Curfew Breakers

The heroin trade gets a Dragnet-style handling, with a poorly written narration breaking out at odd moments when Paul Kelly, whose beat is narcotics isn't offering them.

It's another of the long string of exploitation movies, telling the audience how bad the dope trade is, and it certainly doesn't glamorize this tale of a nice boy (Cullen Wheelas) who meets a cute girl from the wrong side of the tracks and invites her to a party at his house. Eventually the cops get involved, and can they do anything about narcotics, which leads into another spate of exposition.

Just when I thought it was going to be like that to the end, with seven minutes to run, the talking stopped and there was about five minutes of almost pure actin, well performed and edited. Then we had the closing narration....

There are some good, if low-pay performers here, including Byron Flouger, Regis Toomey, and Cathy Downs.

The film is about drug problems among teens in an unnamed town. A lot of nice looking kids are out getting their thrills--and dying as a result. So it's up to the cops to try to work their way up the chain to the dealers supplying this stuff--and there is a lot of legwork and tree shaking to get the break they need.

This is a very uneven movie. On one hand, the excellent and under-appreciated actor Paul Kelly is in the film and, as usual, he does a good job--playing a strong-jawed detective in the Narcotics Unit. Also, the film has a lot of realism and a grittiness that I liked--making it seem like a cheap Film Noir movie. However, the film also has a lot of bad. The acting and dialog of many of the teenagers in the film is just terrible. Poor delivery, occasionally dumb characters (such as the guardian who is totally clueless) and wooden acting all the way. I think the good outweighs the bad, though, as the overall package isn't bad despite a very, very low budget and a lot of amateur actors. Sort of like a poor man's "Dragnet".

The title "Curfew Breakers" is spliced into the title credits of this early 50s crime/drug/JD film originally called "Narcotics Squad," a title still seen in the credits. Starring the distinguished film and stage actor Paul Kelly, in one of his final roles, the film has a great shadowy yet naturalistic look to it, a "dragnet"-style narration in parts (common in post-dragnet 50s crime films), and hard-boiled performances from all. It harkens back to such 30s narcotics crime films as Cocaine Fiends, yet also foreshadows High School Confidential in some ways (although I'm not claiming it influenced HSC). Parents discuss drug issues with concerned school authorities (shades of Reefer Madness), overaged highschool students act tough and use dope, and hardboiled police officers are on the trail, led by the steel-jawed Kelly. The two musical sequences are quite interesting, the first featuring a Jimmy Cavallo/Mike Pedicin-styled jive combo with a rubberfaced, mushmouthed frontman, the second featuring the band's female drummer howling a bluesy tune. I'd love to know who these performers are. Anyone know? Overall, this is a satisfying 1950s drug-crime melodrama.

This well-intentioned docu noir directed by that illustrious unknown, Alexander J. Wells, suffers from shabby photography and poor acting. I think Paul Kelly is the only professional actor in the cast, though Cathy Downs also went on to make a few other B flicks.

I rate the script generally run of the mill for a docu noir but, that said, it certainly remained interesting enough that I would not stop watching it. Though I do not so much as smoke a normal cigarette - and have had but two or three in all my 65 years on this planet - I could not stop watching this police account of naissant drug addiction in the USA, and how the law tried to deal with it. Of course, since 1957 - when CURFEW BREAKERS was made, 65 years ago - the narcotics problem has increased exponentially, and now rates a major international market, with countries in South America and Asia treating it as a major source of revenue, and often the only commodity that will earn them foreign currency.

It is a sad finding that the persons who made this well-intentioned film that has the merit of warning youngsters about the evils of addiction, and parents of the tell tale signs in their children, 65 years on we find this burgeoning problem grow daily in pretty much all countries, with the attendant rippling effects on hard crime, money laundering, corruption, theft, and many other ramifications.

Ultimately, CURFEW BREAKERS rates far from memorable and suffers from many amateurish scenes but it is a warning as to how kids, then beginning to experience rock & roll, twist, and other off the beaten track, often viewed as rebellious, musical and other new trends, could not use highly rated human intelligence to curb this curse.

The wrapup ending left me mulling over the fact great technological gains permitting ever easier communication among humans have also helped spread narcotics addiction as a social disease. We, humans, are not as clever as we crack ourselves up to be.

Curfew Breakers (1957)

** (out of 4)

With heroin use and crime on the rise, Police Lieutenant Lacey (Paul Kelly) decides to work with the local school to try and track down the man who is giving the drugs to the students. Before long another popular student is dead but it's one clue closer to the criminal pushers.

CURFEW BREAKERS is a mildly entertaining mix of REEFER MADNESS like propaganda mixed with the narration style of the Dragnet television show. If you've seen any of the drug pictures from this era (or the ones from the 1930s) then you're not going to see anything new here. While the film is far from being a good one it's at least got a few good things going for it that makes it worth watching to fans of the genre.

The main reason to check this out is due to Kelly. He's certainly the best thing about the picture as he turns in a good performance and you've got to give him credit for actually doing the job and not just sleepwalking through the picture, which would have been understandable considering the production values. I'd also say that there was some pretty campy dialogue that managed to get a couple laughs.

Outside of that the film was obviously produced rather cheaply as there's a lot of stock footage, no direction at all and there's no question that the performances are rather bland to say the least. There obviously wasn't too much effort put into the picture but fans of the genre will get a few kicks out of it.