The Young Stranger (1957)

(On Cable TV, October 2019) I only watched The Young Stranger because it was legendary director John Frankenheimer’s debut feature film, and at times it felt as this remained the only reason to watch the film. Completed shortly after Rebel Without a Cause’s success, it’s about the listless ennui of a teenager ignored by his father, which leads him to a scuffle at a movie theatre and then to further issues at the police station and the family home where he seems intent on not accepting a shred of humility or contrition. It quickly leads to a confrontation between the stern father and the rebellious son. (I’m more disturbed than anyone else by the idea that I now identify far more firmly with the father than the teenager.)  The teenage protagonist does his best throughout the film to act in an intensely unlikable fashion, compounding one exasperating display of attitude by another. And yet The Young Stranger somehow ends up taking a curious milquetoast position that everybody should learn to understand each other through the curious device of the teenager assaulting an older man a second time. The film is clearly aimed at the teenage audience, and the ways it champions its adolescent agenda is off-putting—it jumps far too quickly to redemption. Still, the film’s technical qualities are better than its muddled message: Frankenheimer keeps control over his tone, and the result is a bit less melodramatic than the James Dean classic, a bit more grounded than other teenager movies of the time, and not a bad watch as long as you can get over the protagonist’s crummy behaviour. Which, admittedly, can be a high bar to clear.