No Time to Be Young

The mid-Fifties were a strange time, with most of the elder population being terrified of ' delinquents '. This was a broad word which covered the truly criminal, the outsider and those who society chose to be afraid of. Among these paranoid and fear mongering films were ' Rebel Without A Cause ', ' The Wild One ', ' Blackboard Jungle ', ' The Young Stranger ' and this very good film ' No Time To Be Young'. Of all of the listed above it is the least known, and yet in one actor in it there was another potential James Dean, Tom Pittman. He was as quirkily beautiful as Dean, and his sensitive acting superb and he met the same fate as Dean in a car crash while still very young. There are basically three stories in this scenario, all relating to the lives of three men barely out of their teens. All three have psychological needs and no one really cares about them, and for a rare change it is the men in this who suffer emotionally most and not the women. From a non politically correct point of view the women seemed either sexually predatory or success oriented wanting these young men to be stronger than their fragile selves could cope with. The inner claustrophobia of their lives build to a terrible climax, and an unhappily believable one. All of the relatively unknown cast were good, and it saddens me that in the UK it was double billed with a second rate horror film called ' The Strange World ' and was given the banal and untrue title of ' Teenage Delinquents '. By what I see on the BBFC site it was cut to shreds and for no good reason that I can understand. Crippled by this it was still given an X certificate. And so a film comparable to those I have listed has been more or less lost. In its structure it made me think of ' No Down Payment ' in its implicit criticism of society and I wish more people would track it down. A minor masterpiece of excellent film making and acute perception. If it had had a little less melodrama at times I would have given it a 10.

Buddy Root exits the office of Local Board No. 20 Selective Service. At the bottom of the stairs he lights a cigarette and the music swells. And as he steps to the camera the title "No Time To Be Young" flashes across him. The next title reads: "Introducing Robert Vaughn."

That's how this 1957 Columbia Pictures film begins. And, this is unmistakably Vaughn's picture.

Root (Vaughn) is upset that he's been drafted into the military. He's ruined his chances at a deferral by dropping out of college. He's from a fatherless home and his mother appears to be too busy to offer the type of parental guidance he needs.

Root has been having a relationship with his former college professor. She can't reach this troubled young man either as he wants to leave the country and desert his military obligation.

Root enlists the help of two friends to rob a grocery story and fund their escape. Each of these men face dark futures, too. One, has fallen for a reckless woman and now needs money to help her and the other guy has secretly married the daughter of a wealthy man and faces pressures to achieve financial success. Each of these men has been irresponsible and impulsive.

The filmmakers seem to have trouble with women.

No Time To Be Young tries explore the problems of criminal behavior from young men but it never offers more than superficial reasons.

What Vaughn provides is a vivid screen debut of a sociopath with self-destructive behavior.

And, for that reason, this film is worth a look.

To say the leads and the girl friends are college students is ridiculous. Robert, wasn't that good of an actor period. Same goes for Roger Smith, just a face, no depth, and the third guy, seen him on a couple of movies. He seemed to play losers most of the time. Merry anders nothing special about her either. This movie makes me think of, Robert in the movie called teenage cave man. Talk about a stinker. I don't know why back then they used actors that didn't fit the parts. Too old to play teens or college kids, didn't make sense. They still do it now. Give me the real talent, like the 30s and 40s, when actors had real talent.

It's fun to see Robert Vaughn, his smug, hissable screen persona so fully formed early in his career, starring in the mixed-up soap opera/generation gap/crime drama suffering from a horrible screenplay. But getting to the end of the show is quite a chore given the phony-baloney situations and characters of writer John McPartland's screenplay.

Best performance is not by the leads but by perhaps the least famous of the prinicpal players: Doris Dexter who is Vaughn's sympathetic college porfessor and an early example of what is now termed a MILF. The mother fixation of Vaughn is one of the worst elements of the half-baked story, that devolves into stupid melodrama.

One personal sidelight: McPartland, who like the co-lead Tom Pittman died young the next year (making the title of this movie pay off) wrote the Adult soap opera "No Down Payment", also shot in 1957. I saw the movie in a unique fashion: at my Junior High School they would screen fairly recent feature films at lunch time, one reel a day for 4 cents admission. Most were from 20th Century-Fox and science fiction ("The Fly", "Kronos" and "Spacemaster X-7" for example), but this one proved to be too steamy for us kids (no time to be young, I guess). It was my first encounter with censorship: the final reels were cancelled by the school, as the film was deemed not suitable for us to watch!

At first you think this is just another schlocky, 50s teen pic such as TCM has been burdening us with in their misbegotten Spotlight for this month...why not just make it "Bad B Pictures" and then you're not limited by age?...but then Robert Vaughn's performance, his first, as a spoiled, self pitying mama's boy (both literally and figuratively), starts to intrude on the otherwise banal proceedings and soon it starts to get under your skin and by the 20 minute mark damn if you don't find yourself, if not exactly caring about this loser, at least interested in what will befall him. Most of this reaction is attributable to Vaughn's skills , especially for portraying oleaginous scumbags, but some of it is due to a nice, low key screenplay, (at least by socially conscious, 50s teen pic standards, that is), by John McPartland and Raphael Hayes and fast paced, if a bit too TV-ish, direction from David Lowell Rich. When Vaughn's not on the screen and we're left with the more pedestrian characters played by Roger Smith and Tom Pittman, especially Smith's bland super market clerk, the movie is less compelling, but Vaughn's on screen enough so that it doesn't unduly harm the proceedings. Give it a B minus.