This little 1961 movie has a trashy feeling to it, not helped by its very low budget. Yet it has a kind of sincerity as well, of the sort one used to find in high school civics classes. It's an odd mix of a movie, worth watching once. It's evocative of its era, the waning of the Eisenhower years, just past, and the start of the New Frontier, just beginning. The movie has the conservative mood of the fifties in some scenes, while in other respects it feels almost like a low budget attempt to make a Euopean-style art film in America. Director William Alland's style suggests a touch of Nicholas Ray here, a little John Cassavettes there, with a dash of John Frankenheimer and Arthur Penn thrown in for good measure.
Okay, enough name dropping. From what I recall of the story it revolves around a troubled teen (Paul Anka) who has become a "peeing tom", a voyeur in other words. What drives him seems not to be sexual urges so much as a desire to understand what "normal" is (I'm with you there, Paul). In this sense the story, though semi-sensational for its day, must come off as a little sad today. Since I haven't seen the film in decades I can't say for sure. As at least an attempt to probe into the true nature of dysfunctional or, if you will, troubled families, the film deserves praise for at least bringing the (at the time) hot topic up in the first place.
It's too bad that Paul Anka wasn't much of an actor. What's worse, there's something unappealing about him, not quite creepy but unsympathetic, that makes his troubled teen come off as stranger than he should. As the hypocritical grownups, Ruth Roman, Alex Nicol and, especially Jack Cassidy, are all fine. The latter is surprisingly unhammy, and his playing here much stronger than it would be a decade later, when his acting got slicker and somewhat campy. I find his work in the movie actually touching at times, which is not, I suspect, what the actor or director intended.
