This is from the Sight and Sound A-Z of Cinema in June 1998, a format that (alone in the S&S office?) I loved (so thx to Leslie Felperin for coming up w.it in the first place...)

(it probably makes a bit more sense w.pictures but there you go) (also it is tweaked a bit from the S&S cut, as in stuff lost for space going back in)

Y IS FOR YOUTH

teen pin-ups

Mary Pickford
In the days when most families nursed memories of tragedy, those faces that carried the shock of young beauty out into the world were being measured, consciously or not, against the Victorian cult of the dead infant. Limber acrobats Douglas Fairbanks (b.1883) and Charlie Chaplin (b.1889) were physical rather than numerical teens, young in the sense the New World was (and this new medium). By contrast, the younger Mary Pickford (b. 1893) was a symbol of battling survival, old before her time: starring in some 40 films before she was even 20, she was endlessly an orphan of the storm, forced by circumstance to fend for herself and siblings in a ruthless adult world. After World War One, being young would suddenly stop signifying, plotwise: too many kids had endured too many terrible things not to be deemed full adults, whatever their age in years. In the mid-20s, Pickford famously advertised for grown-up roles: receiving no good suggestions, she retired.

Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland
As a route out of poverty, vaudeville was thick with child performers, some headed for the screen. Onstage at two, Mickey Rooney debuted onscreen aged five, in 1926: from 1937, in some 15 movies, he was irrepressible teen Andy Hardy, rambunctious and scrape-prone son of Judge Hardy, and a model young citizen from a Midwest as gloriously unreal as only MGM could make it. Onstage at three, Judy Garland debuted onscreen aged 13, in 1936: in 1938, she co-starred with Rooney in Love Finds Andy Hardy and in 1939 in Babes in Arms, as Andy’s girl (others were Donna Reed and Esther Williams). Also arriving in 1937 but already half grown-up wrong, youth as bad example, the Dead End Kids were a near-balletic ensemble of six street toughs (Gabriel Dell, Leo Gorcey, Huntz Hall, Billy Halop, Bobby Jordan, Bernard Punsly). In Dead End they upstaged Bogart, and they featured in 19 films before 1943. The Hardy series won a special Oscar in 1942, for representing “the American way of life”; the Kids, fostered over at hard-bitten Warners, were not much more realistic (They Made Me a Criminal was directed by Busby Berkley). They didn’t upstage babyface Cagney in Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), where the moral is that it’s OK for priests to lie to the young. Given the speed MGM dosed Garland with to keep her ‘young looking’, who knows what the moral was there?

Lauren Bacall
Fresh from dumping his emotionally troubled middle-aged wife and taking up with 20-year-old wisecracker Nancy Gross, Slim to his Steve, Howard Hawkes clocked a younger face still in 1943, and wanted her too. Lauren Bacall was just 18, and way more naïve and gauche than the ultracool vixen Hawkes dreamt he saw – she never twigged what he was after (she later claimed), and he never got it. Well, except onscreen – where of course she had total amused poise and infinite carnal wisdom, and Bogart, twice over (To Have and Have Not, 1944, and The Big Sleep, 1946). Notwithstanding the latter’s sense of virtue in the second, when he chooses not to have Bacall’s little sister, a 16-year-old nympho killer (the following year, Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert would first gaze on Lolita). Bacall had Bogie offscreen also, fresh from his own collapsed marriage – as David Thomson puts it, wickedly: “the tough, wry hero at last gets his just reward – an insolent, 19-year-old sexpot with blowjobs lurking behind her sultry gaze.” With the onscreen Bacall such a total fabrication, a runaway Hawksian fantasy, she was then stuck forever lousy as an actress, miserably unable to match an invention who shared her fine features and body but not an inch of her being. In 1948, Hawkes would end Red River with Montgomery Clift (28) and John Wayne as buddies, a famous cop-out of a closure that hints at quite how damaging a more real dream of youth would be for the classic Hollywood genres.

