The Careless Years

Dean Stockwell and Natalie Trundy are high-school seniors who are very much in love. They're also good people -- well, she is -- so they decide to get married. When they tell their parents what they're going to do, that's when the shouting starts.

In its day, the first feature directed by Arthur Hiller was undoubtedly called "sensitive", and it reminds me of some of the arguments around my household almost half a century ago.. but at lower volume (in the movie). It certainly makes an effort to be honest within its Production Code limits. It indicates the reciprocal yearnings, to be young ad free of responsibilities, ad to be accepted as an adult visually, particularly with the woman, via clothes, with Miss Trundy and her screen mother, Barbara Billingsly, trying on the same dress in a changing room.

The movie is cramped a little by the Production Code, but it was clearly made in good faith. If its 1950s assumptions seem a trifle dull more than sixty years later, there's a speech early on about the effects of the Depression on peoples' plans. Sometimes a little dullness is nice after too much excitement.

To me, I am always taken with dramas about a rich girl falling for a fine, yet poor boy. And this movie is just that way, and is very heart-warming.

At a party one night at the rich girl's house, a teenager does fall for the rich girl, and she for him. (Dean Stockwell, who had been a capable movie actor from his childhood, performs his acting feat well in this movie.) It isn't all too long before the two want to get married. The boy's father is not for this, and neither is the girl's mother; Barbara Billingsley, the "Beaver"'s mother, is accomplished as the girl's mother here. While I was taken with the movie, in some places, though not many, there is a bit of frustration. However, the story does have a positive resolve, I feel, and the point of the potential problems of a teen-age marriage are expressed well in this cinematic work.

When we talk about great male actors, how many times is Dean Stockwell mentioned? Dude worked 70+ years in the entertainment industry. This film proves why he lasted so long.

Typical mid-50s teen romance, yet tackles important topics. It's Mrs. Cleaver before Hugh Beaumont got ahold of her. Worth the watch if you're into that kind of thing.

There's no better, as far as I know, telling of sexual repression in 1950s America than Elia Kazan's Splendor In The Grass with Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood. That was a big budget film, with an Academy Award winning script (William Inge).

But, The Careless Years deserves an honorable mention.

Produced four years earlier, from a John Howard Lawson script, this film feels like a short character study of two teens falling in love and having difficulty repressing their physical attraction for one another.

The Careless Years is aptly directed by Arthur Hiller. Even though he was directing his first film, Hiller took a firm hold of the material and told it without grandiosity, focused on the sexual mores of the time and the misery experienced by young people.

Some might be bothered by the methodical (slow-moving) nature of Hiller's direction. But, Dean Stockwell and Natalie Trundy, who, reportedly, was only 16 during filming, handle the material well.

Stockwell, offers a James Dean-like performance as the lower-middle class teen whose intense sexual feelings lead him to make poor decisions.

The script, predictably, given the screenwriter, introduces class differences, however, without making a political statement. Lawson was a member of the Hollywood Ten, a group of moviemaking professionals blacklisted because of their affiliation with the Communist Party. This was his last script.

Stockwell's father, played well by John Larch, is a hard-working blue collar man who has toiled to save money to have his son go to college. When reason with his son fails the two have an intense physical confrontation. When Trundy's parents, the mother is played by Barbara Billingsley (Leave It To Beaver), try reason with their daughter and when that fails they suggest they go to their summer home. But, they never take on the cliched snobbish suburban elites' approach.

Approach the film with low expectations and, maybe, like me, you'll be surprised by its nuanced approach to the topic.

The girls are all blonde and the boys all clean-cut. It is 1957, the peak of those ten years of innocence between the end of the Korean war and the Kennedy assassination. The biggest concern of middle-class white youth is getting a job and "settling down". Jobs are plentiful, Ike's in the White House, and marriage takes care of the sex problem. This earnest little movie rivets on that last element. It's like a one-note laser. The kids are in heat and only marriage is acceptable. But are they responsible enough, adult enough. Stockwell and Trundy say they are, but their parents being certifiably respectable and responsible say they're not. The conflict, I'm sure, resonated from malt shops to drive-ins all over America. Sure, bigger budget films like "A Summer Place" (1959) dealt with the same angst in lavish Technicolor and to much bigger crowds. Still, this minor production presents no distractions to teen mores of the time.

Unfortunately Director Hiller paces events like he's got 10 minutes of script and 60 minutes to fill. Nodding off seems the natural reaction to much of the stretched-out dialogue and Leave It to Beaver action. Stockwell may look like the second coming of James Dean but wisely avoids the temptation, while Trundy makes for a convincing version of Doris Day's younger sister. Even the normally competent John Larch takes the idea of "working stiff" to some lengths. Yet the movie is astonishing in one regard-- it was co-written by Hollywood's top communist of the blacklist period, John Howard Lawson under a pseudonym. I guess Lawson was picking up paying gigs where he could, even drive-in teen movies. Likely he was responsible for Larch's blue-collar status in what is otherwise a strictly white-collar movie. Still and all, the script could easily have come from Dick Clark between sets on American Bandstand. Oh well, as they say, life is stranger than fiction, or something like that.

Anyway, for those interested in what teen concerns were like before Vietnam and an assassin's bullet ushered in a new era, this little Ozzie-and-Harriet artifact is a good place to start.