But the clincher is what Ray and co-writers Irving Shulman and Stewart Stern choose to do with the alienation of their three misunderstood heroes. Jim expresses to Therapy Cop his desperation to belong somewhere, and, in most teen movies, this usually means joining a gang or tribe, conforming, fitting in. But Jim, Judy and Plato can’t fit in, no matter how hard they try. And besides, what they all crave is a family, not social acceptance . . . the extremity of their angst places them way beyond the current teen obsession with being ‘popular’. And who can blame them, when the hoods are now so out of society’s control that they become real criminals, invading the adult world by harassing Jim and Judy’s hapless parents.
So, in a gorgeous, almost celestial abandoned Hollywood mansion that Plato takes them to, the three make their own nuclear family unit, with Jim as the strong, mumbly but attentive Dream Dad, Judy as the loose, non-judgemental Dream Mom and Plato as the damaged, needy, but affectionate child they all are, in reality.
I mean, these kids really are in need of some non-toxic examples of traditional parenting. Because, in my rush to get from planetarium to Chickie Run, I almost forgot the Freudian orgy that is Jim and Judy’s typical evening at home.
In preparation for his meeting with a fast car and a sharp fall, Jim heads back to base. He reaches into the fridge and drinks milk from the bottle like this was, well, milk from somewhere else entirely. We hear a crash . . . and soon we see just how bad a Dad Mr Stark really is.
The crash was Mom’s dinner tray hitting the floor. We now see El Castrato crawling around the floor trying to salvage the food . . . and he’s wearing an apron! A frilly yellow apron! Over his suit!!! This big girl’s blouse cooks food for his woman, instead of the other way round! Man, no wonder Jim has chicken issues. ‘Mom?’ a puzzled Jim enquires up the stairs, so confused about gender now that we almost expect to see Mrs Stark wearing a greasy wife-beater, scratching her balls and reading the racing pages. When Frilly Apron Dad can’t tell Jim everything it means to be A Man in 30 seconds, Jim dons the macho Red Bomber Jacket Of Destiny and bolts for the Chickie Run, pausing only to steal cake.
This is small potatoes compared to the patriarchal minefield at Judy’s place, though. She keeps kissing her very handsome and young-looking Dad. He’s so freaked out by his inability to separate her love and her sexuality that he responds to a kiss with a right-hander. The man is so much more comfortable with her little baby brother . . . and you have some sympathy, frankly, ’cos something real unhealthy is going on with this girl. Can you imagine having a cute little girl, and then you come home one day . . . and she’s Natalie Wood in a push-up bra, and she keeps sort of coming on to you? Plus your wife looks like your spinster aunt? Tough spot.
Still, he really doesn’t handle it well. Judy runs away and cues up another big ’50s theme, as Mom says, ‘She’ll outgrow it, Dear. It’s just the age,’ and little brother, wielding a ray gun, chips in: ‘The atomic age!’ You can see why everyone’s so distracted from the emotional needs of their loved ones, what with the four horsemen of the apocalypse repeatedly shaking dust off their spurs and saddling up their gee-gees just over the not-too-distant horizon.
An apocalypse does indeed come. But not for everyone. When the hoods track down our trio of dreamers, and Plato produces a gun that he’s stolen from his absent mother, Jim and Judy realise that he, like the hoods, is beyond the social pale. So when Plato hides in the Observatory and is besieged by coppers, Jim steps up and does The Machine’s dirty work. He persuades Plato to let him look at the gun and then disarms it while Plato isn’t looking, reinforcing the liberal consensus theme that dishonesty is entirely justified when it benefits the greater good . . . a stance that he rejects out of hand when his father suggests it, in a scene in the Stark home which Ray directs like a seasick voyeur and Dean acts with an intensity of feeling and need that completely obscures the fact that Jim Stark is, in essence, a complete fuckwit. (‘You want to kill your own father!’ Mom Stark screams as Jim chucks Dad around and chokes him. Duh! Please don’t ask what he wants to do to you!) Inevitably, when Jim leads Plato out of the Observatory, Plato freaks and waves the empty gun around, provoking a volley of gunshots from cops who’ve got way beyond the therapeutic stage. He is wearing Jim’s red bomber, so Pop Stark thinks Jim’s a goner. When he realises he isn’t, both parents are so relieved that their damaged darling’s OK that they immediately become what Jim wants them to be: authoritarian Dad and submissive Mom. ‘You did everything a man could,’ Dad Stark insists, as Jim regresses to babyhood . . . ‘Trust me.’ Jim leaves the Red Jacket Of Rebellion with the dead weirdo. Everyone’s so happy that the centre now holds that everyone forgets the dead weirdo. The outsider is only truly mourned by another outsider: his black nanny, the only black face in the entire movie, who is conspicuously not invited into the newly reborn white middle-class consensus. And . . .