James Dean
Before Clift and Brando, a screen persona broadcast inner immutability – and if all was confused and provisional within, the surface read as depthless flibbertigibbet. Now watch Dean (b. 1931) as Jett Rink in Giant (1956), against three interminable hours of immutable Rock Hudson. Dean’s character, misfit Texan nobody turned mumbling racist millionaire, is impossible to figure, but you can’t stop thinking about all that you’re not seeing. Dean’s gift to acting isn’t ‘youth’, let alone ‘rebellion’, but a genius for liminal states – except his death at 24 froze the subject matter of Rebel Without a Cause (1955) into myth, and he was nabbed, en masse, by teens bent on sentimentalising themselves (among them Dennis Hopper, who for years shoehorned a monotonous troubled-teen shtick into Westerns none the better for it). With its overlapping cast (Hopper is an idealistic doctor; pretty little Sal Mineo gets to die again), Giant hints at where Dean and method might have gone. Some way into its epic somnolence, he finally lets fly: covered head to foot in oil, Jett is a sticky black man leering at rich white Liz Taylor; later, he’s winningly funny (if badly made-up) as a middle-aged success on the brink of drunken disaster. Elsewhere, 50s adolescence rarely achieves such ambiguities: Natalie Wood is wide-eyed, winsome and troubled in Rebel, a mutely unturbulent victim in The Searchers (1956), virginal and magnificently frazzled in Splendor in the Grass (1961). Visibly at least, nothing’s tearing her apart.

Jean-Pierre Léaud
When they were still an outsider gang bent on re-inventing by infection the whole body of film, the nouvelle vague cinephiliacs and their pan-European fellow travellers shared and used Léaud (b. 1944) the way junkies share and use needles or lovers: young signifying females came and went, but between his debut at 15 in Truffaut’s Les 400 Coups (1959), when he was the double of the director himself as misunderstood pre-teen tearaway and 1973 – when he stood for all ’68’s left-over adolescent maleness, defeated and aging angrily – in Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la putain, Léaud had been handled with far from selfless intent by Godard, Luc Moullet and Jacques Rivette (as well as by Bertolucci, Pasolini, Glauber Rocha and even grandaddy Cocteau). Truffaut continued to employ him (and drain him) as a reflecting pool (in Love at 20, Stolen Kisses, Bed and Board, Anne and Muriel, Day for Night), the camera watching this wary stripling choose, and bloom, and fail. More cruelly (though ultimately less damagingly) Godard wielded him as one pop idea among many, one of the sweetly mismatched children of Marx and Coca-Cola in Masculin/Féminin (1966) and La Chinoise (1967), these engineers of 60s revolt betrayed by their own gender differences, pretensions, enthusiasms and callow certainties. La Chinoise is hard to find these days; but more invisible even than the true 60s is Rivette’s Out One (the more-than-12-hour original, 1970, or the four hour précis Out One: Spectre, 1974), in which two girls reinvent the universe as a melodrama starring themselves, and Léaud too, lonelier than ever, and obsessed with the number 13.

Michael J. Fox
That rangy camera natural Matt Dillon (b. 1964) was the 80s teen heart-throb as pro forma rebel, looselimbed and lovely. He’d debuted in a school-riot movie which ends with a firebombing (Over the Edge), he’d starred in three films based on S .E. Hinton’s popular 70s teen novels (Tex, The Outsiders, Rumble Fish), and he remains an antidote to the bratpack ideal (Drugstore Cowboy, 1989). But the spirit of the upwardly mobile, wised-up, self-hating 80s was another non-bratpacker, Michael J. Fox (b. 1961), a scrunched, nervy, bouncily physical comedian of hobbitlike omniscience and impatient, appalled foresight. Unlike Dillon, no one fantasised bedding Fox or being him, not in High School USA (1983), not in Teen Wolf (1985), nor even Bright Lights Big City (1988), perhaps because he was always way more adult than the grown-ups he seemed eternally to be shepherding towards maturity. In sit-com Family Ties he was the cartoon yuppie son leading dreary liberal hippie parents towards the Reaganite uplands, endlessly thwarted by routine teen dilemmas. In Back to the Future (1985), he deployed his ‘adult wisdom’, a knowledge of the 50s derived (presumably) from Happy Days, to divert his parents from the undaring loserdom they’d settled for in present-day Hill Valley. Of course, using the 50s (when promise was still untarnished) to rewrite the Darwinian 80s is actually a way of avoiding mention of the tricky 60s or 70s, when youth allegedly seized the day: in the last, lightest and best of the BttF trilogy, it’s the less symbolic 1880s that Fox rewrites, and the adult he’s now mothering is Christopher Lloyd, timelessly white-haired and absent-minded .

