Juventude sem Freios

... as in being behind them. I would be referring to Lawrence Tierney the actor, here as Larry, the bad guy, before Tierney would have his big chance with "Dillinger" the following year and then ultimately blow that chance with all of his bad behavior off the set. But I digress.

I could tell this was not an A or even B list film because TCM is airing a print that looks like it came from a public domain source - very fuzzy. And who knew that in 1944 VD did not just stand for Victory Day???

While the adults are off working double shifts in wartime factories the kids are getting involved in delinquency. The spotlight is on Vanessa Brown's character, Sarah, and her boyfriend, Frankie. Frankie gets into stealing tires to make extra money. Sarah's folks are hardly Ward and June Cleaver. They drink and play cards when they are not working and seems like they would be indifferent parents even if they didn't have intense work schedules. They throw Sarah out at the first sign of any trouble she might be in, and she is reduced to working as one of the hostesses in a dive, which seems like it is shorthand for something a bit more adult. Up to her fall, she is bullied and manipulated by the older world weary Hot Toddy Jones (Bonita Granville). But then, strangely, Toddy morphs into a mentor to the girl.

There are all kinds of unexplained things going on. When a couple of teens are spotted by a security guard stealing tires, he shoots at them! I knew rubber was valuable during the war, but really? One of the cars the teens are stealing tires from in the plant parking lot has a toddler locked inside. This is never explained or commented on. Did the harried factory worker forget about the kid, or is this all they can do for day care? And when a fight breaks out in the dive in which Sarah works and a young healthy person is thrown to the floor in the resulting scuffle, she winds up in the hospital in .... an oxygen tent? With a priest doing last rites? Things never got this bad during the frequent fist fights at the Long Branch saloon in Gunsmoke!

Too goofily constructed to be a stirring social drama with a message, and with too much heavy stuff going on to be an effective kitschy romp, this film fails on every level. It was based on a piece in Look Magazine. Look didn't like the finished product to the point that they refused to promote the film in the magazine, or even to allow their name to be used in the film's credits. .Val Lewton later disavowed the final version of the film and attempted to have his name removed from it. It really had no love 77 years ago when it was released and lost money at the box office, and today I can agree with that assessment.

An unusual entry from horror producer Val Lewton and his team, it is not a very good film, but at least it paints a picture of the 1940s and existing attitudes at the time reasonably well. The messages of the film are unsubtle and heavy-handed, the music choices are tiresome, and the characters are utterly simple. It is downbeat, rather predictable and quite dreary to watch. If assessing why youths turn rebellious sounds appealing, 'Rebel without a Cause' comes recommended instead. This is not quite a terrible film, with some performances that are arguably earnest, but it is not nearly a good one either, and is best recommended just to fans of Val Lewton who are interested in some of his lesser known productions.

"Back where we come from people are kind and good and strangers are welcome" ... so says sappy Sarah at the beginning of this film that seems like a feature length edition of one of the "Why We Fight" series. To see "Produced by Val Lewton and Directed by Mark Robson" is hard to believe with the above speech and the underlying moralistic tone. The film also came right in the middle of Lewton's creative period.

Mary returns home to wait for husband (Kent Smith) who has been injured and won the purple heart. She returns to a quiet home - her parents work shifts at a munitions factory and brother Frank is unsupervised and playing truant from school. His parents blame his behaviour on the new girl next door but his situation is not much different than Sarah's - both sets of parents are shift workers at munition plants.

Frank is on the "road to ruin" - he doesn't want to stay at school - he wants to work to take Sarah to movies and to buy her things. Sappy Sarah would be in 7th heaven with a walk in the park.

There was a much longer film in there I feel. A lot of deleted scenes - Dickie Moore, credited as "son who kills his father - scene deleted" his only scenes were in the back seat of a car.

Lawrence Tierney started out as his usual hard self, within 15 minutes he was "giving those kids a break". Halfway through the film he was gone - only coming back in the last scenes. When he left so did the punch and grittiness.

Kent Taylor and Elisabeth Russell were Lewton veterans. Russell, who played Sarah's mother always seemed to have so much more to give than her roles required.

Worst Actress Award is won by Tessa Brind, who plays sappy Sarah. She is not believable for a minute and when she visits Bonita Granville in hospital (which is the most ludicrous part in the film) she can be seen reflected through this plastic shield with the biggest smile on her face - maybe Tierney had just cracked a joke!!!!

Don't judge Lewton on this effort, please!!!

From producer Val Lewton comes this awkward, hardly bearable WWII mini-soap with teenagers at its center. Beginning with a rash of newspaper headlines exclaiming the downward spiral of the era's delinquent youth, Lewton and director Mark Robson focus on working-class teen sweethearts who live next door in a small town housing project: she's from a rowdy, low-class family yet is inexplicably wholesome, he's a straight arrow who gets into trouble with the law by trying to impress his girl. The unsympathetic nature of the girl's parents is very believable and well-portrayed, but the kids themselves and the other adults are poorly-cast and sketchily-written. There's some business at the beginning about an auto shop dealing in stolen goods, but it's as irrelevant as the salty chanteuse who gets the girl a job as a hostess. Reportedly a troubled production, with R.K.O. altering the finished product against Lewton's wishes (he considered at one point removing his name from the credits). It has to be seen to be believed! *1/2 from ****

This is one of the few teen-age problem movies made during the war years of the early 1940's. Of course, the main problem most young males faced was surviving the horrors of Guadalcanal to D-Day to Iwo Jima, and naturally everything else paled in comparison. Nonetheless, there was a younger generation still in highschool and it's their often overlooked homefront problems that the movie dramatizes. As other reviewers indicate, despite the good intentions, it's not a very good movie, done cheaply, and pretty tame by today's freewheeling standards.

Still and all, it's an excellent little capsule for glimpsing the social mores of that long ago time when boys kissed girls on the cheek, teens gathered at the malt shop, and stealing tires was the height of wanton behavior. As might be expected, the solutions are pretty pat. If kids 'run wild' it's because Mom and Dad are busy at the production plant, while older siblings are caught up in the war. It's also illustrative that teenage Sara's reputation is damaged as the indirect result of gas rationing, at the same time that battered used tires fetch as much as diamonds.

Anyway, the acting is surprisingly good for a low budget production, while Lawrence Tierney's strong presence clearly qualifies for bigger and better things. Then too, it's not surprising that this little oddity came from the production crew of horror-specialist Val Lewton who in a tragically brief career specialized in the offbeat and unusual. It might be interesting-- in passing-- for a cultural researcher to compare this film with 1986's teen film "River's Edge" for a startling look at how times have have indeed changed. Worth a look for the curiosity seeker.