Mean Teens of America

Why were there so many juvenile delinquents in the 1950s? Given the spate of TV shows and movies about the issue, for most Americans the question wasn't the existence of juvenile delinquency but its cause. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, believed the decline of the church and family was to blame.Dr. Frederick Wertham, author of the infamous 1954 treatise Seduction of the Innocent, was of the opinion that comic books were the culprit.⁵ Some members of Congress, including Arkansas Representative E.C. Gathings, thought "many radio and television programs, as well as certain scurrilous books and comics" were the wellspring of corruption, as he claimed in an address to the U.S. House of Representatives on June 21, 1951.³ But, as America grappled with the issue through popular culture, the most common argument for the rise of delinquency was a collapse of authority, a situation that two famous films of the time, Blackboard Jungle and I Was a Teenage Werewolf, explored, albeit in different fashions.

Of the two, Blackboard Jungle is the more conventional, in both approach and setting. Based on a novel by Evan Hunter, Jungle was released on January 1, 1955. In its then-shocking depiction of teen violence and rebellion-as exemplified by the attempted rape of one teacher, the gang beating of two more and the climactic confrontation in a classroom between an armed Vic Morrow and a wounded Glenn Ford as the heroic teacher-Jungle immediately grabbed notoriety, underlining what Variety critic Robert J. Landry called "a suggestion of pitiable waste of human material and promise."⁴ The New York Times, on the other hand, called it "social dynamite," which better captured the mood of the public.

Part of the reason Jungle stood out so strongly was its depiction of teens on their own, with no authority to guide or help. In a poignant scene in a garage, a young Sidney Poitier tells Ford's character, Mr. Dadier, that he gave up on education when he realized that nobody cared about it: "In the beginning, I tried," Poitier says. "Real hard. But what's the use? Nobody gives a hoot. Not the other fellas. Not the teachers. Not my folks, either." More than the questions of race or class that Jungle touches on, this lack of authority emerges as the central theme of the film. The teachers have given up, the parents aren't around or don't take a role, the film says; what else is left for them but crime? This view, echoed by Hoover and, to a lesser extent, Wertham, became one of the common conceits of Hollywood with regards to juvenile delinquency.

To a lesser extent, 1957's I Was A Teenage Werewolf shares this conceit, although surprisingly Werewolf, despite being much lower in budget and arguably talent, takes a broader view of the issue. The movie focuses on a single teenager, played by Michael Landon, who is bright but bedeviled with an intense temper. Verbally abusive, prone to fistfights, in trouble with the law, Landon's character makes a conceptual break from the usual Hollywood juvenile delinquent when he tells his girlfriend, "I say things. I do things. I don't know why." Here is a different tack, the possibility of delinquency as a disease, what critics like Joseph Reed have argued is central to the genre Werewolf belongs to, horror.²

This is where Werewolf begins to step away from the then-conventional treatment of authority in relation to delinquency, as shown by Jungle. The film sets up the traditional figures of authority in a teenager's life-parents, police, school-and displays them as uncaring, bullying or ineffectual; the police harass Landon's character Tony, eventually telling him to see a psychologist, while his single father comes to stand as a symbol of ineffectuality (when informed of his son's crimes near the end of the film, he tries to rationalize them by saying, "Maybe I should've remarried" ²). However, the film plays a trick on viewers' expectations. More traditionally structured films, such as Jungle, show the absence of authority as being the soil in which criminal behavior flourishes; Werewolf suggests that authority is sometimes more corrupting and destructive than the so-called criminal behavior.

Despite being set up as a sociopathic lout, Tony does as he's told and goes to visit the psychologist, Dr. Brandon, which turns out to be a mistake. Dr. Brandon is the quintessential mad scientist-who makes his purpose known with a monologue that begins, "I'm going to transform him, and unleash the savage instincts that lie hidden within . . ."¹-who proceeds to use hypnotism and drugs to regress Tony to a werewolf-like beast, who then sallies forth to attack and kill two of his fellow students in a pair of effective filmed sequences (one in a park, the other shot in a high school gym). With Werewolf, then, viewers see the root cause of the (admittedly extreme) delinquency is due not to ignoring authority, but following a corrupt one, one rooted in one of the groups that generated the deepest ambivalence in the 1950s: scientists, which became the focus for many of the period's deep anxieties, particularly in the aftermath of developments such as nuclear testing.⁵

In both movies, the development of the criminal youth, the feared juvenile delinquents, does not happen in a vacuum. Withdrawn parents, uncaring teachers, indifferent or hostile legal authority; these factors are all present in these films and many others, and despite the presence of other mitigating factors, this vacuum holds firm as the root cause. Whether you're a knife-packing hoodlum or an incipient lycanthrope, Hollywood told America, you're headed for trouble without a firm guiding hand to lead you there. Despite their different approaches, Blackboard Jungle and I Was A Teenage Werewolf affirm this belief in their narratives, and thus share a common value.

1 Briggs, Joe Bob. "It's a '50s Thing - You Wouldn't Understand." San Francisco Chronicle. 23 June 1991: p. 30.

2 Hendershot, Cyndy. "Monster at the Soda Shop: Teenagers and Fifties Horror Films." Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture 10: March 2001. Available at http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue10/features/monster/default-nf.htm. Accessed 8 November 2005

3 Hoerrner, Keisha L. "The Forgotten Battles: Congressional Hearings on Television Violence in the 1950s." Web Journal of Mass Communications Research 2:3 June 1999. Available at http://www.scripps.ohiou.edu/wjmcr/vol02/2-3a-B.htm. Accessed 8 November 2005

4 Landry, Robert J. "Film Review: Rebel Without a Cause." Variety: 26 October 1955. Available at http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=Variety100&reviewid=VE1117794353&content=jump&jump=review&category=1935&cs=1. Accessed 8 November 2005

5 Mintz, S. (2003). "New Directions in Post-War Film." Digital History. Available at
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/hollywood_history.cfm#postwar. Accessed 8 November 2005