Youth culture in global cinema

10 rebellion and resistance
for instance, The Wild One was the only movie of the 1950s to be denied a
censorship certificate. Many other juvenile delinquency pictures from the
other side of the ocean had great difficulties with local European censors,
while film critics often expressed their disbelief about the growing openness
of the American censorship system.
However, looking more closely at the historical reception and censorship
of these movies, we should acknowledge very different positions, including a
growing respect for the refreshing audacity of these imported movies. Especially
leftist intellectuals and film critics soon started to glorify the critical
tone of these movies. In France, for instance, independent producers
and filmmakers such as Richard Brooks, Stanley Kramer, and Nicholas Ray
were increasingly praised by young film critics, who claimed that these
new American auteurs were showing the right direction for contemporary
cinema.
This article examines how these controversial movies were received outside
the U.S., concentrating on the censorship and reception of The Wild
One, Blackboard Jungle, and Rebel Without a Cause in various European
countries, with a special focus upon the U.K. and France. I rely upon original
film censorship files, censors’ internal correspondence, and religious (Catholic)
classification sources, supplemented with other contemporary sources
such as reviews in journals and articles in the press.
juvenile delinquency movies, moral
panic, and the censors
In 1954, when European censors, critics, and audiences first saw the motorcycle
gang movie The Wild One, the issue of youth crime and the influence
of cinema had been a hot item for a long time. The metaphor of cinema as
a dangerous school of crime went back to the very beginning of motion pictures,
but it was still vibrantly present in public debates after the war. In
the immediate postwar years, many major European cities were confronted
by poverty, a large number of orphans, and a spectacular increase in juvenile
delinquency. Cinema attendance rose as never before, while film theater
screens were almost completely filled with Hollywood’s imagery. The issue
of cinema and youth delinquency was a regular item, not only in the popular
press, but also in social science, law, and criminology journals (Decharneux).
European politicians, like those in the U.S., put the issue high on the
agenda. As early as 1948, for instance, a special committee on children and
cinema was installed by the Home Office in the U.K., presenting its report
in May 1950 to Parliament. 1 For critics the report was too tame, mainly be-