Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  But the detail mounts up until it becomes something far bigger than Truffaut’s revenge. It’s tempting to view every early nouvelle vague classic as a prophecy of the 1968 student-led Paris uprisings . . . the closest any western European country came to revolution in the 20th century. Every rebellious and subversive move these movies make seems charged with pre-revolutionary fervour lent by hindsight. But, in this case, the feeling is unavoidable. In the early classroom scenes the boys take the piss out of the sexy bits in the teacher’s recitation, provoking him to threaten them (‘Confess or I’ll punish anybody!’), call them ‘morons’ and, in a scene filmed in 1958, actually utter the exasperated line: ‘What will France be like in ten years time?’ Truffaut knew that something was brewing in the apparently moronic mischief of French students. As Teach (whom Antoine refers to as Sourpuss) also rants, ‘I’ve known morons but at least they didn’t let it show. They hid in their corner.’ The 400 Blows itself is a key example of France’s young morons refusing to hide in corners any longer, invading centre-stage and looking for trouble.

  Paris looks amazing here . . . even more like one giant film set than Hollywood’s New York. Sure . . . Paris is a good-looking town anyway. But through Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard’s eyes it’s so beautiful and tough and smoky and stylish and dirty and claustrophobic and effortlessly charismatic it just makes you want to hug it, and kiss it and never let it go. It’s a city where impossibly glamorous women accost boys at night to help them look for a lost dog they’ve never named, and where impossibly glamorous men emerge, Harry Lime-like, from shadowy doorways to ‘help’, and where none of this seems filmy

  But Truffaut takes, and gives, just as much pleasure from looking at the mesmerised faces of children at a puppet show. The opening credits, where we are in a car looking up the buildings of Paris, with the Eiffel Tower dominating the sky from every angle, playing peek-a-boo with us, are suffused with love. Truffaut was so obsessed with the Eiffel Tower that he collected models of it throughout his life.

  But I digress. Antoine lives in a rabbit hutch apartment with his parents. He sleeps in a sleeping-bag in the floor of the hall. We meet the fun and apparently loving Dad and the Bad Mom who does nothing but bark orders and admire herself in the mirror, wondering, you imagine, how a woman so chic ended up with a poor man and a chaotic teen in a poky apartment. She takes money meant to make Antoine’s life better and spends it on mysterious things; perhaps the afternoon ‘dates’ her husband teases her about. Dad may be The Nice Parent, but he’s as keen as Mom to pack Antoine off to a summer camp, just to get rid of him. We eventually learn that Dad is actually Stepdad.

  There is an interesting side-theme whereby various women talk about how disgusting childbirth is. A prophecy of the impact contraception would have on the lives of Western women? Or another sign that France despised its young?

  Having pissed off Sourpuss with the girlie calendar, then written a rude poem about Sourpuss on the classroom wall, and then failed to do his extra homework, the definitively alienated Antoine decides to play truant with René. This inspires a particularly memorable scene where Antoine is taken for a ride by a fairground contraption, a giant circular drum which spins so quickly that the centrifugal force pins the punter to the wall. Truffaut switches quickly from shots of the boy, out of control, throwing shapes, lost in the ecstasy and pain of the moment, and of the faces of people watching above, laughing, even at blinding speed, at Antoine’s struggle to cope. In a few seconds of screen-time a perfect metaphor for society’s sickening chaos and gleeful contempt for youth. But who needs metaphors when you walk around the corner and catch your mother making out in the street with a handsome Arab?

  Antoine may look pretty cool without the aid of nice clothes, but he is also as daft as a brush. When asked why he wasn’t in school he panics and says that his mother is dead. Soon his parents are in school and Nice Stepdad is slapping him around in front of his class. Afraid to go home, he spends a night at René’s uncle’s old print shop, and roaming the streets. A contrite mother welcomes him back and tries to show him some love. He responds by making a candle-lit shrine to Balzac and accidentally starting a fire. He then submits an essay which cribs word-for-word from Balzac’s A Sinister Affair. He’s humiliated and expelled by the Prof and, again afraid to go home, secretly hides at René’s house.

