The Violent Years (1956)
dir. Wm. M. Morgan
In The Violent Years, the suburban inland hills of 1950s Southern
California are besieged by a primly-dressed teenage girl gang.
The young ladies rob gas stations, trash the high school,
rape a man, and kill cops.
The usual image of the ‘50s “girl gang” evokes the raiment
of derriere-tight capri pants, heavy thunderbolt
eyeshadow, and a beehive doo in which razorblades are hidden to slash rival chicks.
The nubiles in The
Violent Years do not dress with street thuggess flair but like a McCall’s pattern foursome, in sleeveless
Judy Bond blouses, high-waisted checker skirts, Sally Gee headscarves and quaint
picnic flats.
The wardrobe is by “Victor Most… of California,”
who designed Mardis Gras Poplin Pants, silk shantung tops, and lurex lame knits
sold at Collegienne Sportswear in Bullock’s
Department Store on Broadway and Hill
Street in downtown Los Angeles.
At a running time of just less than an hour, The Violent Years peculiarly credits
no scriptwriter, though it is understood among prescient midcentury Z-movie
hagiographers that the screenplay was pounded out by Ed Wood, Jr., the famed
zilch-budget imagineer. In addition to
Ed Wood’s beleaguered motion picture work, the author penned numerous “adults only”
paperbacks. Wood’s friend and actor
Paul Marco often witnessed the writer impassioned by the page-churning life:
He was always like a
Liberace, banging away, bouncing up and down on the sofa, banging on the
typewriter… just like Liberace did when he played the piano.
The title sequence is followed by the introduction of each
girl gang member standing in front of a sinister classroom blackboard.
A backlot studio voiceover intones the gravitas of public
service educational reels:
“This is a story of
violence…”
The remarks of the needledick narrator take inflammatory
aim at culpable parents trapped in a “smug little world of selfish interests
and confused ideas.”
Father Carl Parkins is editor of the local Daily Chronicle, which long and stressful
hours “will be the death of him,” and which estrange Father from home life. Mother Jane has no time for a
“heart-to-heart” with Daughter Paula, and is busy scheduling her appearances at
charity functions where she looks forward to the “nice flattery” from peers,
and “ ‘my my how pretty and young you look, and you with an 18 year-old daughter…’
”
Paula is granted permission that evening to use Mother’s Mercury
roadster. She picks up Geraldine,
Phyllis and Georgia, who like Paula are facemasked in bandanas and Gatsby caps. Tonight they will boost a gas station dressed
as lads—the gang’s seventeenth heist that month.
The girls take orders from a dacron-dyke crime queen
called Sheila, who runs a small-time racket from her Sun Belt deco apartment
complex.
But Paula does not care about the boosted dough, and is rabid
to behave bad. “It’s the principle of
the thing… the thrill that gets me…”
The brutette bobbysoxers ambush teen couple Johnny and
Shirley canoodling in a parked convertible.
Shirl’ is comely in her pale slip after the gang forces her to unclothe
and tie herself up in the backseat.
“You have my money,” pleads pinhead Johnny. “You have my
watch, you have my ring! What more do
you want?”
Paula reacts with viperish amour. “Maybe he’s worth something more than money…”
The gang escorts Johnny at gunpoint into the woods. They hold down the squirming geek while Paula
advances in the act of stripping…
The next day’s Daily
Chronicle reports: “MAN ATTACK IN LOVER’S LANE…”
Paula holds a “pajama party” at the Parkins home while
Mother and Father, typically, are out.
The girls suck face with creepy beach bum suitjacket prepsters who may
be just as spoiled by terrafamilias as
the girls and equally in revolt of “self restraint, politeness and loyalty.”
As genre historiatrix Imogen Smith
notes in In Lonely Places
(2011), an examination of the city and suburban sprawl as featured in film
noir, after WWII Americans turned to “wholesome, sanitized domesticity—kids,
kitchens and lawnmowers.” In Lonely Places cites relevant dialogue
from marriage identity potboiler Tension
(1950, John Berry), when worksleeves husband Warren Quimby exalts the L.A. subdivision in which
the couple will soon settle down:
“It’d be great out here—fresh air, room to entertain. And it’s a great spot for kids.”
Wife Claire Quimby retorts: “It’s a miserable spot… thirty
minutes from nowhere.”
