The Careless Years

"The Careless Years" is a film about two teens who fall in love and want to grow up too fast. Jerry and Emily (Dean Stockwell and Natalie Trundy) are desperately in love and their hormones are raging. As a result, they plan on marrying...even though they are still seniors in high school.

I appreciate this film for two reasons. First, it's realistic when it comes to sex and sexuality. Most films of the day take the 'just say no' attitude towards sex, which is awfully naïve. Second, it has an excellent message for teens...that it IS difficult to control those urges and that patience is important. But it also doesn't come off as preachy or phony...which I really appreciate. Well worth seeing and well made.

By the way, IMDB trivia says that Trundy was only 14 when she made the film. Unless she made it and they shelved it for a few years before releasing it, she was probably 17 or 18 (check her birthdate and year it was released...you'll see what I mean).

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.

A powerful drama of young love that marks an interesting intersection of the careers of Dean Stockwell, Arthur Hiller, John Howard Lawson and producer Edward Lewis (who originally fronted for the blacklisted Lawson). Made for Kirk Douglas's company Bryna, it marked a very early breach in the Hollywood blacklist.

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.

Careless Years, The (1957)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Dean Stockwell and Natalie Trundy play a poor boy and a rich girl who find themselves in love but they're starting to feel sexual desires so in order to do things right they want to get married but all of the parents involved thinks that's a bad idea. I was pleasantly shocked to see how well made and at times emotion this film was. The story is told in a very serious manor and outside the title song the film comes off pretty well without any of the camp factor that usually attaches itself to a film like this. What really makes the film worth viewing are the performances, all of which are very good. Stockwell steals the show as the poor boy who finds himself falling apart as he tries to do things the right way. He does a great job at building this character up into someone we can care about. Trundy is also very good as the good girl who wants to do things the right way. John Lynch is terrific as the boys father and Barbara Billingsley from Leave it to Beaver plays the girl's over cautious mother. There's a terrific scene towards the end where the boy steals some of his father's money and how this plays out is very brutal, realistic and quite emotional. The one thing that hampers the film is the fact that we've seen this type of movie countless times before.