Juvenile delinquency (1955)

JUVENILE DELINQUENCY 81 We do not laiio-h at our mothers. We do not laugh at God. AVe do not hiu<ih at tlie lixw if we are ^jood citizens. Now, these people lau<ili at the law and they laugh at some of those innnutable principles which not only catholicwise—I am not speaking as a Catholic, although I happen to be one—but by Christians, Jews, and all good Americans, I think, are accepted as immutable principles. Chastity and fidelity are not to be laughed at, even in a motion picture. Five Against the House is a story about college boys wlio, for fun— and here it is in the same milieu as The Seven Year Itch—for the sake of fun conceive of and start to plan and carry out a holdu]i in a Reno gambling joint. I don't have nuicli respect for those kind of ])laces, so if it is held uj) it is tlieir own business, but the law says they shall not be. The law says no one shall do these things. Of course, these boys didn't need the money; they were only doing it for the "kicks." What message does that convey to the not-too-cleeply-thinking youth who sees it ? Doesn't it rather appeal the idea generally in a laughing way, because of the fact it creates laughter, that it is perfectly all right, as long as you are not serious about it and will give the money back afterward? Kiss Me Deadly. I wouldn't dilate on that; no. The usual mixture of Mickey Spillane trash and crime and—I think they call them dames. The Aery word itself so often used in the advertising connotes exactly that disrespect for womanhood which I think these kind of films may tend seriously to increase. Cell 2455—Death Row, the Caryl Chessman story. Everybody knows it because there is a credit on the screen which says it is his story. But the film gets by the code presumably because it technically does not offend against that rule wliich says that the criminal in modern, times shall not be identified and referred to in this,film. Now, I always thought the credits were a pavt of the films. I stand corrected b}^ the Motion Picture Association code authority, which passes this ])icture and this picture goes out as a justification, prac- tically, in a sense, of what this man did. He tries to tell them not to do the same thing, but he also tells tliem that the reason why he became a juvenile criminal was because of advei'se social conditions besetting his youth and his family was poor and he was an underprivileged boy, and here tlie film repeats this theme wliich has been used ab initio in films of tliis tyi)e, always im]>uting that a class matter is involved in this question of juvenile crime, when we know all the time it is not always poverty which breeds this kind of juvenile crime, unless one includes that kind of poverty one sometimes finds in very wealthy homes, the poverty of parental example and guidance. Big House, IT, S. A. Here again, on a technicality, we ^lei a quite fi'ightful story of childhood. It has always been held by the code that cliild kidna])ing is a subject so urgent and so fearful in this country, in vieAv of tlie criminal history, that it should not I)e too graphically ]^resented or even ])resented at all on the moti()n-])ictui-e screen. It is said that it shall not be presented. It is said in the code it shall not be presented as a theme. So here a producer conceived the idea of introducing M'hat he called a major theme of prison break, relegat- ing the theme of kidna])ing, child kidnaping, to a secondary signifi- cance.