1 Troubling teenagers: how movies constructed the juvenile delinquent in the 1950s David Buckingham This essay is part of a larger project, Growing Up Modern: Childhood, Youth and Popular Culture Since 1945. More information about the project, and illustrated versions of all the essays can be found at: https://davidbuckingham.net/growing-up-modern/ . The story you are about to see is about violence and immorality – teenage violence and immorality. Children trapped in the half-world between adolescence and maturity, their struggle to understand, their need to be understood. Perhaps in this rapid progression into the material world, man has forgotten the spiritual values which are the moral fibre of a great nation: decency, respect, fair play. Perhaps he has forgotten to teach these values to his own. He has forgotten to teach his children their responsibility before god and society. The answer may lie in the story of the delinquents, in their violent attempt to find a place in society. This film is a cry to a busy world, a protest, a reminder to those who must set the example. These portentous words are intoned over the opening titles of Robert Altman’s first film The Delinquents, shot in 1955 but not released until 1957. In fact, they are preceded by a pre-credit sequence, which begins with the black rhythm and blues singer Julia Lee entertaining the entirely white clientele of a bar. When a group of young people enter and attempt to buy drinks, they are told to leave because they are under age. After a tense confrontation, they eventually depart, smashing the window behind them, and the credits begin. The trailer for The Delinquents strikes a rather different tone. Over scenes of violence, sex, drinking, vandalism and jive dancing, it promises to show ‘the screen’s most shocking portrait of the babyfaces who have just taken their first stumbling steps down Sin Street USA.’ ‘Here,’ the trailer continues, ‘is a picture that dares to put on film the ravaged lives in the adolescent jungles of America today…’ Likewise, the publicity posters screamed: ‘The hoods of tomorrow! The gun molls of the future! The kids who live today as if there’s no tomorrow!’ The film was shot in suburban Kansas City, Altman’s home town, and its central character is Scotty, a rather clean-cut middle-class young man. When his girlfriend’s parents forbid the couple to be together (for reasons that are not fully explained), he resorts to deceiving them, with the help of the nefarious group introduced in the opening scene. Scotty’s rapid descent into crime seems partly accidental, and partly a result of the evil intentions of the group: he is forced to drink a bottle of whiskey, and then left to take the blame for the killing of a gas station attendant, assaulted with a pump nozzle during a bungled robbery. Scotty is essentially a victim of bad luck rather than the product of a poor social environment – although what motivates the ‘delinquents’ who lead him astray remains quite unclear. Nevertheless, the film’s conclusion is unequivocal about the need to deal with the problem: