The Delinquents (Robert Altman, 1957)

Scotty White (future Billy Jack Tom Laughlin), a good-natured 18-year-old soon headed to college , is distraught after his 16-year-old girlfriend Janice Wilson's (Rosemary Howard) parents forbid him to see her, saying they're too young to go steady. Heading to the drive-in, he sulks in his car while Bill Cholly (Forbidden Planet's Peter Miller) and his gang of hoodlums let the air out of one of the tires of another gang that recently crossed them. The rival gang falsely assumes Scotty is responsible and accosts him, but Cholly and his buddies come to his rescue, and they drive off together. When Scotty tells his new friends about what happened with Janice, Cholly suggests a plan where he makes Janice's parents think she's going on a date with him (wearing a suit and lying about having a nice job in order to make him look palatable to the Wilsons), and then brings her to Scotty. The young couple join the gang at a party at an old abandoned house, where Cholly's right-hand-goon Eddy (Dick Bakalyan, who played a number of JDs early in his career, and later did pictures such as Von Ryan's Express and Chinatown) gets Scotty to drink some gin and gets more than a little untoward while dancing with Janice, causing them to leave. When the cops show up soon afterward to take everyone into custody, Cholly and Eddy become convinced Scotty tipped them off.

Besides an early turn by Laughlin, this film is also notable as the first feature-length film written, directed, and produced by Robert Altman, who would go on to such immortal films as Nashville (by the way, in my personal Wold Newton Universe, Karen Black's singer Connie White is Scotty White's first cousin) and McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Prior to this, Altman had mostly done short documentaries, and while it doesn't quite have the tone of his more famous work (e.g., naturalistic dialogue and characters talking over each other), his talent is still quite evident. Laughlin is surprisingly convincing, considering he's playing a character eight years younger than he himself was at the time, and Miller and especially Bakalyan are great at playing slimy punks, though the rest of the gang aren't nearly as memorable. Howard is passable but hardly a standout in her one and only acting gig, though she did some modeling in the '60s and '70s. Altman's script thankfully doesn't do much proselytizing, although United Artists tacked on some narration at the beginning and end blaming the negligence of society in general and parents in particular for the rise of juvenile delinquency, and suggesting the church and youth groups among others as alternatives. Altman was not pleased about that, understandably. It's also interesting to note that Altman's daughter Christine plays Scotty's little sister Sissy, her only film work apart from Ron Mann's documentary Altman. The Delinquents is well worth watching to see a future auteur's beginnings.