  The pair settle all too easily into a life of scams and petty theft. You know where it’s going: if Doinel really is Truffaut, then Truffaut was a self-deprecating man, happy to paint himself as painfully incompetent when it came to rebellion. His theft of a typewriter from his father’s office is probably the most useless caper in movie history. But it’s still a shock when Nice Dad takes Antoine to the police and pleads with them to take the boy away. The copper recommends an ‘Observation Centre’ for juvenile delinquents. Antoine is now a borstal boy for doing little more than trying to escape the cruel intentions of various uncaring adults. While waiting to go to court, he is thrown in a tiny cage with adult criminals. He cries silently as the van takes him away through the beautiful streets of night-time Paris, his real parent.

  But Antoine takes to being brutalised by the system with the same sanguine adaptability as he takes to every situation. He reclines in his holding cell smoking newspaper roll-ups and takes on the demeanour of the hard-bitten con. The Observation Centre is leafy and rural, and replaces the military academy that his father has previously threatened him with. The boys are in uniform and march up and down, aimlessly, obediently. The idea that French boys of the period are merely marking time until they are drafted haunts the film at a time when Vietnam was more a French problem than an American one.

  But assessment by The System gets Antoine one privilege. He gets to explain himself to someone who is actually listening. The assessment officer is off-camera so Antoine tells his back-story to us; a shrugging, articulate account of his lying and stealing, and of a mother who was only persuaded not to have him aborted by his now-dead grandmother. Léaud twitches and fiddles as he talks, utterly natural, tragic but refusing to act the victim, and it hits you just how small and young he is. His rude smirk when asked if he’s a virgin is a true and adorable thing. But the story he tells of hanging out on Rue St Denis with a north African pimp paints a quietly frightening picture of how much his parents have neglected him.

  It turns out that Antoine has written a letter to Dad telling him about his mother’s affair. It’s another gambit that just makes things worse. Mlle Doinel visits Antoine, tells him that Dad believes her lies over his truth, and that neither parent wants him back. René also tries to visit but is refused entry and the boys wave uselessly at each other.

  The ending is a mystery, and a joy, and the most famous j’accuse! in movie history. Faced with the prospects of trade school at a foundry, Antoine makes a bolt for it during a borstal football match. We watch him run and run through the French countryside, expecting him to be caught at any moment. But Truffaut found a Third Way to end one of the best teen movies ever made, and one far more resonant than the triumph of escape or the tragedy of capture.

  As another gorgeous Jean Constantin waltz swells gaily (the light, bright lyricism of the music ensures that The 400 Blows never becomes grim), Antoine reaches a bleak beach. He trots towards the sea. The beach is huge, and the jog seems to take for ever, as we long to know what he’s heading for.

  But Antoine is not heading for anything. He reaches the sea and . . . that’s it. He looks briefly around him and – suddenly looking old and adult and tough and immeasurably cool in his borstal boilersuit, as if he has instantly aged 20 years – begins to swagger back. For the one and only time in the movie, he breaks down the fourth wall. He makes straight for the camera – for us – and finds a look of infinite dimensions for us to juggle. There is anger. Some exhaustion. No fear, but perhaps a little bemusement. But, mainly, there is cold, hard accusation. His eyes are asking what we are going to do about this, and how we can live with the world we’ve created.
The camera zooms tight into that look, and freezes. And the legend ‘FIN’ – The End, of course – is superimposed upon Antoine’s face in white, cartoonish font as the music dies slowly on a plucked violin.

  The first time I saw it I swear my heart stopped for a second. I don’t understand where this kid found this expression, and I didn’t know what to do with it. But I’ve not been exactly the same person since.

  1960s

  WHERE THE BOYS ARE

  1960

  Starring: Dolores Hart, Yvette Mimieux, Paula Prentiss, Connie Francis, George Hamilton, Jim Hutton, Frank Gorshin

  Dir.: Henry Levin

  Plot: Why first love and first shag are rarely the same thing.

  Key line: ‘So why don’t we get down to the giant jackpot issue? Like should a girl, or should she not, under any circumstances, play house before marriage?’

