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Youth Runs Wild (RKO-Radio) is not to be confused with the sort of catch penny cinemalpractice which such a title normally suggests. It is, to be sure, a story of wartime juvenile delinquency, and a rather scrambled one at that. But Youth Runs Wild, for all its clumsiness, is remarkably full of warmth, of life, and of real cinematic sensitiveness. Credit for its awkward grace is due in part to a round dozen of its little-known players, in part to its scripters and director and cameraman, but most of all to 40-year-old Producer Val Lewton, nephew of Alia Nazimova.
Up to now Producer Lewton has wrung an impressive amount of blood out of such turnipy titles as The Curse of the Cat People and The Seventh Victim. He did so largely, as he says, by placing "very ordinary normal people in extraordinary situations." This new film is his first, uneven attempt to show normal people in normal situations. It investigates two working-class families, the steady Hausers, who are old inhabitants of Euclid Street, and the unstable Taylors, newcomers whom war has brought to be next door neighbors. The Hauser parents, both hard at work in a war plant, are eager for their son to finish school. But Frank (Glenn Vernon) is far more eager to earn money, out of restiveness, and because his friends do, and because of Sarah Taylor (Tessa Brind), the gentle, neglected child next door. Both get into bad company (Bonita Granville and some able supporters). Both "have ugly moments with their parents and at a drinking joint, and in an attempt at larceny, both are redeemed through a mellow juvenile-court judge and through kinfolk who, on a modest scale, set up every delinquency-preventive, from a kindergarten to machinist's training.
Some of the causes of delinquency are crudely underlined and reiterated; some of the delinquent episodes are dragged in by the hair. It will remain a mystery forever, for instance, just how or why Miss Granville gets killed in a roadhouse brawl. But a memorable amount of adolescent confusion and pain flickers on& off-beam, illuminating its causes with an honesty, economy and poignancy which are rare on the U.S. screen.
Youth Runs Wild is not a very competent film nor, as entertainment, is it likely to be very successful. But it contains elements which are far superior to competence or success. Indeed, the hope for great films in Hollywood seems just now to be shared about evenly by Val Lewton and by Preston Sturges, with the odds, perhaps, on Lewton. Lewton wholly lacks the Sturges brilliance, adroitness and comic gift; he probably hasn't it in him to make a wow. But his feeling for cinema is quite as deep and spontaneous as that of Sturges, and his feeling for human beings, and how to bring them to life on the screen, is deeper.