Youth Runs Wild

Youth Runs Wild (1944)

The Truth about Modern Youth! It will ASTONISH you! It will AMAZE you! It will ELECTRIFY you!

The teens of a defense-plant town hop on the road to juvenile delinquency while their parents are busy with the war.

Date of release
1944-09-01
TMDB
4.5 / 10 (11)
Runtime
1h 7m
Genres
Drama
Director
Mark Robson

Casting

Interesting facts

Youth Runs Wild is a 1944 drama film directed by Mark Robson and starring Bonita Granville, Kent Smith, Jean Brooks, Glen Vernon and Vanessa Brown. The plot concerns inattentive parents and juvenile delinquency. The film was produced by Val Lewton. It was written by John Fante, Herbert Kline and Ardel Wray. Although Val Lewton produced the film, the final released version was so different from the original cut that he asked for his name to be removed from the picture; a request denied him by RKO.

Production

Edward Dmytryk, who had recently directed the sensationalistic films Hitler's Children and Behind the Rising Sun (both in 1943), was initially set to direct Youth Runs Wild – which at various time had the working titles "The Dangerous Age", "Look to Your Children" and "Are These Our Children?" – but he left to direct Tender Comrade.

The film was inspired by a photo essay that appeared in Look magazine on September 21, 1943. Look, however, did not like the completed film, describing it as an "outworn, stale documentary", and they refused to promote the film in the magazine, or even to allow their name to be used in the film's credits. Some copies of the film do carry on the main title card (see the image in the infobox at the head of this article) the legend:

The film's technical advisor, Ruth Clifton, was a teenager whose example of starting a youth recreation center in Moline, Illinois, inspired others around the country to do the same thing. RKO attempted to position the film as authentic by showing it to various state and local authorities concerned with juvenile delinquency, but they also did not receive the film well, even though one of the writers, Herbert Kline was a noted director of document…

Lewton argued that the intent of the film was to draw attention to a national problem and help bring about measures to solve it, which would do the country more good than harm. ... RKO decided not to pull the film from active production, but because of its controversial subject matter, Lewton was given more supervision than usual, much to his displeasure.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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