The Delinquents (Imperial Productions, United Artists, 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I watched Robert Altman's The Delinquents on April 29, 2008, just before I started the moviemagg blog. I was inspired to look it up again by a YouTube post featuring the great Kansas City blues/jazz singer Julia Lee, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfXMGJSVbbE, who appears in the film's opening scene. Altman's film, his first theatrical non-documentary feature (he'd worked previously on a documentary called The James Dean Story), was a pretty standard cookie-cutter juvenile delinquency film but it has its moments and is worth checking out if you're an Altman fan.

When Charles finally got home at 10 p.m. we squeezed in a movie mainly because I’d especially wanted to see it: The Delinquents, a cheapie made in Kansas City in 1956 (imdb.com dates it as 1957, but the copyright date is a year earlier) distinguished from all the other J.D. exploitation films of the time only in that the director is a young Robert Altman and the star is a young Tom Laughlin, both of whom made their livings mostly in television for the next decade or so until both of them achieved explosive popularity in movies aimed at the youth counterculture of the late 1960’s: Altman with M*A*S*H and Laughlin with Billy Jack (which he produced and directed — under the pseudonym “T. C. Frank” — and wrote with his wife as “Frank and Teresa Christina,” as well as starring in: the false names came from their kids, Frank, Teresa and Christina). In addition, the film opens with what turns out to be its best sequence: the great Kansas City jazz-blues singer Julia Lee singing the James P. Johnson-Andy Razaf song “A Porter’s Love Song to a Chambermaid” with a jazz band led by the film’s musical director, Bill Nolan. The song is interrupted by an altercation started by a band (and not the musical kind, either!) of juvenile delinquents led by Cholly (Peter Miller), who try a transparently obvious scam to get the bartender to sell them beer (they pass the same I.D. around and all try to use it), are refused, threaten to start a fight and/or break up the place, and eventually leave, then retaliate by grabbing a bus stop sign and hurling it through the club’s window.

On the way out they drive crazily — apparently they got booze from somewhere — and a girl with the group tries to sing Julia Lee’s song while they boast at how scared they got her. (She didn’t look scared at all to me — she looked like she’d seen far worse in the wide-open days of the 1920’s and 1930’s in which Kansas City was a hangout for gangsters from all over the country and many of them went to the jazz clubs and dug the music.) As Charles predicted, the movie went downhill from there. Tom Laughlin plays Scotty White, a decent kid whose descent into J.D.-dom starts when he’s no longer allowed to see his girlfriend Janice Wilson (Rosemary Howard) because her parents (James Lantz and Lotus Corelli), in what has got to be one of the dumbest decisions in a movie full of them, have decided to bar her from seeing Scotty because she’s only 16 and therefore too young to go steady — though they’ll let her see other guys. Devastated, Scotty goes alone to the drive-in movie they were planning to see together and he’s assaulted by another J.D. gang, then rescued by Cholly and company. They invite him to a party in an abandoned (though surprisingly well-stocked) house that the sheriff has sealed off, and there they get him drunk on whiskey (which, judging from the discomfort he feels when they’re forcing it down his throat, he’s never drunk before) and they try to split him and Janice (who’s sneaked out of her parents’ home by pretending that Cholly is her date — ironically, they approve of him because he’s handed them a line about having a good job as a messenger at a stock exchange and wanting to go into brokering as a career!) apart and seduce them. According to an imdb.com trivia entry on this film, Altman directed the party scene by telling his young actors to act as they would at a real party, then moved his cameras willy-nilly and caught whatever they caught for the final film — the one part of this movie that offers any clue to Altman’s working methods on his major films.

Though it’s only 72 minutes long, The Delinquents is one of those films that seem to creep along at a snail’s pace (or maybe that’s being unfair to snails). The big youth party is raided by the sheriff’s men, and the gang members blame Scotty and Janice for having tipped off the cops (it was actually the fault of the boy they stationed as their lookout, who was too busy necking with his girl to give the signal). They go after him and force him into their car, then stick up a gas station — Eddy (Richard Bakalyan), the most blatantly psychopathic of the gang members, who’s essentially to the dramatis personae of this film what Sal Mineo was in Rebel Without a Cause (see, I couldn’t write about The Delinquents without mentioning the great J.D. film it was attempting to reach for!), belts the gas station attendant with his own pump handle (and both Charles and I registered the chime sound when the car pulled up — from the days when gas station driveways had rubber pipes that sounded chimes to let the attendants know that a car had driven in and they had a customer they needed to wait on — as a slice of history that in and of itself dated this film!), and they eventually take Scotty to the home of yet another gang member, get him even more drunk (on the theory that the cops won’t believe him if he has liquor on his breath) and ultimately wound him with a switchblade, whereupon the cops duly arrive, take everybody into custody and the narrator who opened the film in stentorian tones (“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 its rapid progression into the material world, man has forgotten the spiritual values which are the moral fiber of a great nation: decency, respect, fair play...”) comes in to close it again and give it the general air of a movie you’d see on the audio-visual equipment of a high school.

According to imdb.com, Alfred Hitchcock saw The Delinquents, “read” it as the work of a potentially major talent and hired Altman to direct episodes of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents TV show — though aside from admiring Hitchcock for the accuracy of his call on Altman’s talent, I can’t imagine what he saw in this incredibly cheesy film that gave him the idea the person who’d helmed it was a major director in the making. It was also fascinating to look up both their biographies on the Internet and find that Altman was only five years older than Laughlin (Altman was born in 1926, Laughlin in 1931); on the strength of this film Laughlin appears to be yet another James Dean wanna-be who was trying to make a career by taking advantage of the opening left by the death of the real one (Paul Newman was the “official” replacement — he was under contract to the same studio, Warner Bros., and he made the two films that Dean had been set for when he died, Somebody Up There Likes Me and The Left-Handed Gun — but actors whose ultimate career trajectories were as diverse as Elvis Presley, Michael Landon, John Cassavetes and Steve McQueen also tried for the Dean mantle), and Richard Bakalyan seems the only actor in the piece with any real charisma or star power — though I must say Laughlin holds his own quite well in the fight scenes even though he’s way outnumbered and he hadn’t yet reconnected to his Native American roots or learned karate. There are also a few noir-ish compositions (though Altman was never much for atmosphere — even in his major films he’s more interested in getting sensitive performances from his actors and keeping his famous multiple plot lines sorted out than he is in spectacular visuals) and this film benefits from being in black-and-white (especially by comparison to the RancidColor process used to shoot Teen-Age Strangler!), but — aside from the welcome presence of Julia Lee in the opening sequence (“It’s all going to go downhill from here!” Charles joked, and he was right), The Delinquents has little to offer and seems a very strange first feature credit for Altman.