Winona Ryder
In Heathers (1989), in which the eternal teen war between ‘cool’ – that snobbery of secret straights – and the genuine unloved outsider (the fat, the ugly) is taken to deliriously murderous levels, Winona Ryder (b 1971) rejects the call of her own beauty – but she also courageously rejects the psychotic Christian Slater (whose idea of rebel nihilism is little more than a xerox of aging careerist fraud Jack Nicholson). She would sustain her Goth-princess promise from the Hispanic-widow-at-14 look in Beetle Juice (1988) through to Edward Scissorhands (1990) – and what sustained her was her amazing open-mouthed stare-and-frown. It betokened depths of astonished rage at adult stupidity and the perfidious tolerance and low ambition of her peers, a idealistic rage that would surely bloom, one day, into magnificent queenly flame. Tim Burton, self-confessed Cure fan, directed these two and provided her at last with the perfect Goth mate, and a love forever unrequited: Johnny Depp as Scissorhands, chaotically creative yet socially shunned, and a figure for outcast teen Burton himself. By the overbusy Reality Bites (1994), a purported ‘spirit of the 90s’/slacker choices movie, the increasingly mousy WR is disastrously forgiving of the mysteries of the male teen organism (Ethan Hawke as beatnik pain-in-the-butt), and therefore Goth-queen-to-be and face-of-her-age no longer.

Leonardo DiCaprio
Heart of Titanic’s ocean of subtexts is James Cameron’s belief (first spied in The Terminator) in the transcendence of the One Night Stand. For reasons perhaps outside mere box-office calculation, the claim seems to be made that the parting of just-met golden teens is more tragically glorious and more filmically significant than the ending-by-sinking of any other species of relationship. Hence Kate Winslett shoving Leonardo DiCaprio (b.1974) down into deepfreeze; hence his subsequent rise, soaring beyond reason, to worldwide posterboy iconicity (actually, Titanic suggests youth has other dimensions on film: the surviving Winslet/Gloria Stuart character can be seen as a sly homage to Lillian Gish, prankishly ageless spirit of cinema over nine decades). To see how fashions in Holywood teendom shift, observe the many Romeo and Juliets over the decades (cf chronology). Obviously DiCaprio dies in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996). Obviously Juliet – Clare Danes (b. 1979) – dies also (she dies too as Beth, in Little Women, 1994, another reliable because much-filmed guide to Hollywood youth stylings). But compare her Angela Chase in television’s My So-Called Life – pained in her troubled idealism, yet almost wearily mature – with a Mary Pickford role, from a time when adult women with brains and sexual appetites were everywhere invisible. Death may still be the essence of iconic youth, but – call it post-modernism, call it the queering of the mainstream – it’s the men whose growing up no one today wants quite to address.

teen hang-ups

Mayflies in amber
“I was 18 and going to hell in a handbasket,” begins Kathryn Bigelow’s biker-movie homage The Loveless (1981). A great kick-off, but Love Story (1970) trumps it: “What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who dies?” Youth as a purer, truer way of being – for this (incredibly) is what Ali McGraw represents – must be sanctified by sacrifice. The most valuable element in Easy Rider (1969) was Dennis Hopper’s edgy, blocked obnoxiousness – until his and Fonda’s shock deaths at the film’s close allowed fans not only to forgive the inability to grow up, but to embrace it, as a blueprint of social resistance. The girlfriend’s blueing riverbank corpse in River’s Edge (1986) was intended as condemnation of empty doper lifestyle (Hopper in cameo as dire warning); actually it gave this emptiness an embalmed glamour. In Australian proto-grunge indie Dogs in Space (1986), Anna’s death by OD frees Michael Hutchence, no less, from commitment to punky nowheredom: her end is key to his stardom. Hirokazo Kore Eda’s Maborosi (1995) is rare for being a film where (her) young life convincingly shakes off the witchy pull of (his) equally young suicide.

Acting your age-group
As youth is ever more mediated, teen conformism is required not only to real-time peer groups, but to their retrospective celluloid approximations. Dead Man’s Curve, a little-noticed biopic of 60s surf duo Jan and Dean, “made history real by evading what passes for it,” noted Greil Marcus, spearing what spoils most recreations of the subcultures of yesteryear. As another stab at the same dilemma, in movies of quality and subject as disparate as chrome-gleam nostalgia tale American Graffiti (1973), spree-killer romp Badlands (1973), forlorn urban-loneliness allegory Chungking Express (1994) and mannered thug-celebration Gravesend (1996), the voiceover is truth-telling only insofar as we realise the narrator is deludedly moulding his/her lifestory in retrospect, to fit received wisdoms of teen identity. While Sid and Nancy (1986) matches Grease (1978) for bad faith in this respect, such unlikely recreations as Hairspray (1988) and That Thing You Do! (1996) freed their characters from hindsight smugness by siding with history’s subcultural losers. In non-western cultures, precision of mimicry is less to the point than the role anglophone pop culture plays locally: so the Arab gang youths in Merzak Allouache’s Bab-El Oued City wear jeans and leather jackets, yet the crybaby Japanese hero in The Worst Day of My Life patterns himself after noir tec Mike Hammer.

