Stranded at the Drive-In

by Garry Mulholland

  Visually and thematically, the film brings to mind Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, though it’s a New York to Mexico distance behind that stone classic. So if it’s no masterpiece, why is The Young Savages in here? Well, there are some great scenes and set-pieces – the on-location funeral, a never-mentioned passed-out drunk in a neighbourhood bar, a metaphor-laden scene involving billiard balls between Burt and Pretty Boy (Chris Robinson), leader of The Thunderbirds. Burt gets a beautifully shot, young and savage teen kicking on the subway to boot. Unusually, some of the teen characters are more than just symbols, including (the admittedly pretty symbolic-sounding) Pretty Boy and Zorro (Luis Arroyo), leader of The Horsemen. Roberto and his sister turn out to be not-so-innocent bystanders in Harlem gang and criminal life, so it’s not all black and white. And it has one of the most memorable – and memorably ugly – teen thugs in Chandler’s Arthur Reardon, a genuinely disturbing mess of drunk, swimming eyes and slobbering chops.

  But in the end, the clincher is Burt Lancaster. From his brilliant debut in The Killers through to this in 1961, Burt Lancaster was a titanic talent in From Here to Eternity, The Leopard, Sweet Smell of Success and the previous year’s Elmer Gantry, for which he won the Oscar. Astounding performances in future cult favourite The Swimmer and for European maestros Louis Malle and Bernardo Bertolucci were still to come. He also wielded power behind the camera as part of the über-successful Hecht-Hill-Lancaster production company.

  So what was he doing slumming it in this overwrought (albeit imaginatively filmed) teensploitation? This film is like the Knorr stock cube of teen movies, with every teen ingredient carefully concentrated into 90 minutes. Absent fathers? Oh yes. Cops and psychiatrists? Fo’ sho’. Gangs as surrogate families? Uh huh. Anxious mothers trying their best but defenceless in the face of youth-powered change? You betcha. (By the way, the source novel was written by Evan Hunter, aka Ed McBain, birth name Salvatore Albert Lombino. Hank Bell isn’t the only one to realise that changing your name changes the game.)

  Maybe it was because Lancaster was a long-term and vocal liberal, raised in East Harlem himself, who could afford to promote his beliefs through a race and class message movie. Maybe it was another chance to work with long-time colleagues and friends – Harold Hecht, his long-time business partner, was producer on this film and Lancaster knew co-star Shelley Winters well too; in fact Winters’ autobiography maintained they had an affair lasting many years. Maybe he had a hunch it was the start of another beautiful friendship – The Young Savages was the first of five collaborations between Lancaster and Frankenheimer, including the following year’s mega-acclaimed Birdman of Alcatraz for which Lancaster was also Oscar-nominated.

  Whatever his reasons, he’s head and shoulders above everybody else in the film. He elevates the movie and gives it a grace and grandeur it wouldn’t have without him. ’Cos he could do that. Chuck Heston is good enough in Touch of Evil – actually brilliant, for him – but imagine Burt Lancaster in that kohl moustache facing off with Orson Welles and Marlene Dietrich, and dream. He was some kind of a man, even in a weird, trashy movie like this one.

  THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE RUNNER

  1962

  Starring: Tom Courtenay, Michael Redgrave, Avis Bunnage, Alec McCowan, James Bolam, Topsy Jane, Julia Foster, John Thaw, James Fox

  Dir.: Tony Richardson

  Plot: Baby, we were born to run.

  Key line: ‘I’d get all the coppers, governors, posh whores, army officers and members of parliament, and I’d stick ’em up against this wall and let them have it. Because that’s what they’d like to do to blokes like us.’

  Tony Richardson’s second great teen movie has all the elements you would expect from Britain’s late ’50s/early ’60s Free Cinema movement. Like A Taste Of Honey (see here), it is interested in The Grim Up North (well, actually, Nottingham in the Midlands – but the Midlands counts as Up North in movies of this era), disadvantaged youth, class conflict, documentary monochrome and a lead performance by an English Every Youth of such charisma that all possibilities of bleak worthiness are cast aside. Unlike A Taste Of Honey, it’s also about The System . . . the greatest bogeyman of Angry Young Man cinema. Adapted by Alan Sillitoe from his own, equally essential short story, Loneliness . . . is based around the simplest of metaphors: in a society where freedom and social mobility is impossible to achieve for most of its members, the rebellious boy runs, and runs, and runs some more . . . and never moves anywhere.

