Frühreife Generation

Contrary to the lurid poster and title, The Explosive Generation is an enlightened, sensitive, and even-handed treatment of the issues involved in attempting to include a sexual education curriculum in high schools in the early 1960's. William Shatner is sensitive, realistic, gentle, and winning as the teacher trying to his best only to find his words and methods distorted by those with other agendas.

Patty McCormack (known for the Bad Seed, Kathy O, the Miniskirt Mob, and the Ropers) is quite good as the ingenue made to feel suddenly uncomfortable about her own sexuality in increasingly tense and challenging times. 50's TV fans will enjoy seeing Bud from Father Knows Best (Billy Gray) as one of the students. This is truly worth seeing both as a movie and as a history lesson.

A high school teacher (Wiliam Shatner) gets in trouble when he tries to teach a class in sex education.

This was the directing debut of Buzz Kulik, who went on to make the cult classic "Bad Ronald" as well as several episodes of "Twilight Zone" (though not, oddly, the ones with William Shatner).

I had low expectations for this film and only watched it because today was Shatner's 82nd birthday. Seemed like a good time to check out career highlights. And this one is a bit of a stunner.

For being 1961, which is really more the 1950s than the 1960s, it has a very honest look at sex and the idea that high school teenagers engage in sexual activity. While times have changed and kids today are certainly more "free" than fifty years ago, it is nice to see a film that actually addressed the subject rather than pretending it did not exist.

From the title I was expecting some fluffy 50's style juvenile delinquency. Actually, for folks wishing to bridge the gap between conformist youth 50's style and the rebellious 60's youth, this is a good flick to catch. 50's teacher Shatner is tired of processing his high school classes into dull adult conformity. So, he tries one day to get them to discuss topics that interest them apart from the settled curriculum. It just so happens that many of the kids attended an all-night stay-over at a beach house where many boy-girl things happened. Thus sex is upper-most for many, even though that's not fit subject matter outside of hygiene class. Still, teacher Shatner wants to fudge precedent and thus has them write about their concerns. However, one thing leads to another and the innovative-minded teacher's job is jeopardized once parents learn of the assignment and take their traditionalist concerns to the principal. Things reach a climax when the kids, hungering for treatment of their personal issues, react to Shatner's dismissal.

In many ways the script confronts the cultural conformity of the 50's with issues simmering beneath the outward calm. Among them-- education is more than simply preparing students for adult-level jobs; sex is as much a personal issue as a parental one; pressure to conform is reinforced by profits at the business level (Dunne's used car lot); real reform only comes about through mass action.

There may be more, but these are issues brought to the fore by what amounts to a daring script for its time (1961). It's also revealing that the movie was produced by independents and not a big studio. Anyway, the acting is skillfully unmannered and doesn't overshadow the important topics, while the staging uses location shots rather than studio sets giving the results a better sense of realism, even though I found the upshot to be a little too "Hollywood". All in all, the movie may be obscure; still, the 90-minutes reflects a significant undercurrent in the evolution of modern American culture. After all, Vietnam may have triggered the youth explosion, but the fuse was smoldering long before as the movie providentially suggests.

The Explosive Generation is a harbinger of things to come. Little did they know about student protests in 1961. The best that kids could come up with as a protest concern is the dismissal of a popular English teacher. This was way before an unpopular war, a slew of assassinations, and the spread of drugs. This was before half of the Sixties was over.

These kids are as normal a group of Eisenhower era teens as you can find. But when William Shatner asks them about topics they want to discuss in his class and Patty McCormack mentions sex and not in the hygiene manual way it all mushrooms from there.

The parents of these kids particularly Arch Johnson who is McCormack's father get hysterical when their kids want to discuss grownup topics. When Shatner is canned, the protesters led by McCormack, Lee Kinsolving, Suzi Carnell and Billy Gray get creative in their protest. They would have made the kids who sat in in Columbia later in the decade proud.

The Explosive Generation isn't exactly atomic in its impact. More like a few pounds of TNT. Still those nostalgic for the era and its music will like it.

Progressive teacher Peter Gifford (William Shatner) allows the students in his class to write essays about anything they want. Most write about sex and their feelings about it. One student tells her mother, other parents find out, go crazy about their kids talking about sex in school (this WAS 1961) and order the principal (Edward Platt!!!) to fire Gifford. He does but the students led by Bobby (Billy Grey), Dan (Lee Kinsolving) and Janet (Patricia McCormack) decide to fight back. But will they win?

This film is laughably dated but still is not bad at all. The kids naivety is actually pretty interesting and the parents overreaction is convincing. This could have become a camp classic but competence at every level makes it work. The acting is pretty good--this is before Shatner became full of himself and it's amusing to see McCormack all grown up from "The Bad Seed". However Billy Grey is TERRIBLE in his role. And look for a young Beau Bridges in a few scenes. It's well-written (and based on a true incident) and I really liked how the students fought back in a non-violent fashion. Also well-directed in stark black & white. It also treats the teenagers (and parents) with respect. The ending was a little TOO goody-goody but still worked.

Worth seeing as a (I think) pretty accurate look at teen life back in 1961. Recommended.