. . . And I really am making this sound despicable. It kind of is, politically, morally. But what a fantastic melodrama, lurid and confident enough to end the short period of teen film, and begin the never-ending genre of teen cinema. It makes opera and Greek tragedy out of the pettiest adolescent problems and social concerns of the day, and gives us an acting performance from Jimmy Dean that all male teen performances since have had to attempt to take on board and match up to. They come close sometimes. They never quite make it.
I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF
1957
Starring: Michael Landon, Yvonne Lime, Whit Bissell
Dir.: Gene Fowler Jr
Plot: Hairy moments from the days before anger management classes.
Key line: ‘Hugo! Prepare the scopolamine!’
AIP favoured a hard-hitting style. And nowhere more than here, where, around ten seconds in, you get punched in the face.
Of all American International Pictures’ teen exploitation films, I Was A Teenage Werewolf was the most profitable, influential and notorious. The movie grossed $2 million on a production budget of $82,000. It spawned three further ’50s hit AIP movies – I Was A Teenage Frankenstein, Blood Of Dracula and How To Make A Monster – which weren’t strictly sequels, but used elements of the same daft plot and many of the same actors. It was remade (kind of) in 1985 as Teen Wolf, a terrible but popular film starring Michael J. Fox. Its trash title has been referenced in so many movies, books, records and TV shows that it’s become part of the language of irony . . . in fact, an alternative title mooted for Clueless (see here) was I Was A Teenage Teenager, which someone thankfully concluded was irony gone mad. In the 21st century it’s a film that almost everyone in the Western World has heard of but few have seen, and it isn’t even available on DVD in Europe any more. This is a scandal. Because . . . Teenage Werewolf is a teensploitation classic: funny, strange and more wiseass subversive each time you see it.
But first, a word about our sponsor. American International Pictures was a poverty row production company set up by movie salesman James H. Nicholson and brilliantly named lawyer Samuel Z. Arkoff. They aimed their movies squarely at teenage boys, producing a stream of flicks about beach parties, rock ’n’ roll, aliens and monsters, and later branching out into Roger Corman’s much-admired adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe novels and ’60s hippy exploitation films, including The Wild Angels starring Peter Fonda and The Trip starring Jack Nicholson.
The garish titles of AIP movies were key to Nicholson and Arkoff’s business plan. Rather than buy or commission scripts, they would raise the money to make a film on the basis of nothing but the title . . . exploitation at its purest. Shoving together the buzzword ‘teenage’ and a popular movie monster was a perfect money-raiser in the 1950s. But the story that co-writers Herman Cohen and Aben Kandel wove around the concept was both insane and ingenious.
Michael Landon – who went on to a hugely successful TV career playing leads in western perennial Bonanza and period weepie The Little House On The Prairie – is Tony Rivers, a teenage rebel with a violent temper. After yet another fight at (here co
mes another perfect name) Rockdale High School, he is persuaded to go into therapy. Problem is, our shrink Dr Brandon (Bissell) is actually a mad scientist in the Dr Frankenstein mode, who wants to use troubled kids to prove his crackpot theory that Man can only be saved from Armageddon by reverting to a pre-evolutionary state. He hypnotises Tony, and it turns out that Darwin was lying after all, because pre-evolutionary man was, you know, a werewolf.
When Tony kills a couple of fellow teens he returns to Dr Brandon to get cured. Instead, the doc turns him back into a werewolf. Mayhem ensues and, as transgressors in AIP movies were always harshly punished, it doesn’t end well for Tony or the evil scientist.
The reasons why this preposterous scenario works here are entirely down to director Fowler and stars Landon and Bissell, who instinctively understand that the only way to make something stupid stick is to play it straight.