  Tom Courtenay plays Colin Smith, a bright but troubled boy who has been sentenced to reform school for robbing a bakery. The scandalously posh governor (Redgrave) of the borstal has a bug up his arse for athletics and learns that Colin is a prodigiously talented cross-country runner. He awards Colin privileged status in return for him running in a sports event against a nearby public school, an event the governor dearly wants to win. As Colin trains for and runs in the race, we see flashbacks to exactly how he got to this lonely, exhausting place. Friend Mike (Bolam) questions Colin’s willingness to sell out, and the public school boys – in preparation for If . . . (see here) presumably – appear to have more in common with the borstal boys than one might imagine. By the time Colin gets to the finishing line, he has sifted the harsh details of his life, the empty promises of material success, and the hypocrisies of the governor, the ruling-class and everyone else over the age of 25. So he rebels in the only way left to him. He stops running.

  Or, to put it another way, this is a pioneering English class war template for all those American high school movies about dumb or sensitive jocks who are awarded King Of School status because they’re good with various types of ball. Colin is given privileged status because he’s good at sport, and his reaction to that determines whether he’s hero or villain. American high school movies are full of jocks given privileged status because they’re good at sport, and, in films like The Breakfast Club (see here) and Dazed And Confused (see here), and a TV show like Glee, their reaction to that determines whether they’re hero or villain. The governor spots Colin’s talent for running during a football match, and ignores the new, new-fangled liberal idealist member of staff, Mr Brown (McCowan), when he suggests that life might be more complicated than a game of football.

  It’s also a feast for Brit telly nostalgists. The late John Thaw of The Sweeney and Inspector Morse fame is one of Colin’s fellow inmates, playing a Scouser and sporting a very fetching Teddy Boy DA cut. And pug-nosed cockney comic stooge Arthur Mullard – the most appropriately named man in TV history – is one of the governor’s henchmen. Future Likely Lad Bolam gets a bigger part as Colin’s mate and partner-in-petty crime, while future Performance star Fox is the star public school boy Colin races against.

  Loneliness . . . is not as great a film as A Taste Of Honey. There are too many dodgy acting performances. Too many sledgehammer political speeches. Too many ironic uses of William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ in the annoyingly busy score. So much class anger that you wonder if the whole movie doth protest too much. There is one reason why the film is here, and its name is Tom Courtenay.

  Those who know Courtenay from a later and much-admired career of playing comic dreamers, fey aesthetes and wimpy nice guys will barely recognise him in his second film role. In sharp contrast to his next role in the brilliant Billy Liar, Courtenay is a flint-eyed threat, wiry and gaunt, mouth drawn into a constant hard and baleful glower. His pale and skinny body in vest and shorts, running and running, legs so thin you fear they’ll snap in two if he treads on a bug, is the image you take away from Loneliness . . . Because he is small and thin, the threat Courtenay carries isn’t of the punch-you-out variety. It’s more about an absence of fear and an infinite capacity for pain. He feels like a rock ’n’ roll northerner, a Mark E. Smith or a Liam Gallagher, a mixture of impenetrable insolence and smartarse street smarts. Courtenay is the movie.

  We know Colin is brighter than the other boys. Partly because he’s the only one who doesn’t have a greasy rocker cut, but
mainly because he is as unimpressed by Brown’s intrusive reformism as he is by the aloof authoritarianism of the governor and his thugs. He accepts his life of dead dad and miserable mum, downbeat romance, days out at Skegness (in European new wave movies, there is always a beach), borstal riots, and the wonders of poverty row television and consumerism with a weary stoicism. He’s a study in pessimism and a mix of Antoine from The 400 Blows (see here) and Trevor from Made In Britain (see here). He could go on to become a thoroughly bad lot or Poet Laureate, and would probably insist that there wasn’t any difference, when it came right down to it. Colin is a practical existentialist, which is probably what will save him from flirting with fascism like Trevor.

  Existentialism actually gets a mention, oddly. At one point Colin and Mike watch a party political broadcast on TV, mocking the empty platitudes. The PM then goes into a very weird rant about ‘continental existentialists’ before calling America ‘our cousins in affluence’. This cosying up to the Yanks and rejecting the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre is presumably, according to Sillitoe, A Very Bad Thing.

