To mark the fiftieth anniversary of Rebel Without a Cause and Blackboard Jungle, Mark Venner explores images of juvenile delinquency in cinema.

Youthquake!

The explicit themes articulated by sixteen-year-old Holden Caulfield in the fractured vernacular of J. D. Sallinger's novel The Catcher In The Rye (1951) – distrust of elders, distrust of adult values, and distrust of the prevailing conspiracy of silence over sex – grew more and more insistent in the early 1950s until they converged in one crucial year,1955, which saw the explosive discovery of teenage identity – a Youthquake. The adult world in the USA and Europe first became aware of the process in the early fifties through a bewildering and disturbing increase in juvenile crime and delinquency. Crimes by offenders under twenty-one in England rose from 24,000 in 1951 to 45,000 in 1958. In both the US and Britain hordes of unskilled urban working-class youths, who sought tribal identity through stylised clothing, pursued violent gang warfare and vandalism in the streets and dancehalls. This puzzling and unprecedented youth movement soon became international with similar gangs emerging in France ('Blouson Noirs' – blackshirts), Japan ('Taiyo-zoku' – children of the sun), Sweden ('Skinn-nuttar' – leather jackets), and even Soviet Russia ('Stilyagi' – style boys). As 1950s historian Peter Lewis noted: 'It was a youth movement almost as international as its opposite, the Boy Scouts. Scouting – good deeds in eccentric uniform – had its greatest appeal after the first "war to end all wars"; delinquency in eccentric uniform appealed to the generation that did not quite remember the second war to end war.'

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 105.