How
Hollywood Invented Teenagers By
HENRY P. RALEIGH YOU
MIGHT NOT know this but before, say, 1950, there weren’t any teenagers.
There wasn’t even the word ‘teenagers’ — not in the sense that
it could be spoken with a shake of the head and as if surrounded by
quotation marks to designate a special category of society bearing
its own unique and disturbing characteristics. You see, prior to 1950
there may have been persons who fell within that age group we now
are all too familiar with, but no one really noticed them nor were
they supposed to be noticed. They were, after all, not quite fleshed
out versions of adults, even to dressing more or less just like adults
save for the East Coast fashion for knickers which pretty much died
out by the late 1930’s. Booth Tarkington’s Penrod and
Penrod and Sam describe
quite well the general regard for teenagers as amusing yet totally
insignificant human beings. It should be noted that the current expression
of displeasure with a teenager’s behavior, the rather impotent ‘you’re
grounded’, does not appear in parental language until after 1950 and
replaced with the far more effective ‘just wait until your father
gets home’. This tells you a lot, I think.
Now typical of the classic view of teenagers, or better to
say no view whatever, Hollywood films from the silents through the
Golden Age paid no attention to this largely invisible segment of
the population. Films were about adults and for adults. An actor might
well be a teenager as were the Gish sisters and Mary Pickford, yet
they always played women, albeit on the short side. Something of a
change occurs in the 1930’s. Depression audiences craved light, inexpensive
diversions and Hollywood obliged by knocking out screwball comedies
and low-budget kiddie films. Shirley Temple, the Little Rascals, Our
Gang Comedies — Los Angeles became overrun with parents lugging
their young tykes along hoping to cash in on the popularity of the
cute-kid flicks. Fat kids, thin kids, pretty, funny-looking, talented
or not — all hoped for a shot at stardom but, and I must underscore
this, no teenagers. No one wanted teenagers on screen any more
than they wanted to see them off screen. Yet something was bound to
happen when some of these little performers, through no fault of their
own, became teenagers. Mickey Rooney was seventeen when he appeared
with everyone’s Mom and Dad, Fay Holden and Lewis Stone, in the 1937
“A Family Affair” and kicked off a fifteen-film series about the Hardy
Family. Rooney’s teen love interests included Donna Reed, Judy Garland,
and Kathryn Grayson — Ann Rutherford became a regular until
the series ended in the mid-forties. In 1938 MGM gave Rooney a special
Oscar for “bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of
youth”. Teenagers had finally been recognized and boy, were they swell.
Given now and then to harmless and adorable pranks, this bunch were
just plain American nice. And, goodness gracious, what teen wouldn’t
want to live in Carvel, Andy’s hometown?
There was dark side, however, something lurking behind the
Norman Rockwell notion of teenagers favored by Hollywood. A hint of
this comes through in the 1937 “Dead End”, followed by “Angels With
Dirty Faces”. Still, the Dead End Kids were but misguided products
of the socio-economic evils of urbanism and had nothing to do with
Carvel and real teens singing and dancing at the local malt shop.
And to prove nothing had changed there was a nineteen-year-old Shirley
Temple being adorable in the 1947 “Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer”.
A
harder and less forgiving portrayal of teens in 1949 came with “Knock
on Any Door” made from one of a number of social-conscious novels
appearing after the war’s end and inspired by the rise of teenage
gangs during the war years. Hollywood was beginning to discover a
new sort of teenager, one who did not sing or dance but did interesting
things with switchblades, zip guns, and chains. Where the 1955 “The
Blackboard Jungle” and “Crime in the Streets” in 1956 placed the blame
on the gritty urban problem, the 1955 “Rebel Without a Cause” was
set in suburbia and saw the trouble lay with lousy parents. James
Dean became the inheritor of Mickey Rooney’s old gift to us —
a brand new and updated “spirit and personification of youth” —
angst-ridden, silky, confused, and rather dangerous. The former Hollywood
teen would lamely soldier on for a few years in the hands of a sixteen-year-old
Sandra Dee, a Bobby Darin, an Annette Funicello — after Gidget
in 1959 the studios by and large ceded the family safe image of teens
to banal television sit-coms. The teenagers of “West Side Story” 1961,
“Lords of Flatbush” 1974, “Grease” 1978, “The Wanderers” 1979, and
a slew of others provided American youth with much more fascinating
role models. With Hollywood’s help, teenagers had become a social
culture all to themselves, objects of study with entire industries
including film, music, clothing, and psychologists devoted to their
needs and desires.
Boggles the mind, doesn’t it, to think that only some fifty
years ago there weren’t any teenagers — and now look what we’ve
got. |