Class warfare
Perhaps inspired by the Billy Wilder version of Erich Kästner’s Emil and the Detectives (1931), the child-clouds that flow in omniverous righteousness across the bomb-scarred London of Hue and Cry (1946), to snare and bring to natural justice the villains official law-and-order overlooks, are the closest English-speaking cinema ever got to easy love of proletarian revolution – except for the everfresh free-life/free-love summer anarchisms of the St Trinians no-go zone. The intoxicating if…. (1968) also has a European precursor, Jean Vigo’s legendary school-uprising film-poem Zéro de conduite (1933). But in Lindsay Anderson’s clever but bitter remake, the fantasy of machinegun murder as just deserts unmasks a vengeful Stalinist behind the romantic middleclass revolutionary. In Blackboard Jungle (1955), the riot is presented as timely sociological warning; in Unman, Wittering and Zigo (1971), the sinister pupil-mob’s mindgames are inevitably psychopathologically triumphant; in Carrie (1976), with most of the kids as conformist as the grown-ups, the collective bloody unconscious manifests through the most despised outsider.

Another planet
The unlikely hooligan argot derived from Russian in A Clockwork Orange (1971) and the straight Shakespeare gay hustlers Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix rabbit with mixed success in My Own Private Idaho (1991) relate imagined youth community to self-definition in exclusive slang – but both miss the point that genuine coded teenchat reflects a shared mastery of widely available Pop Cultural knowledge. The ancestor of the genre is Melville’s Les Enfants Terribles (1949), with its brother and sister locked in their tiny two-headed subculture – and its moment of explosion into pop consciousness is early interview footage of The Beatles and Dylan, by virtue of the sheer verve of their media-rich repartee. Some subcult jargons are harder to catch than others – Bloody Kids (1979) and Repo Man (1984) capture UK and LA punk by brilliant crabwise assault through, respectively, mise-en-scène and hilariously unlovable performance. Harmony Korine’s Gummo (1998) celebrates subcultural alertness, but insists also that it no longer implies any control over one’s own life. Perhaps the two Bill and Teds (1988/91) and the two Wayne’s Worlds (1992/3) acknowledged this, too, but only insofar as their charmingly goofy, non-bogus utopias didn’t at all resemble real heavy-metal life.

Learning curves
Generally what’s learnt in a Rites-of-Passage movie is less ‘being adult’ than how to fuck and who not to. In The Sterile Cuckoo (1969), Liza Minelli as student Pookie Adams is a fascinating, dizzy, neurotic free spirit: her lover must discover the hard way why so fabulous, damaged a being is bad news. Scary Anne Bancroft as Mrs Robinson in The Graduate offers herself on a plate to passive college-leaver Dustin Hoffman: he finds out that saying no to willing older women wins you their cute daughters, a lesson both ugly and false. In David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986), Kyle MacLachlan learns from older woman Isabella Rosselini, erstwhile youth icon Dennis Hopper and former child star Dean Stockwell, that not being young will be a terrifying state of near-meaningless violent trade-offs and snatched peace; in Twin Peaks (1989), with former youth stars Russ Tamblyn, Richard Beymer and Laurie Piper in attendance, an adult MacLachlan discovers small-town teendom in the Pacific Northwest is if anything worse. Outside the west, where one doesn’t necessarily get to choose one’s own mate, Satyajit Ray’s Apur Sansar (1958) finds the good in the Indian arranged marriage, something Shekhar Kapur’s Bandit Queen (1994) definitively fails to. Rites-of-Slasher-Passage movies from Nightmare on Elm Street on down (Halloween, Friday the 13th) propose something simpler still: scary Freddie – or scary someone – slices up kids for having (or just wanting) sex. In some (the ones where the survivors don’t seem to be virgins) you can maybe fool yourself that it’s the wrong kind of sex that’s the crime.

