(3 of 3)
Teenage Rebel (20th Century-Fox) is not nearly so bad a movie as the title—with its overtones of juvenile delinquency —makes it seem. Adapted from last season's Broadway near miss, A Roomful of Roses (TIME, Oct. 31, 1955), the movie describes a skirmish in the unending teenagers v. parents' revolution. The rebel, in this case, is the maladjusted daughter of divorced parents. At 15, the youngster visits her remarried mother (Ginger Rogers) for the first time in eight years. Her mother and stepfather (Michael Rennie) sympathetically figure that the hostile, resentful girl is merely a little bundle of misery. The boy next door is less sympathetic. "Am I losing my charge," he wonders aloud, after she holds him at arm's length, "to be turned down by a creep?" In the language of her contemporaries, she is a square who wants to fit into a world that is round. In the end, after her mother and the boy next door smooth off some of the rough edges, she does. Betty Lou Keim, as the girl, is too convincing a little stinker to generate much pathos, and Ginger Rogers is too vapid a mother to rouse much sympathy. But the acting is competent, the big scenes affecting. In fact, the whole thing is a lot better than most of the drama the moviegoer could see at home on TV.