IN “Youth Runs Wild,” Producer Val Lewton has succeeded in making a very human, neat examination of wartime juvenile delinquency, without showing any very delinquent children or significant examples of their development, hang-outs or behavior. Two extremely good, likable adolescent sweethearts, played beautifully by Tessa Brind and Glenn Vernon, are used for hero and heroine, and get onto the edges of delinquency partly by accidents, partly because of their own thoughtful concern for each other. Tessa becomes involved with a “bad” girl (Bonita Granville), who really has the soul of a Marie Dressler type—incidentally, the least convincing character in the picture—and wisely takes her advice and leaves her parents, who have no parental drive and aren’t home much of the time anyway. She probably wouldn’t have done this if the boy’s parents hadn’t idiotically stopped him from seeing her. The boy is caught by the police half-heartedly trying to make some money stealing tires in a parking lot; then he is caught again in a night-club brawl trying to get in to see his girl, who has becomes a hostess there. The boy’s sister and brother-in-law, who have already started a day-nursery for war workers’ children and made many fine suggestions on child guidance and civic duty in wartime, take the girl into their home and make another wholesome suggestion: the girl should become interested in the kind of work Ruth Clifton (Look magazine, May 16) did in Moline, Illinois, which was to make Moline set up play, study and work centers for its youth.
In this manner, and by the vigilant planting of some hints along the outside of the film, “Youth Runs Wild” manages to touch on an adequate number of causes, centers and cures for delinquency, but it runs somewhat pale. As a picture of child corruption, it probably would have gained energy by projecting the personality of at least one adolescent who had been thoroughly educated on Main Street, night clubs, juke boxes, movies and some degree of prostitution; it could at least have used some unbleached examination of life inside or around some of the above institutions. The hang-outs in “Youth Runs Wild” are rendered with accuracy, but they aren’t visited enough.
What is generally too mild and too much like school, would have been more so if it hadn’t had Val Lewton’s production, which includes some adequate realism and some of the only thoroughly acceptable humanity to be found in movies today. Much of this humanity is the result of screen writing that tries and generally succeeds in having characters react with some degree of interest, good faith and intelligence, and of direction and playing which attempt to express characteristics such as dignity or evil in the actor himself as well as through incident. His pictures show a beautiful eye, memory, and a feeling for gesture and attitude—for instance, for the whole visual vocabulary of a group like his high-school kids: their stance and gestures playing handball, smoking, toward parents, and their ways of showing disrespect and superiority at the movies. The best parts of this film are the conception of the girl’s parents (Ben Bard and Elizabeth Russell), which exhibits a real knowledge of and love for working-class people, and the performance of the girl (Miss Brind) in which she presents a touching portrait of thoroughly sincere, trusting innocence. In it there is childishness, a middle-class character and belief that make the adolescence of a Jennifer Jones seem corny and that of a June Allyson seem like a pampered midget’s.
On the basis of his last three movies, of which the two preceding ones were “The Cat People”—my idea of the best Hollywood film in about three years—and “The Curse of the Cat People,” I would rate Lewton as the least commercial film maker in Hollywood by about a hundred miles. Whatever spurious device you can think of for making a movie break box-office records you will find least present in these three pictures. Each film had a different director and writing crew, but they look enough alike to make you feel that Lewton controlled the work on all of them. One of their main characteristics is the peculiarly efficient care and good, somewhat pale, sense that moves evenly into every corner of them. They are about the only Hollywood movies in which the writing and direction try to keep in front of rather than behind the audience’s intelligence. Also present in all of them is a belief in education (it started in the middle of “The Cat People” when the hero gave a textbook definition of adult love, and has enveloped the two later films), actors who seem to be as serious about their work as the producer, and intelligent realism.
Lewton escapes the corruption of Hollywood by his own integrity and by skillful practicality such as either making horror films or tackling subjects that are unlikely to disturb Hollywood’s present idea of what movies can handle, and in staying on the non-volcanic side of their problems and on the mild, conservative side of technique (though this is very promising compared to other native films). Also, he makes small pictures that don’t get in the hair of the industry or the audience, and being low-budget jobs, they don’t have to bring in enormous returns. In another set-up, I think Lewton would probably make extremely good movies; he may eventually do that even in Hollywood.
September 18, 1944