Of their elders’ projection
Reviewing Rebel Without a Cause in Cahiers du cinéma, Eric Rohmer wrote, “It is the honour of these boys and girls which is at stake, an honour ill-conceived but which cannot be otherwise…” And of all directors, it is Rohmer who has over the years fairly, fondly and exactly mapped the complexities – and the conservatism – of adolescent intelligence, morality, etiquette, in Le Genou de Claire (1970), Pauline à la Plage (1982) and elsewhere. Elsewhere, aging male idealisation of youth is both patronising and perilous (think of Bertolucci’s vision of Liv Tyler in Stealing Beauty, 1995, or Woody Allen with 18-year-old Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan, 1979: her cultural salvation, yeah, right). Weird 30s apogee of projection is still that most adult of infants Shirley Temple (“the mature suggestiveness of a Dietrich”: Graham Greene); weird 90s apogee is surely Starship Troopers (1997), in which pan-galactic youth (of both sexes) is portrayed as gay male and dim, Aryan-gorgeous and inevitably victorious. Though flawed, both Lolitas (1962, 1998) are black-humour essays in the relevant delusions of intelligent middle-aged masculinity, and the bleak dangers. And the sweetest, smartest review of either is 17-year-old Dominique Swain’s, in Elle in May 1998: “Basically, I think the moral of this story is, Don’t try this at home.”