The central idea is simple; adults are so bewildered by teenage behaviour that they refer to adolescents as monsters . . . so what if they actually were? While the script plays fast and loose with contemporary obsessions – juvenile delinquency, therapy, fear of The Bomb, crazy beat music – Fowler shoots the movie in a gritty monochrome, throwing in expressionist angles and great gimmicks like the punch into the camera. And Landon plays Tony with genuine pathos and rage, and creates one of the big screen’s most sympathetic (and cute) victims of anger issues.
In the opening fight scene we see that Tony is a lousy and dirty fighter, at one point wielding a shovel that could easily kill his opponent. When the cops – who obviously favour a ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’ approach to law enforcement – break it up and begin a dialogue, we realise that Tony is nuts, too, starting the fight because the other guy – a friend – slapped him on the shoulder. ‘I don’t like to be touched!’ Tony rages, weirdly. Detective Donovan (Barney Phillips) decides to be the Therapy Cop to end all Therapy Cops, suggesting that Tony go see a radical modern doctor who hypnotises bad kids until they’re fit to be a part of society. As Tony’s surprisingly not-Bad Dad says, ‘Sometimes you just have to do things the way people want ’em done. That way they’re happy and they leave you alone.’ It’s a steal from Rebel Without A Cause (see here) . . . Jim Stark’s emasculated father says something similar. But here, from an older man who seems entirely masculine, it seems even more depressing, and exactly what any self-respecting teenager doesn’t want to hear. This little scene in the Rivers’ home is packed full of info: Mom is absent, Dad is always out working but is loving enough to prepare Tony’s food the way he likes it before he leaves . . . and Tony already has the peculiar habit of eating raw hamburger. Teenage Werewolf is full of little winks at its audience, rejecting the sledgehammer moral approach of movies like Rebel and Blackboard Jungle, treating the teen viewer as a smart friend who is far too slick to be manipulated by condescending adults. And the scene also tells us that whatever is ailing Tony isn’t, for once, the fault of the parent.
The dance party scene is rich with top dance action, crazy jive talk, a bongo-playing teen crooner who has a real gone fusion of rock and jazz going on, and an incredibly keen appreciation of who the audience are. One young couple have a good old sneer at adult-approved entertainment, and, in tribute to all the boys who’ve taken their girl to the drive-in hoping to take advantage of the scary bits, the big party laughs are provided by Halloween-style pranks played by the boys on the girls, who scream with pleasure. But Tony ruins it all by responding to one prank with those uncontrollable fists of fury. He accidentally knocks his simpering blonde girlfriend Arlene (Lime) to the ground, and hangs his head in shame as all the other kids at the party glare at him in mute disapproval. Suddenly, we’re accompanying Tony to the evil shrink’s surgery. Because Tony is, again, a typical teen: the cop can’t make him do anything. Neither can his Dad or Arlene’s parents. Arlene herself got short shrift when she sided with Therapy Cop. But peer pressure . . . that’ll do it.
Dr Brandon unveils his evil plan, and even encourages poor Tony to see his drug-induced hypno experience as ‘a trip’. By the time we get to Tony’s first onscreen transformation into a hairy head in a jock jacket – cheap, cheerful, wonderful – he is being praised for improved conduct at school. But those primal urges are all man . . . his second victim is a girl being lithe and gymnastic in the school sports hall.
The scenes of Landon running around the woods in wolfie head make-up are hilarious. And, as with all good trash movies, you can’t tell whether it’s deliberate comedy or accidental ineptitude. But everything else is played resolutely straight, with Malcolm Atterbury, as Tony’s Dad, especially heart-rending as the helpless father, wondering if he should have remarried after Tony’s Mom died (or left – it’s not made entirely plain), as if lack of mother love routinely leads to young men growing fangs and baying at the moon.
I Was A Teenage Werewolf has a message, and, as was the tradition in AIP pictures, it’s delivered to us through the film’s last line of dialogue: ‘It is not for man to interfere in the ways of God.’ Critics have attempted to interpret the film as a repudiation of science, and The Big Society of 1950s America. I personally read it as a big, dumb bunch of meaningless hokum which becomes subversive entertainment precisely because of its sneering contempt for ’50s message movies. It’s a satire at the expense of the three movies we’ve already looked at, and was a huge hit because these new teenage creatures were already smart enough to get the joke.
