No Time to Be Young

This low budget film was much better than I anticipated. The story is slow starting but it becomes interesting and compelling and the direction and acting are on par with an A production.

It's fun to see Robert Vaughn, his smug, hissable screen persona so fully formed early in his career, starring in the mixed-up soap opera/generation gap/crime drama suffering from a horrible screenplay. But getting to the end of the show is quite a chore given the phony-baloney situations and characters of writer John McPartland's screenplay.

Best performance is not by the leads but by perhaps the least famous of the prinicpal players: Doris Dexter who is Vaughn's sympathetic college porfessor and an early example of what is now termed a MILF. The mother fixation of Vaughn is one of the worst elements of the half-baked story, that devolves into stupid melodrama.

One personal sidelight: McPartland, who like the co-lead Tom Pittman died young the next year (making the title of this movie pay off) wrote the Adult soap opera "No Down Payment", also shot in 1957. I saw the movie in a unique fashion: at my Junior High School they would screen fairly recent feature films at lunch time, one reel a day for 4 cents admission. Most were from 20th Century-Fox and science fiction ("The Fly", "Kronos" and "Spacemaster X-7" for example), but this one proved to be too steamy for us kids (no time to be young, I guess). It was my first encounter with censorship: the final reels were cancelled by the school, as the film was deemed not suitable for us to watch!

The mid-Fifties were a strange time, with most of the elder population being terrified of ' delinquents '. This was a broad word which covered the truly criminal, the outsider and those who society chose to be afraid of. Among these paranoid and fear mongering films were ' Rebel Without A Cause ', ' The Wild One ', ' Blackboard Jungle ', ' The Young Stranger ' and this very good film ' No Time To Be Young'. Of all of the listed above it is the least known, and yet in one actor in it there was another potential James Dean, Tom Pittman. He was as quirkily beautiful as Dean, and his sensitive acting superb and he met the same fate as Dean in a car crash while still very young. There are basically three stories in this scenario, all relating to the lives of three men barely out of their teens. All three have psychological needs and no one really cares about them, and for a rare change it is the men in this who suffer emotionally most and not the women. From a non politically correct point of view the women seemed either sexually predatory or success oriented wanting these young men to be stronger than their fragile selves could cope with. The inner claustrophobia of their lives build to a terrible climax, and an unhappily believable one. All of the relatively unknown cast were good, and it saddens me that in the UK it was double billed with a second rate horror film called ' The Strange World ' and was given the banal and untrue title of ' Teenage Delinquents '. By what I see on the BBFC site it was cut to shreds and for no good reason that I can understand. Crippled by this it was still given an X certificate. And so a film comparable to those I have listed has been more or less lost. In its structure it made me think of ' No Down Payment ' in its implicit criticism of society and I wish more people would track it down. A minor masterpiece of excellent film making and acute perception. If it had had a little less melodrama at times I would have given it a 10.

To say the leads and the girl friends are college students is ridiculous. Robert, wasn't that good of an actor period. Same goes for Roger Smith, just a face, no depth, and the third guy, seen him on a couple of movies. He seemed to play losers most of the time. Merry anders nothing special about her either. This movie makes me think of, Robert in the movie called teenage cave man. Talk about a stinker. I don't know why back then they used actors that didn't fit the parts. Too old to play teens or college kids, didn't make sense. They still do it now. Give me the real talent, like the 30s and 40s, when actors had real talent.

Buddy Root (Robert Vaughn) is a slick bad boy up to no-good. He was kicked out of college and is desperate to avoid the draft. Stu Bradley claims to be a successful writer but it's a lie. He needs $500 as a fake advance selling his book to fool his new wife and her father. Store clerk Bob Miller is obsessed with his girlfriend Gloria who refuses to marry him. She has a backbreaking accident and needs money for medical. They come up with a plan to rob the supermarket.

With hindsight, it's obvious to make Robert Vaughn the undeniable lead of the movie. The other characters are only supporting cast. I actually like Stu's predicament and it's a great opportunity to go on a crime spree. He's the lying type and a good second fiddle in a crime duo. Bob's predicament is less compelling. The fall looks silly and Bob whines too much. It's sillier than the other two and I would just cut him out. I would make Buddy even harder. I really like Buddy and Stu as a duo. This may as well be a part of Crime doesn't pay.