teen round-up

1908 Two Romeo and Juliets, one (US) with Paul Panzer (36) and Florence Lawrence, the legendary ‘Biograph Girl’ (22), the other (UK) with Godfrey Tearle (24) and Mary Malone [age unknown]
1911 Romeo and Juliet with George Lessey (32) and Julia M. Taylor (33)
1916 Two Romeo and Juliets, one with Francis X. Bushman (39) and wife Beverly Bayne (22), the other with Harry Hilliard (30) and Theda Bara (26); Mary Pickford vehicle When We Were in Our ’Teens signals PopCult arrival of term for those between 12 and 20 (she was 23)
[ps from 2004: ‘PopCult arrival’ is nonsense; Tracer Hand and I saw a playbill for a drama called Teens: or something something something in the 1753 exhibition at the British Museum]
1917 Little Women (UK)
1919 Little Women (US)
1921 Jackie Coogan (6) debuts opposite Chaplin in The Kid: in 1964 he will finally cast off ‘child star’ millstone as Uncle Fester in TV’s The Addams Family; As the World Rolls On revels in exploits of youth gangs; rape and death of Virginia Rappe (26) at party ruins innocent Fatty Arbuckle, ends Hollywood’s flaming-youth era, and leads to Hays Code
1922 Garbo (17) debuts in Peter the Tramp
1924 Law-student lovers Nathan Leopold (19) and Richard Loeb (18), believing themselves Nietzschean supermen, murder Bobbie Franks (14): films Rope (1948), Compulsion (1959) and Swoon (1993) all based on this case
1926 Death of Rudolph Valentino (31)
1927 Ernest Lough (12) records million-selling ‘Oh for the Wings of a Dove’
1930 Bing Crosby (25) debuts in King of Jazz; the future pipesmoker is thrown off Paul Whiteman tour this same year for drunken misbehaviour
1931 Schoolgirl movie Mädchens in Uniform will later become a lesbian cult classic
1932 Shirley Temple (4) debuts in The Red-Haired Alibi
1933 Little Women, with Katharine Hepburn (26) as Jo
1934 Ingrid Bergman (19) debuts in Munkbrogreven; death of Jean Vigo (29), director of Zéro de conduite, L’Atalante
1936 Romeo and Juliet with Norma Shearer (36) and Leslie Howard (43), Robert Donat (31), Robert Montgomery (32) and Frederic March (39) having all turned role down: John Barrymore (54) is Mercutio
1938 In Quai de brumes deserter Jean Gabin (34) dies for love of Michèle Morgan (18)
1940 Orson Welles (25) directs Citizen Kane; Seventeen is movie of Booth Tarkington’s ‘teen problems’ novel
1941 Margaret O’Brien (4) debuts in Babes on Broadway: career will end in 1951 with Her First Romance; George Cole (16) debuts as cockney evacuee in Cottage to Let
1942 Elizabeth Taylor (10) debuts in There’s One Born Every Minute
1943 New York bobbysoxers paid each to squeal/riot at sight of Frank Sinatra (28)
1945 Dean Stockwell (9) debuts in The Valley of Decision
1947 Richard Attenborough (24) plays 17-year-old Pinkie, razor-gang leader, in Brighton Rock
1948 Little Women, with Elizabeth Taylor, Margaret O’Brien O’Brien, Janet Leigh and Mary Astor
1950 ‘Little’ Esther Phillips (15) puts seven records into US R&B top ten
1952 Surprised during robbery, Christopher Craig (16) shoots policeman dead: he is too young to be hanged, but cohort Derek Bentley (19), though unarmed and already in custody at time of killing, isn’t: film Let Him Have It based on this case
1954 Romeo and Juliet with Laurence Harvey (26) and Susan Shentall (20, her only film); The Wild One with Marlon Brando (30) is based on true-life event in Hollis, California; in New Zealand, obsessive PopCult-fantasist lovers Pauline Parker (16) and Juliet Hulme (15) murder Pauline’s mother when families forbid relationship: film Heavenly Creatures (1994) based on this case; Elvis Presley (19) records ‘That’s Alright’ for Sun Records
1955 Death of James Dean; Dennis Hopper (20) debuts in I Died a Thousand Times; Hideo Suzuki’s pastoral A Girl in the Mist depicts likably pretentious students visiting country
1956 Presley (21) goes into movies (Love Me Tender) to be the next Dean, though his management has other ideas; Patty McCormack (11) debuts as eight-year-old murderess in The Bad Seed; in Baby Doll, child wife Carroll Baker is seduced by aging husband’s rival; Frankie Lymon (14) and the Teenagers release ‘Why Do Fools Fall in Love?’ (Lymon will OD aged 26 in 1968); John Lennon meets Paul McCartney
1957 Future youth-identification in Bonanza Michael Landon (20) debuts in I Was a Teenage Werewolf, in which adolescent drives and monsterhood are equated (Landon-free follow-up is I was a Teenage Frankenstein, 1958); countrywide competition winner Jean Seberg (19) debuts in Preminger’s Saint Joan: in 1959 she will feature as the perfectly amoral American teen in Godard’s A bout de souffle; Jack Nicholson (20) debuts in Cry Baby Killer
1958 Steve McQueen (28) debuts in The Blob, in which teens save world from murderous red spacegoo; kids team up with alien brain to defeat grown-up warmongering in The Space Children; Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds stars Zbigniew Cybulski (31), the ‘Polish James Dean’; in Youssef Chaine’s Jamila, Algerian schoolgirl comes of age by joining liberation front; Marcel Carne’s Les Tricheurs is first in cycle of successful French youth movies (others: Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960, 1959, La Vérité with Bardot, 1960); ‘Sweet Little 16’ by Chuck Berry (32) reaches US #2; eloping with girlfriend Caril Fugate (14), Nebraska spree-killer Charley Starkweather (19) slays her family, and over four days eight more; Jerry Lee Lewis (23), ‘The Killer’, marries second cousin Myra Gale Brown (13)