Produced one year after the tortured innocent recidivism
of Rebel Without A Cause (1955,
Nicholas Ray), The
Violent Years is likewise set among the Cold War Los Angeles
middle-class exurbs, and lays blame for amok youth on improper authority
figures. But the premise serves to
indulge the roughie fetishes and nihilist phantasms of hot dog and Night Train
wine-stained topcoat pocket-poolers. Rife
with bullet bras and soundtracked to the watered-down cocktail jazzhorns of Culver
City mood session gobble-pipers, The
Violent Years is not dated, and was also known to screen under the apt
title Girl Gang Terrorists. The gang steals money and shoots policemen
with similar societal abandon as the Black Liberation Army in the
1970s, who murdered cops and robbed Brink’s trucks.
In 1957, Dissent
magazine would publish New
York Intellectual essay “The White Negro” by fisticuff wife-knifer Norman
Mailer, whose macho exegesis of the expropriation of oppressed black culture by
mainstream “hipster” whites is muffed-up by the ironic motivations of four
coiffed teenyboppers in 1956 behaving like radical extremists. The exploitation of mixed-race politics are
augured by Ed Wood’s bebop gendertwist negative
exemplum.
Rhyme schemes may also abound in this year’s vernal
release Spring Breakers (2013,
Harmony Korine).
In Spring Breakers,
the white girl bikini crew from Michigan
are not punished for the crimes they commit against white meathead tourists and
African-American Fort Lauderdale racket lords.
The girls are daffy for the violent years but return to college safely after
the break. They are not spoiled rich
kids but post-Bailout townies who cellphone their parents expressing wholesome
intentions for the future, before donning Pinkberry masks and arming themselves
with automatic weapons for a midnight assault on the bayside compound of
Archie, the local kingpin who furnishes America’s spring breakers with the drugs
and sex traffic upon which the season subsists…
Paula Parkins is sick of underboss Sheila, who is simply
another figurehead of control. “Whaddya
take me for,” cries Paula, “a stupe?” Sheila makes vague reference to secure connections
with a “well-organized foreign plan,” whose administrators would pay “a whole
lotta dough” for “certain damages reported” at the local high school,
especially if a “few flags get destroyed in the process…”
The girls take the job.
They thrash desks, rip maps from the wall, and throw a globe out the
window, a hefty symbolic gesture of the females’ own psychic predicament on
earth.
When the police arrive outside, the gang draws guns and engages
in a shootout as if on the list of J. Edgar Hoover’s Ten Most Wanted.
“Lay into em fast, then we’ll beat it…”
Cops are killed and Phyllis is shotgunned to death.
Paula now inhabits a jacket of stark chic leather…
Paula gutshots Sheila, complains of stomach cramps, and is
apprehended by the police. Doctors at
the city hospital discover that the maryjane murderess is pregnant. She gives birth to a daughter, but faithful to
the archetypes of sweatyhand soap opera, dies in childbirth.
Judge Raymond Clara rules that Mother and Father Parkins
are responsible for the sadistic behaviors of Daughter Paula, and are not fit
to raise the newborn orphan.
The State cannot risk more dead cops and globes thrown out
the school window. Judge Clara seizes
upon a popular phrase employed by today’s youth as the mantra of his
argument… “So what?”
Juvenile delinquency is rooted in “adult
delinquency.” The audience may accept
that this is true, if only that The
Violent Years opens with the courtroom portrait of George Washington, remembered
in history as a rebel leader and founding Father.
Judge Clara underpins his legal case as if the American Court is
the American Church, and defers to the holy precedent
of “the Back-to-God Movement,” which should inspire “higher moral values.”
Writer Ed Wood, Jr. cream-stuffs the movie with guilty
acts, and must firmly bookend the tale with a moral lesson. The concepts of
anti-communism and love of the Deity are treated as the desk chairs and
textbooks in the marauded high school classroom. Humans are born evil and without the right
family and political order will endure the violent years. As the city doctor explains, "These aren't kids, they're morons..."
One pictures Ed Wood in Liberacesque form over a
hock-bought typewriter, giggling at the
semantics of Judge Clara, and not only because the actor I. Stanford Jolley is
unable to read his lines without looking at the script in front of him as if
legal pages. Ideas peep through the
bottle-blonde bangs of the writer’s mind.
Judge Clara tidies up the social and spiritual
implications of “good citizenship” with bloodless Y-chromo supremacism; the
Judge also understands the patriotic pressures of money, and warrants that making
parents financially liable for the damage caused by their children will spur
the scruples of adult delinquents.
Promised a new future, the baby is signed-off as a ward of
the State, a “more responsible agency,” and wails in the shadows of institution
bars… doomed.
