war and how they were altering, even shattering, the social order of the United States. His means were simple --- a series of connected vignettes about wartime youth shot in a flat, neo-realistic style. Such an earnest effort surely merited applause and encouragement.

"Apart from its rather singular view of wartime life in small-town America, however, YOUTH RUNS WILD is barely watchable today. Lewton himself despised the film, which the studio had heavily cut and re-shot, and asked to have his name removed from the credits. (The request was denied.) One of the major plot-lines --- a brutalised teenage boy is forced to kill his sadistic father --- was totally excised, and most of the film's carefully distinguishing touches were removed. What is left --- a series of cliched dialogues and situations shot in an undisguisable studio back lot --- cannot be recommended.

"The cast is virtually a Lewton stock company --- Jean Brooks, Kent Smith, Glenn Vernon, Ben Bard, Arthur Shields and Elizabeth Russell. Lewton's screenplay, written with John Fante and Ardel Wray, is an improvement over the completed film, but is none the less below his usual standard. His sensibility was probably too baroque and antiquarian to explore successfully so contemporary a problem as delinquency. This is not to say that the film is not, as Agee indicated, likeable and deeply felt, but amiability and sincerity can only carry a film so far. By the film's conclusion --- a studio-added documentary montage demonstrating the success of a youth recreation centre programme in Illinois --- one's generosity and good nature have been stretched to the limit.

"THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE proved that Lewton was able to deal with youth very successfully when allowed to treat children of his own class and experience in a more literary form. But the woodenness of YOUTH RUNS WILD solemnly resists taking on the look and feel of life, however noble the producer's intentions. Indeed, the only hint of youthful feeling in the film is Lewton's joke on himself. When a young couple go to a neighbourhood movie, the showcases are literally plastered with posters advertising past Lewton productions."

From the Turner Classic Movies website (www.tcm.com), this 2004 article about the film by Jay S. Steinberg:

"Over the years, an appreciative cult has continued to flourish around the remarkable flock of moody, minimalist chillers created during the WWII years at RKO under the aegis of producer Val Lewton. In the relatively short time-span from Cat People (1942) to Bedlam (1946), Lewton and his directors were responsible for no less than nine genre classics. The Lewton unit films famously eschewed the marquee monster approach of Universal in favor of using lighting, camerawork and the power of suggestion to create a palpable sense of dread.

"The semi-exploitative social commentary film Youth Runs Wild (1944), however, was a bit of an anomaly in Lewton's career. That may be because the subject matter is so far afield from the rest of Lewton's output. Ironically, Lewton had lobbied hard for a non-horror project, and was handed one that the RKO brass hoped would match such sensationalistic past successes as Edward Dmytryk's Hitler's Children (1943) and Behind the Rising Sun (1943). Another reason may be Lewton's own notorious disavowal of the finished work, which the studio heavily doctored after a disastrous test screening. Still, there is much to commend the film, particularly for the perspective it grants on a prevalent social ill of its era.

"Inspired by a Look magazine article and mounted under the working title of Are These Our Children?, the scenario dealt with the steady increase of juvenile delinquency in the U.S. caused by the upsurge in parental absenteeism due to the war effort. The drama unfolds as two working-class households are depicted. Mary Hauser (Jean Brooks), a young wife awaiting her wounded husband's return from service, lives with his hard-working parents. Their odd hours mean that she spends nearly as much time parenting her own toddler as she does being a surrogate to her teenage brother-in-law Frankie (Glenn Vernon) who's beginning to have trouble with truancy.

"Amongst Frankie's distractions is his new girlfriend, Sarah Taylor (Tessa Brind), whose home life makes Frankie's seem normal by contrast. Her loutish parents (Ben Bard, Elizabeth Russell) keep her pressed into endless household service, and prefer to spend whatever downtime they have partying. These kids are ripe for temptation, which comes in the form of the sleazy young tire bootlegger Larry Duncan (Lawrence Tierney) and his too-easy companion Toddy (Bonita Granville). It isn't long before Frankie is drifting into tire theft, and Sarah moves in with Toddy to begin apprenticeship as a B-girl. When Frankie's brother Danny (Kent Smith) finally arrives home, he pours his energies into bringing some semblance of order to both his family and the community at large.

"Lewton began with the best of intentions on Youth Runs Wild, offering a consultancy to Ruth Clifton, an Illinois teenager who instituted a youth center movement in her hometown in response to the problem and inspired others nationwide to do the same. The preproduction ballyhoo, however, only drew the attention of the U.S. State Department, which voiced its own reservations about the subject matter as being detrimental to the nation's security and morale. 'Lewton argued that the intent of the film was to draw attention to a national problem and help bring about measures to solve it, which would do the country more good than harm,' Edmund G. Bansak wrote in his biography Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career (McFarland & Co.) 'RKO decided not to pull the film from active production, but because of its controversial subject matter, Lewton was given more supervision than usual, much to his displeasure.'

"The studio renamed the project The Dangerous Age for release. After a preview marred by the antics of a loud drunk, a jittery RKO yanked the film back for extensive reworking. An entire subplot involving one teenage boy's murder of his abusive father was dropped completely. The conflicts of the story, and the greater issues that they raised, wound up getting resolved a little too neatly. Lewton's subsequent demand to have his name removed from the picture was denied by RKO. While Youth Runs Wild won't likely find a spot in the upper tier of his legacy, it remains an earnest attempt to address a significant problem that still echoes in society generations later."