THE COOL AND THE CRAZY
1958
Starring: Scott Marlowe, Richard Bakalyan, Dick Jones, Gigi Perreau
Dir.: William Witney
Plot: The teenage Reefer Madness.
Key line: ‘Quit the clowning. I need some more M. I need some more M now!’
The beautiful opening image: a camera simply placed on the grass of a school playing-field, and an in-your-face shot of a teenage girl . . . tying her shoelaces. In 1950s teensploitation classics, you can often feel this joyful mutual pact between director and target audience; a sense of amazement that the styles and settings of ’50s teen life are actually up there on the big screen. The shot is quick; it doesn’t linger and there’s no leering at the girl in question. It isn’t about sex. It’s a shot that says, ‘Here you are. And we, the grateful adults who are allowed to tell your stories, are looking up at you, as we put you on the pedestal you deserve.’
As the standard big-band sleaze-jazz blares away, promising cheap thrills like a plump stripper in a burlesque show, we find ourselves following a hot curly-headed boy who actually looks something close to teenage. The Radio Times Guide To Film describes Scott Marlowe as a ‘James Dean wannabe’, and that sums it up neatly, as his doomed Bennie Saul character slouches, leers and twitches constantly in a mesmerising attempt to bring The Method to The Cool And The Crazy’s reefer madness. Sadly, Marlowe never got to die tragically and iconically after a couple of movies, nor play Evil Buddha in Coppola war movies, nor found his own successful range of spaghetti sauces. But he is truly fabulous here as the sexy but doomed drug dealer. Can’t act, exactly. But when you have this whole piercing eyes/curly hair/cat-like swagger thing going on, thespian shortcomings are moot. He’s a great smug, sexy, psycho punk. And the film suffers a little every time he’s not on screen.
When we first meet Bennie, in a post-Blackboard Jungle, JD-disrupted classroom scenario, we immediately understand that he is cool, but imagine he might get over the crazy and be redeemed. Then we remember that this is an AIP picture (see I Was A Teenage Werewolf, here) where the lead kid is exactly the same as a AIP sci-fi alien and therefore never gets a chance at a happy ending.
Bennie is the New Kid In School at a campus somewhere in America. Don’t ask me where . . . sometimes it looks like a leafy middle-class suburb. Other times it resembles South Central LA if all the black people were moved to Beverly Hills. When Bennie takes a beating from the greasy class Bad Boys, and then pulls a knife, yet still wants to be their friend, it all seems a bit weird. It turns out that he�
��s an enthusiastic apprentice for the neighbourhood dope-peddling Mr Big, who lives in a seedy hotel, smokes cigars and never smiles. When Bennie suddenly beats up head Bad Boy Stu, and therefore becomes Head Of The Pride, he then feeds the boys evil, evil dope: you know . . . grass, Mary Jane, spliff, Ganja . . . seen, Dread? One puff and the entire gang are Jonesing like crack ho’s in a hip hop flick, suddenly acquiring shooters and planning stick-ups to feed the habit they got, erm, two days ago. From there, the plot becomes utterly ridiculous. All you need to know is that enthusiastic B-movie actors do an hour’s-worth of barely feasible stuff, and it ends with an exploding car and a cop insisting that we all learn a valuable lesson before dramatically chucking away his strictly non-jazz cigarette. Forget all that mimsy shit about how weed leads to harder stuff. The truth is that marijuana itself is so addictive and brain-addling that if you let your kids even look at a joint they won’t live long enough to discover the good things in life . . . like, for example, smack, angel dust and amphetamine sulphate.
But part of the pleasure in watching inspired trash like The Cool And The Crazy lies in the sheer unpredictability of hastily contrived plot. In the first five minutes, you think you’re in a classroom-based drama about the reform school bad boy who may or not be redeemed by/get off with the strait-laced, authoritarian teacher. Then, when Bennie gets slapped around in the playground by Stu, it could turn out to be a drama about a misunderstood victim of bullying. Then a hard-bitten LA noir. Then a Wild One-style orgy of teen jukebox coffee-bar riot shenanigans. Then, when gang clown and human punchbag Jackie falls for good-girl Amy, a dull-bird-tames-the-savages romance. You wouldn’t be entirely surprised if a Bacofoil alien suddenly arrived to introduce The Kids to Venusian acid.
Stranded at the Drive-In Page 5