Mit Siebzehn am Abgrund

"The Blackboard Jungle" had covered somewhat similar territory in a far more respectable way. Not too much about this movie could be called respectable. It does have a fine director in jack Arnold. He gave us, among others, the classic "The Incredible Shrinking Man." It's by no means a bad movie, despite its exploitative nature.

Boyish Russ Tamblyn is an unlikely jive-talking bad guy. John Drew Barrymore, on the other hand, is typecast as the snarling hotshot of this high school before Tamblyn had arrived. Diane Jergens is very good as a troubled student.

Mamie Van Doren is there for the sex appeal. Her character doesn't make much sense, to me anyway, but her name and picture on posters doubtless sold tickets. And Jan Sterling plays a teacher. She is, as always, very good.

The movie is about drugs. I have never been drawn to drugs, though most of my friends were or still are users of pot. To me "High School Confidential" seems at times like a riff on "Reefer Madness": Yes, all drugs can have their downside. However, smoking pot does not automatically, as is suggested here, lead directly to heroin use.

The movie has great Jerry Lee Lewis music. I also like Bill Haley and the Comets' famous contribution ("Rock Around the Clock") to "The Blackboard Jungle.

Had I seen this when I was a teenager, a decade or so after it came out, I wouldn't have understood it. Thankfully, I knew nothing about drugs while in high school. But I'm sure that even in 1958 some schools were overrun with them.

As a force for social change, the movie is questionable. But as an occasionally campybut solid entertainment, it's a gas, man.

Believe or not but in this movie I just love to see over and over again the opening credits. And I am sure that everybody that sees this movie, will agree with me. Another outstanding thing is that if you think that rap music was invented and started in the 90's, you must check out this lady from the 50's. Now, the rest of the movie is a very serious drama. A drama that made me laugh throughout the movie like if it was a comedy. Could this be a funny drama? I don't know but if you give it a chance you'll know what I mean. And about the DVD, I was disappointed to read that it was in "full screen", but when I saw it I couldn't be more happy to see that it was a mistake and it was in widescreen as it should (too bad it was mono). And too bad that in those days the credits at the end were so short. It would've been great to see Jerry do the whole "high school confidential" again, or maybe "great balls of fire". I gave it a 10 for the credits, 8 for the rap song and 0 for the rest, My total is 6.

This decent late 50's teen-exploitation flick is one of the better ones, although the hot Mamie Van Doren is in it all too briefly. Jackie Coogan adds a weird twist, and Russ Tamblyn is appropriately youthful (a few years before WEST SIDE STORY). Michael Landon has a small part (around the time he started BONANZA).

A 6 out of 10. Best performance = Mamie Van Doren). This film needed more rock 'n rock songs, beside the GREAT opening number by Jerry Lee Lewis on the back of a truck. Jan Sterling is subdued as the "good" teacher and John Drew Barrymore is rather strange. Great B/W cinematography helps this slide along. Check it out!

Mamie Van Doren as somebody's aunt could put a whole new slant on "visiting the relatives". Here her twin gunboats are aimed at no one in particular, and I expect she was added at the last minute to further hype this exploitation exercise. But then this was cutting edge material for 1958 teens-- sassing the teacher, hotrod chickie runs, and maybe a pull on a joint if you could find one. Yeah, this is reefer-madness for the pre-Vietnam Pepsi generation. Never mind that the movie is one-third Blackboard Jungle, one-third Rebel Without a Cause, and the rest sheer Hollywood hokum.

Producer Zugsmith may not have known Leonardo Da Vinci from Leonardo Da Caprio, but he knew how to crowd teens into drive-ins. Then too, lead actor Tamblyn may look more like a cheer-leader than a hoody delinquent, but at least he's not bored with the part. Fast-buck artists like Zugsmith knew how to market these exploitation quickies as timely warnings to parents and teens. But kids weren't fooled. They knew they could see forbidden topics like teens kissing on a bed under the uplifting guise of civic betterment. No, this drive-in special may never have made it into uptown movie houses, but as an artifact of its time, it's more fun than any 10 of that year's dreary A-productions.

There's not much to be said about High School Confidential, a teen exploitation movie from the end of the fabulous ‘fifties, except that it's hard to think that it wasn't just as laughable upon release as it is today. But some comments on its cast members may be in order:

• Russ Tamblyn was a child star, then primarily a dancer. This `dramatic' role fell to him between his memorable assignments in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and West Side Story. He's not at all bad here (in an badly written and implausible role), but was never able to establish himself as a serious actor, though he continued to work, showing up notably decades later in Twin Peaks.

• John Drew Barrymore had just taken up his middle name to distance himself from his legendary father; in earlier roles (The Big Night, While the City Sleeps), he was billed as John Barrymore, Jr. Here he brings off an eerily precise impersonation of Elvis Presley, speaking both in hillbilly accent and in basso-profundo register. (Alas, he does not sing.) It's clear he inherited the family talent, which he was to squander, because he also inherited the predisposition to chemical experimentation.

• Jan Sterling seemed destined for a bigger career than she ended up with. The high points of her filmography – Billy's Wilder's The Big Carnival/Ace In The Hole being the most impressive of them – were behind her, and she was taking secondary roles to the likes of latter-day Joan Crawford ( in Female on The Beach). Here, as a schoolteacher, she not only does a riff on Eve Arden's Our Miss Brooks character, she even looks like Arden.

• The late ‘fifties were the blazing noon of Mamie Van Doren's fling at playing third-string sexpot (after Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield). All Dagmars and platinum hair, she was rarely called upon to display what might have been a comic talent, visible here in fits and starts. Her role as a married nymphomaniac whose attempts at fulfilment – absent her husband – seemed doomed to disappointment is practically a clone of the part she played in The Beat Generation, a slightly more interesting vehicle that covers much of the same ground as High School Confidential.

High School Confidential remains notable from a view of drug trafficking and the process of addiction that had advanced not a whit since Reefer Madness in the ‘thirties. And of course its view of teen-aged life in the second Eisenhower administration bears not the slightest resemblance to any reality – then or now. That said, it's fun to watch.