  Where The Boys Are is one of the movies that sowed the seeds of this book. I remember first seeing it on daytime TV around six years ago, and being amazed that a film so rich in feminist subtext had been made at the arse-end of the early rock ’n’ roll era. The point was hit home when I found a superb book by Susan J. Douglas about ‘Growing Up Female with the Mass Media’ that took its title from the movie and devoted a short chapter to its impact upon the writer as an adolescent. Where The Girls Are mixes academia with memoir in order to analyse the sweeping changes in ’60s youth culture that led to women like Douglas becoming feminists. The acknowledgement that this fizzy, cute but strangely dark picture was key to those youthquakes made me realise that I hadn’t been nuts to feel so moved and intrigued by a film that, on the surface, appears both lightweight and old-fashioned.

  Where The Boys Are is a classic subversive pop artefact, weaving its big theme – when should a girl lose her virginity, and why? – into a frothy beach party musical format. And, even after fifty years of ‘sexual liberation’, its discourse about adolescent female sexuality still feels relevant and thought-provoking.

  The premise upon which this exploration of ‘the giant jackpot issue’ is based is that peculiar American phenomenon, Spring Break, when thousands of well-to-do teens descend upon Stateside beach resorts during spring school and college holidays to have one last party hearty before the last term and exams descend upon them. We follow four girls from the frozen Midwest as they decamp to Fort Lauderdale, Florida to find fun, which means romance . . . and, possibly, something less hygienic.

  Each of the four symbolises a different aspect of the teenage girl’s attitude to men, love and sex. The gangly, deep-voiced Tuggle (Prentiss) is an old-fashioned girl who is already looking for the boy she will eventually marry. Melanie (Mimieux) is the insecure hot chick who is on a mission to pop her cherry. Angie (’50s pop megastar Francis, in her first film role) is the jokey tomboy who strikes out with the boys. And Merritt (the excellent Hart) is the smart, assertive and intelligent audience representative, who seems to have already sussed out that sex is a feminist issue. Their essential characters lead them down four differing paths with four separate boys, and all end up somewhere unexpected and life-changing.

  The film sets out as a comedy, full of pithy witticisms and a wry sense of exaggeration. The opening voiceover, delivered by a male newsreader type over travelogue shots of beautiful, empty Fort Lauderdale beaches, is drenched in irony as it insists that thousands of teens will turn this sea of tranquility into ‘bedlam’, and that, while the girls are there for the boys, the boys are there for the beer. The apparent sexism is tempered by the underlying truth, which is that girls are always a few years ahead of boys in terms of maturity, and that, even though the male characters are given plenty of life by the engaging male leads, Where The Boys Are is a movie about girls for girls. Of course, the very presence of a beach and the implication of sex ensures that boys will be watching, too, what with the promise of all that Hollywood cheesecake in swimsuits.

  Boys must have liked the early classroom scene as much as girls, too. An elderly teacher in the kind of twinset that makes an argument for celibacy in itself is delivering a lecture on a sociology book which appears to be a thinly veiled warning against the ‘dangers of random dating’, that is, promiscuity and pre-marital sex, using language like ‘interpersonal relationships’ to intellectualise basic prudishness. Merritt is ostentatiously bored. Picked out to be humiliated by Teach, she is having none of it, and engages with the dry, lofty text from a position of frustration and knowledge, bringing the name of Dr Kinsey – author of the Kinsey Reports, the two infamous books about male and female sexual desire published in 1948 and 1953 that helped sow the seeds of ‘the sexual revolution’ – into the exchange to make her teacher seem ridiculously out of touch, delivering our key lines above in a way that is more political speech at a feminist rally than pupil-teacher discussion. At this stage, Merritt seems well up for it, and fully engaged with the idea that this is a political matter as well as a personal one.

  But, once the film takes its extraordinary turn towards the abyss, we’re forced to look back to this speech and see that the implications of ‘promiscuity’ can be dangerous for young women. Blonde bombshell Melanie is sitting next to Merritt in class and is so impressed by her friend’s sexual militancy that she makes a decision that leads her into a kind of hell. This, obviously, could be seen as a deeply conservative message. But it’s what happens to the characters around Melanie that defuses that message somewhat. We’ll get back to it.