1959 Nagisa Oshima’s Fun’s Burial is startlingly bleak Japanese youth-genre movie (others: Cruel Story of Youth, A Town of Love and Hope); in The Ghost of Dragstrip Hollow, meddling drag-racer teens unmask ghost (an embittered out-of-work actor), establishing eternal return of Scooby Doo plot; Ed Wood Jr’s Jail Bait; Robert Vaughn (26) debuts in The Teenage Caveman, last in 50s teensploitation horror cycle; Sandra Dee (17) is ‘girl midget’ in Gidget, first beach movie: it will spawn four sequels, each with a different Gidget, not including Jonathan Demme parody Gidget goes to Hell; Hayley Mills (13) debuts in UK notion of beach pic, Tiger Bay
1960 Sometime lesbian pin-up Cliff Richard barters shaky rock’n’roll status for eternal pop youth in showbiz cycle Expresso Bongo, The Young Ones, Summer Holiday (1961) and so on; Kurt Russell (13) debuts in The Absent-Minded Professor
1961 West Side Story is Romeo and Juliet as musical, with Richard Beymer (22) and Natalie Wood (23); Warren Beatty (23) debuts opposite Wood in Splendor in the Grass; Rita Tushingham (21) debuts in A Taste of Honey, from stageplay by Sheila Delany (17)
1962 With It’s Trad, Dad (kids bop to Trad jazz), director Dick Lester (29) garners rep as top youth director: A Hard Day’s Night (1964) affirms claim, after which Help!, The Knack (both 1965) and Petulia (1968) progressively squelch it
1963 Little Stevie Wonder (12) has #1 with ‘Fingertips – Pt 2’; Frankie Avalon and former mouseketeer Annette Funicello star in Beach Party, which boldly mocks tired iconography of 50s biker movies: seven beach movies follow in 1964
1964 Berkeley Free Speech movement; Mia Farrow (19) debuts on TV’s Peyton Place
1965 Hayley Mills (20) marries Roy Boulting (53): in 1997 their son Crispian has hit as Kula Shaker
1966 The Wild Angels, with Peter Fonda (27) and Bruce Dern (30), is first of many biker movies: others are Hell’s Angels on Wheels with Jack Nicholson (30), Satan’s Sadists with Russ Tamblyn (33), Rebel Rousers with Harry Dean Stanton (41) (all 1967); death of Montgomery Clift (46)
1967 The Trip is LSD movie written by Nicholson, with Fonda, Dern and Dennis Hopper; in Privilege, singer Paul Jones (26) plays rockstar used by state and church to manipulate youth: when he breaks free, fans murder him
1968 May events in Paris inaugurate year of student uprisings and street battles worldwide; in Wild in the Street, over half population is under 25, popstar becomes president, over-35s are forced to retire and dosed on LSD: as film ends, ten-year-olds call for revolution; in Lancashire, Mary Bell (11) and another girl murder two small boys (3 and 4); Franco Zefferelli’s Romeo and Juliet with Leonard Whiting (18) and Olivia Hussey (17)
1969 In True Grit, John Wayne (62) is bullied into sobriety and heroism by stiffnecked yet fiesty Kim Darby (22); two years later, Bud Cort (21) has affair with ancient eccentric Ruth Gordon (75) in Harold and Maude (Gordon’s first screen role: Camille, 1915, aged 19); depite Pink Floyd s/t, Antonioni’s student-rebellion movie Zabriskie Point fails to reach even “a beach-party level of insight” (Roger Ebert); in Stereo, directorial debut of David Cronenberg (22), youngsters volunteer for experiment in polymorphous perversity conducted by Canadian Academy of Erotic Enquiry: creepy mayhem ensues; Manson teengirl gang murders Sharon Tate and others
1970 The Strawberry Statement is Hollywood notion of ‘sincere’ student-rebellion movie: starring (among others) Kim Darby and Bud Cort, it flops; in same bogus vein, if more successful at box office, are Getting Straight (with Erich Segal script) and R.P.M. (Revolutions per Minute); in Walkabout, desire for Jenny Agutter (18) brings death to young aborigine played by David Gulpilil (18); Woodstock documents legendary 1969 pop festival; lead singer/dancer Michael Jackson (12) gives Jackson Five US #1 with ‘ABC’
1971 In surprise youth hit Billy Jack, halfbreed Viet vet protects teen from bigots; Cybill Shepherd (21) debuts as small-town temptress opposite Jeff Bridges (21) The Last Picture Show
1972 Inspired by Manson, Cannibal Girls (directed Ivan Reitman, 25) is cheerful, gory, low-budget inspiration for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and (arguably) first teens-in-serial-peril movie
1973 Jesus Christ Superstar recasts Greatest Story Ever Told as would-be trendy rock opera
1974 In The Cars that Ate Paris, feature debut of Peter Weir (30), tearaways menace Australian town of title in spiky VWs; Moskva – Kassiopeia is first of Russian SF two-parter in which team of lovable 15-year-old scientists fly spacemission to constellation Cassiopeia: in second part, Otroki vo Vselennoi (Teenagers in Space, 1975), they discover planet ruled by robot autocracy and free ‘human’ slaves; Patsy Kensit (6) debuts in The Great Gatsby
1975 Turn-of-the-century over-concentration of Australian girlteen sexuality causes inexplicable disappearance incident in Picnic at Hanging Rock
