d. Fred F. Sears (1955)
According to the prologue of this film, teenage delinquency
is ‘a plague’. I don’t disagree with that but I always think of delinquency as
being no worse than some petty crime and vandalism, maybe some minor violence, somewhere between high spirits and childish frustration at the adult world. I'm clearly very naïve as here the
teens start off with armed robbery before very quickly moving on to several murders,
including the shooting of a police man.
The protagonists are Mike Denton and Terry Marsh, a teenage
Bonnie and Clyde with a penchant for guns and heavy petting in public. Mike is
about five foot four, has a scar on his face and a chip on his shoulder. He’s
the sort of person for whom it’s not enough to have a gun, he has to keep
pushing it in people’s faces. You can’t want for the tough guy act to slip and
for him to start snivelling and bawling.
His girlfriend Terry wears a satin blouse and talks out of
the side of her mouth in a clipped hardboiled tone, like Mae West and Jimmy Cagney's lovechild. She has no intention of being taken alive, which is just as well, as
she won't be. A victim of sorts, she’s had a tough upbringing (think Cinderella
but without any of the magic stuff, especially not a handsome prince) and cries and moans in her sleep.
Most of the film is taken up with a siege at a mid-west
farmhouse. It all gets pretty intense, so it’s a relief when the duo and their
hostages break out and take to the road. The climax takes place at the Griffith
Observatory, more famously used at the end of Rebel Without A Cause*. There’s a
real humdinger of a fist fight in one of the rotating telescope domes, and Terry gets her wish, evading capture by being shot in the back and killed. The
beaten and bloodied Mike, under arrest, breaks down and cries like a big old baby, or rather like the little kid he actually is - and well he might, as his next stop will be
the gas chamber.
* The James Dean film came out barely a month before Teenage Crime Wave, so it may have even been a coincidence. But I doubt it.
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