  Right now, we’re seeing just how hostile American power is to women who have the temerity to treat their minds and bodies as their own. Teach packs Merritt off to the Dean, who promptly threatens her with expulsion in a deeply condescending manner, making Merritt understand that her continued academic career is dependent upon the girl ‘see[ing] things more clearly’ after Spring Break. And she will, but perhaps not in the way that arbitrary power would approve of. The Dean goes so far as to ask Merritt if she is ‘overly concerned with the problem of sex’. Merritt’s anxious demeanour might be because she has a cold and she’s now freaked out about flunking, but there is an implication, deftly delivered by scriptwriter George Wells and director Henry Levin, that her palpable sense of panic and physical discomfort comes from somewhere else entirely.

  But sex on the brain doesn’t stop it from working. Merritt, composure regained, simply remarks that there are half a million college kids in America who are overly concerned with sex. ‘I guess that makes me fairly normal,’ she smiles. The Dean shifts uncomfortably in her seat, as adults constantly do in this movie as they are confronted with the new sexual frankness of these baby-boomer brats.

  Wells’s script is so loaded with subterfuge and winks to a hip new teen audience that any one of a couple of dozen lines could have been chosen as key. At one point plain Jane Angie explains not having to lie to parents about her outdoor activities thus: ‘That’s the nice part about being captain of the girl’s hockey team – your parents know you’re safe.’ Is that as obvious a coded lesbian reference as it seems these days? Probably not – just a perennial truth about girls who do rough sports being seen as unfeminine by their male peers. But maybe not. It’s interesting in itself that Francis – the biggest female pop idol of her day – was so boyish and unglamorous.

  The film is also fond of playing with gender stereotypes. The first guy we meet, TV Thompson (Hutton), is a goofy, penniless hitchhiker who talks too much about nothing and drives really badly. He is the powerless irritant in this situation, constantly mocked by the girl he ends up with. Tuggle seems only to choose him because he’s one of the few readily available men who is taller than she is. What’s more, he is a New Man, of sorts, an easy-going chap secure enough in his manhood to be unthreatened by the apparent emasculation.

  In contrast, adults are mocked for their terror of teenage. One of the funniest scenes takes place outside Fort Lauderdale police station, where a set of suited and booted coppers are being assembled like an army repelling an invasion, which is exactly what they are. The gr
izzled police chief addresses his troops like a general giving a last pep talk to doomed Civil War volunteers. ‘Gentlemen . . . the city of Fort Lauderdale is once again under fire from the North. We’ve survived it before and I reckon we’re gonna survive it again. To you newly installed officers who’ve never seen action in the war against higher education . . .’ – you get the idea. The cops laugh, because in this movie, even adult squares do understand irony. And the speech becomes more interesting when it moves away from its comic metaphor, as the police chief reminds his stormtroopers that The Kids have ‘a right’ to have some fun, that they are ‘future citizens and future voters’ of the good old USA, and that he wants his cops to control their antics ‘without arresting anyone’. It’s like some liberal paradise!

  But even here, a discourse about class joins the one about age, with the blue-collar cops from the South doing battle with college kids from the North, in a neat little comic prophecy of what was coming over the next decade in the protests for civil rights and against the Vietnam War.

  Because Where The Boys Are is a film that sees ‘The Sixties’ coming, far more so than even The Wild One (see here) or Rebel Without A Cause (see here). Wells and Levin appear to have had an early grip on the issues that would really drive what movie critic Peter Biskind calls ‘The children’s crusade’ of the ’60s, which was for freedom of expression for the young and an end to the sexual repression that their parents had accepted as necessary, largely brought about by the invention of the contraceptive pill. Drugs, music, race awareness and anti-war agitation were simply the lifestyle choices added to the imperative – an end to eternal hormonal frustration – and the resulting explosion of new possibilities once one saw clearly that the personal is political. Whereas The Wild One provided blatant sexual imagery without having the nerve to address the S word directly, and Rebel . . . ignored teen sex completely because we all apparently wanted to fuck either Mom or Pop, Where The Boys Are addresses the burning issue of its day head on, and repeatedly reminds you that sex is the most important obsession of the hormonal adolescent.