  And this is the meaning of the unforgettable, inspiring, sobering ending. America is where winning means everything. The British Left hate America. So losing becomes an anti-capitalist, anti-American act. Which, apart from explaining much about British sport, carries a unique political sting. Colin’s refusal to play the game doesn’t give him revolutionary glory. We leave him among the other boys, privileges long gone, being hollered at in the borstal workshop. They are making gas-masks; slave labour in preparation for war. Jerusalem plays us out.

  Top stuff. I miss The Old Left. Sometimes.

  TO SIR, WITH LOVE

  1967

  Starring: Sidney Poitier, Judy Geeson, Christian Roberts, Suzy Kendall, Lulu, Geoffrey Bayldon

  Dir.: James Clavell

  Plot: The Swinging ’60s Blackboard Jungle.

  Key line: ‘Unless you can work up a little black magic, these little bastards have a multitude of tricks.’

  No film makes an exiled Londoner more nostalgic for the old Route-master double-decker London buses. You’re not entirely sure at first which western suburb Sidney Poitier’s Mark Thackeray is travelling from (it turns out to be Brentwood), but the opening credits take you on a journey through London at its bustling best, through the West End and past Tower Bridge and the Tower Of London and right on through to the wild East End, where everyone suddenly becomes louder, friendlier and scarier, which they do. I get all overcome with removed nostalgia by a glimpse of a No. 15 to Ladbroke Grove, which, in 1967, would be taking you right into the middle of plans for the early Carnivals, the first Pink Floyd and Soft Machine shows, the ever-growing rebellion against evil landlord Peter Rachman, black power leader Michael X, Marc Bolan living in a squat, and the beginnings of the underground press. Sigh. Born too late.

  Thackeray is a rookie teacher thrown into the lion’s den at a tough secondary modern school in, we think, East Ham. The credulity-stretching question as to why a dazzling African-American intellectual stud-muffin has ended up in London to educate the poor – apart from persuading American bums onto cinema seats, of course – is taken care of by the early explanation that he’s an immigrant from British Guiana who ‘spent some time in California’. He’s only become a teacher because he can’t get work in racist England as an engineer, despite his splendid qualifications.

  Suzy Kendall is the fellow-teacher love interest, which is funny, because Kendall was kind of a poor man’s Julie Christie – all blonde hair and blow-job lips – but is made into a teacher here by – you guessed it – an elastic band round the do and a pair of black horn-rim glasses. As soon as she walks onscreen you’re on standby alert for the bit where she shyly shakes her hair free and Sidney removes the glasses and declares, ‘But, why, Miss Blanchard . . . you’re beautiful!’

  Far better is the presence of a young Patricia Routledge, the future Hyacinth Bucket from the Keeping Up Appearances sitcom. Not only is she quite shockingly hot, but she has the cut-glass upper-class accent Hyacinth would’ve killed for, and her character is called Clinty Clintridge. Clinty Clintridge! A couple of ‘N’s away from a career in porn. Where did it all go wrong, Patricia? But while the rest of the teachers talk in tired platitudes, Clinty – hur! – is the Voice Of Reason.

  The ostensible villain is cynical veteran teacher Weston, played by Geoffrey Bayldon, who made a ’70s career out of eccentric goobers, most notably in Marc Bolan’s Ringo-directed Born To Boogie movie and much-loved kids’ time-travelling wizard telly show Catweazle. Weston parades his loathing of both youth and the working classes with jaded sneers, and everything he says to Thackeray has some kind of jauntily racist undercurrent. Just in case Poitier’s presence isn’t courting the American audience enough, one of Weston’s rants proves he hates Yanks as much as everyone else, so he’s obviously an English middle-class loser.

  If you’ve already read the entry for The Blackboard Jungle (see here), then your head is probably spinning by now. To Sir, With Love really does play like Gregory Miller grows up to be a teacher and finds himself having to deal with kids like him . . . in England! And they’re mostly white, and he’s all black, which therefore shows off how much we white liberals have grown in the last ten years of the civil rights struggle! This really should be a confused, contrived and condescending wet liberal disaster. But it isn’t. Director and screenwriter James Clavell, an Australian former prisoner of war who made magic from his experiences by writing the script for The Great Escape, has too much heart to let that happen.