1976 Death of Sal Mineo (37), ex-screen hoodlum murdered by real-life ditto; Don Johnson (25) is teen scavenger after nuclear holocaust in A Boy and His Dog: boy meets girl, girl loves boy, boy feeds girl to dog; Nastassia Kinski (15) debuts in To the Devil a Daughter; at 14, Jodie Foster is youngest cast member in Taxi Driver, oldest in Bugsy Malone; startling performance by former TV Gidget Sally Field (30) in Sybil links Multiple Personality Disorder to sexual abuse as child in popular imagination; in Logan’s Run, over-30s are put to death
1977 Saturday Night Fever makes star of John Travolta (23); Roman Polanski forced to quit US after sex with 13-year-old girl
1978 National Lampoon’s Animal House features boffo campus humour
1979 Murder of punk Nancy Spungen is swiftly followed by OD of Sex Pistol and prime suspect Sid Vicious; suicide in Paris of Jean Seberg (40); US schoolgirl Brenda Spencer (17) slays fellow pupils because, in her words, “I Don’t like Mondays”; ‘Just 13’ by The Lurkers reaches UK #66; too late, flowerpower musical Hair arrives onscreen
1980 Farewell-to-virginity flick Foxes is Adrian Lyne’s directorial debut
1981 Pixote stars genuine Brazilian homeless children to portray grim street life; Penelope Speeris’ The Decline of Western Civilisation: Punk Rock, first of influential rock-kids trilogy, portrays slightly less grim surbaban anti-life
1982 Molly Ringwald (14) debuts in The Tempest as Miranda; Phoebe Cates (19) and Nicolas Cage (17, né Coppola) debut in former Rolling Stone writer Cameron Crowe’s byebye-virginity movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High, alongside Sean Penn (22), Jennifer Jason Leigh (23), Judge Reinhold (26): Brat Pack cycle dawns; similarly important socio-sexual-cycle study of teen mores dawns, less respectably, with Porky’s
1983 In A nos amours, Sandrine Bonnaire (16) chooses promiscuity
1984 Eddie Murphy, 22, debuts in 48 Hrs; John Hughes’ directorial debut is Sixteen Candles, with Ringwald
1985 In Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, Paul Reubens is magnificently infantile grown-up in microscopic suit; in Vagabonde, Bonnaire is streetgirl found frozen to death
1986 Julian Temple’s ‘post-music video’ musical Absolute Beginners is flop
1987 In Zhou Xiaowen’s In Their Prime, platoon of young Chinese die under Vietnamese fire
1988 In confusing manga epic Akira, teen-orphan biker gangs are post-Holocaust humanity’s salvation, maybe, somehow; Colors, directed Dennis Hopper, is portrait of LA gangs; Macauley Culkin (8) debuts in Rocket Gibraltar; in Big and Vice Versa (remake of 1947 UK film) adults (Tom Hanks, Judge Reinhold respectively) swap roles with children; Little Vera, complete with scenes of Leningrad youth underground, is first Russian post-glasnost youth movie (to follow, Is It Easy to Be Young?, The Asthenic Syndrome)
1989 Soviet inability to invent/deploy equivalent of ‘teenager’, to dramatise and thus reabsorb generational dissatisfactions, results in bloodless overnight exchange of communism for consumerism; Park Kwang-Su’s Chilsu and Maisa, from banned novel, mixes social rebellion with Korean ‘John Hughes’ teen movie; Do The Right Thing prefigures widespread black US youth rioting; Winona Ryder stars as teen-bride Myra Gale in Jerry Lee Lewis biopic Great Balls of Fire!
1990 Life Is Sweet stars Jane Horrocks (26) as bulimic with swot for sister; Wong Kar-Wai’s Days of Being Wild re-imagines Hong Kong youth of 1960
1991 Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day recalls true-life 1960 gang-murder incident, and celebrates Taiwan youth’s attraction to US pop culture; Richard Linklater’s Slacker snapshots present state of same
1992 Singles entwines love stories of 90s twentysomethings; true-life “Long Island Lolita” murders lover’s wife, inspiring three instant movies: Amy Fisher: My Story (1992); Beyond Control: The Amy Fisher Story (with Drew Barrymore) (1993), and Casualties of Love (1994); Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer attempts vamp-highschool combo-genre
1993 In Zimbabwe’s Jit, poorboy teen must find brideprice to wed beloved; Dazed and Confused memorialises lifestyle of 70s schoolyears; Menace II Society, directed by Hughes twins (20), portrays black criminal youth, Mi Vida Loca a Hispanic girl gang
1994 Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women with Winona Ryder, Clare Danes; Shopping celebrates joyriding and ramraiding in UK; Liv Tyler (18), daughter of rockstar Steve Tyler and punk groupie Bebe Buell, debuts in Silent Fall; death by OD of River Phoenix (23)
1995 La Haine is banlieu movie about youth wars with police
1996 Troma’s Tromeo and Juliet
1997 William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet with Leonardo diCaprio and Clare Danes; Jang-Sun Woo’s Timeless, Bottomless, Bad Movie, improvised in witty collaboration with Korean street teens, sparks moral panic; in Greg Araki’s Nowhere, iconography of TV’s Beverly Hills, 90210 is given trippy queer twist; Joss Whedon’s Buffy TV series begins epochal seven-year run
1998 Neil Jordan’s The Butcher Boy features murderous 12-year-old; in Arkansas, two 11-year-olds with guns slaughter teacher and fellow pupils; 1998 aliens-infiltrate-highschool movie The Faculty combines highschool soap with themes from The Thing
1999 In C4’s Queer as Folk, with gay-age-of-consent bill as real-life backdrop, 15-year-old Nathan seduces 29-year-old Stewart: subsequent plot explores dialectics of ‘growing up’ in homo subculture and beyond; Colombine school slayings ignite US backlash against Goth culture.