[3]

Robert Altman made his directorial debut with this inauspicious teenaged rebellion romp. Tom Laughlin stars as Scotty, a young guy who just wants to hang with his girlfriend (Rosemary Howard), but her parents intervene to keep them apart. So poor old Scotty does what all grown-ups in 1950s America thought teenagers did: he joins a gang of hoodlums. The girlfriend gets caught up in the shenanigans, and all hell breaks loose. But not really. If anything, The Delinquents is interesting as an example of how terrifying society found teenagers back then. It’s hard to find any of the qualities that would later define Altman’s style here, but if you had to rip off Rebel without a Cause, I suppose you could do worse. The acting is hit and miss (I’m being generous), the stakes aren’t very high, and the opening/closing narration is hilariously awful.