  This school – which remains unnamed, oddly – is one of these new-fangled ’60s experiments in liberal education. Teachers are not allowed to punish the kids. Not just physically . . . I mean, not at all. And, apropos of nothing, in the middle of the school day, the kids have discos. Real discos, in a big hall, with crazy beat music which just happens to be sung by Lulu, who, as killer bee-hived pupil Barbara, is dancing right upfront. None of the kids asks her about how the pop career’s going. They’re all too cool for that. But this cool doesn’t stretch as far as the dancing which is triumphantly bad. Teen movies may have got better, all things considered. But the genre lost something crucial when it started to employ actors who could dance and gave them proper choreography. Every film ever made would be substantially improved by a bad-freaky-dancing at-a-disco-scene. The King’s Speech. Inception. Everything by Woody Allen. It’s just laziness, is what it is.

  Anyway, the pupils at this paradise – sorry – deeply troubled school are rejects from other schools and this place is essentially just babysitting them until they are old enough to become grunt soldiers in the ever-growing reserve army of labour. This is easy to suss because they all have Dick Van Dyke, ’ave-a-banana-I-should-coco-guv cocker-knee accents, rather than talking like normal London urchins, who, by the time this Londoner was four, were already starting to sound like Dizzee Rascal.

  In terms of the standard classroom war zone, these kids go in more for the drip-drip-drip of low-level disruption, rather than flick-knives or assault with a deadly chair. But after a couple of days, the frustrated and rather distant Mark is circling local paper ads for engineers. His food for thought moment is, perhaps, the moment that makes the movie seem personal to me, leading me to forgive much of its soft-soap sentiment and the mockney over-acting of one Christian Roberts as head Bad Boy Denham.

  Mark has a conversation after school with his class’s token mixed-race boy, Seales. The boy’s angry and miserable because his white mother is ill and his black father is absent. I, too, grew up with an absent black father and a white mum who physically and psychologically buckled under the strain of raising me on benefits and low-paid jobs. The scene is nicely under-played . . . teacher doesn’t take Seales under his wing and provide a black male role model to make everything all right for the boy. It just reminds him that these kids have been fucked up and have a right to be hostile, and that their teachers have little idea of how bad things are at home, asid
e from Clinty’s sweeping assumption that they’re slapped around by Bad Dads.

  Because America is a gun culture, the vision of juvenile delinquency in American film is always apocalyptic, on some level. But this is a school I recognise, where the pain of being a ‘disadvantaged’ child doesn’t play itself out in shoot-outs, gang-fights or death, but the drawn-out nightmare of a hellish home life and a school system that, largely, doesn’t give a shit how you turn out as long as you turn up. To Sir, With Love captures a British cultural cringe, in the ’60s and ’70s, around the ‘problem’ of working-class youth, unmarried mothers and ‘half-caste’ children, a constant implication, dressed up in liberal hand-wringing, that there was something naturally wrong with our start in life, and that the emphasis should be on teaching us to be obedient rather than how to achieve our intellectual potential.

  I’m not saying that a bright working-class kid – of any colour – might not have identical grievances in 2011. Simply that there isn’t another movie, that I’ve seen anyway, that talks about my ’60s/’70s London childhood with any degree of honesty while coming to the conclusion that being working class in England isn’t inevitably a dead end. And that is why I love To Sir, With Love.

  The tension in the early part of the film revolves entirely around Poitier’s USP – the proud and beautiful black man, attempting to keep his dignity intact under assault from lesser beings. In this case, unlike most of his best-known roles, Poitier is caught up in generational war, rather than race war. We are simply waiting for him to lose his temper and tame the beasts. And the incident that creates the tipping-point is a weird, creepy one that must have seemed fairly daring back in 1967.

  After being narrowly missed by a water-bomb, Thackeray strides into his classroom to find something burning. Nobody says it out loud, but, from his horrified reaction and targeting of the girls, we infer that one of the little madams has set fire to her used sanitary towel in the classroom bin. In truth, the story needs this huge upping of the ante, because water-bombs and slammed desktops aren’t really getting over the idea that these kids are, as Mark now declares, ‘Devils incarnate’. But burning bloody sanitary towels is the kind of nastiness that stands the test of teenage time.