Youth Runs Wild (RKO, 1944)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Pretty Hurts on June 28, I ran my husband Charles a grey-label DVD of the last Val Lewton movie we hadn’t watched together in some time: Youth Runs Wild, a 1944 movie about juvenile delinquency and how it was being exacerbated by World War II and conditions on the home front. It began as a 1943 photo essay in Look magazine and was originally planned as a vehicle for director Edward Dmytryk (who was actually of Ukrainian ancestry; with a name like “Dmytryk” I’d always assumed he was Greek!) as a follow-up to his sensational successes Hitler’s Children and Behind the Rising Sun. Then that version fell through (though Dmytryk’s then-wife Madeleine got credit as a “researcher”) and it ended up with Lewton’s unit. Lewton assigned some of his “regulars,” notably Mark Robson as director and Kent Smith, Jean Brooks, and Elizabeth Russell in leading roles. Smith plays Danny Coates, a World War II veteran who was invalided out of the service due to a leg injury and returns home to his small town of “Middleton.” Brooks, fresh from her brilliant performance as the suicidal Jacqueline Gibson in Lewton’s and Robson’s The Seventh Victim, plays his wife Mary, who’s living with her parents, the Taylors (Ben Bard and Elizabeth Russell), during his absence. Next door to the Taylors live the Hausers, parents Fred (Art Smith) and Cora (Mary Servoss) and their son Frankie (Glenn Vernon). Frankie had previously been a good student but he’s been cutting classes lately to do odd jobs for an income so he can woo his girlfriend, the Taylors’ daughter Sarah (Tessa Brind).

Among the first things we hear in this movie is the sound of metalworking coming from the Hausers’ garage – and we soon learn it’s Frankie making a new personalized clasp for the handbag he’s just bought Sarah as a present. That’s about all in this movie that looks or sounds like a typical Val Lewton production. Instead Youth Runs Wild is a pretty ordinary story about alienated youth, though there’s a bit of novelty in why the young people in it are alienated. Both the Hauser and Taylor parents are working the graveyard shifts in the local munitions plant (which by the way is owned by a company called Hobbs), and they literally never get to see or talk to each other except on rare occasions. Most of the time they communicate via a chalkboard in the living room on which they leave each other messages. At one point Frankie Hauser falls in with a bad crowd centered around local garage owner Larry Duncan (Lawrence Tierney, making his credited film debut) and his girlfriend, Toddy Jones (Bonita Granville, top-billed and playing the only character with any real moral complexity). Frankie and his only slightly more bad-ass friends Georgie Dunlop (Dickie Moore) and Herb Vigero (Johnny Walsh) try to make some easy money by stealing spare tires out of cars, but they get caught and fired at by the night watchman (Harry Harvey). Ultimately a stray bullet wounds Larry, who takes this as a sign that from then on he should stop dealing in black-market auto parts and run his garage legitimately.

The Hausers insist that Frankie stop dating Sarah because they attribute his ruination to her and his desire to buy her presents he can’t afford, and the film takes on a weird Romeo and Juliet vibe as the young people are separated by their families. At least it doesn’t end that gloomily, though Sarah moves out of her parents’ home in disgust. Toddy takes her in as a roommate and helps her get a job at Rocky’s, owned by Rocky (Rod Rodgers), a nightspot which hires underage girls and steers them perilously close to out-and-out prostitution. Though Sarah manages to make it through her career at Rocky’s without losing her virginity, either for money or for fun, she lies to her parents and to Frankie and hints (under the Production Code she couldn’t do anything more than hint) that she’s “grown up” in the fullest sense. Ultimately all the wanna-be miscreants are hauled before a juvenile court judge (Fritz Leiber), who like virtually all movie judges from this period is tall, thin, ancient and cadaverous-looking. He also has a photo of Franklin D. Roosevelt on his courthouse wall even though this film took so long to get into theatres that by the time most people saw it Roosevelt was dead and Harry Truman was President. The judge gives them a speech and brings in Ruth Clifton (playing herself), a teenager who managed to solve the juvenile delinquency problem in Moline, Illinois by opening a teen center where the young people of her city could have wholesome recreation. There’s a long documentary-style sequence showing how Clifton’s centers work, and Frankie and Sarah reunite and set about opening such a center in “Middletown.”

Charles was disappointed in Youth Runs Wild, saying that there was virtually nothing of the highly personal style Lewton brought to his horror films (and to his other non-horror RKO production, Mademoiselle Fifi, reviewed by me at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2022/11/mademoiselle-fifi-rko-1944.html). A lot of people at the time didn’t like Youth Runs Wild, either, including the U.S. government (Lewton got a memo from the State Department to the effect that a film focusing on juvenile delinquency would be bad for national morale), Look magazine (who refused to promote the film even though it had been based on a story they’d published, and according to some accounts even asked that their name be taken off the film), movie audiences (the film reportedly lost $45,000, though as I’ve mentioned before about Lewton’s alleged money-losers, “B” films were essentially sold like yard goods and as long as it came in under budget and on schedule, it was virtually impossible for a “B” to lose money even if moviegoers didn’t like it), and the “suits” at RKO. Lewton was reportedly disgusted with the sheer amount of studio interference he got on Youth Runs Wild – especially since previously he’d been allowed pretty much free rein on his horror films – and was even more disgusted when final cut was taken away from him and the film was heavily re-edited.

Among the studio’s deletions was a scene in which a teenage boy kills his father after suffering long-term abuse at his old man’s hands (a situation director Robson would return to in 1957 in Peyton Place, though in that film the victim turned killer is a woman who acts in self-defense when the man, who is not her father, tries to rape her). Lewton was so angry at the deletions that he even tried to have his producer’s credit removed, but RKO refused. Today Youth Runs Wild seems like an important precursor of the wave of juvenile delinquency films that came out in the mid-1950’s – The Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, Crime in the Streets – but not a very good movie, partly because the casting was inevitably weak. The kinds of actors this film needed wouldn’t be around for another decade or so, and the part of Frankie Hauser in particular cried out for a James Dean type and got gangly, almost terminally milquetoast Glenn Vernon instead. (Two years later Vernon would score an unforgettable triumph as “The Gilded Boy” in Lewton’s last RKO film, Bedlam, even though in that one he’s only in one scene!)