When 17-year-old Hal Detmar (James MacArthur – later better known as Danno from Hawaii Five-O) gets into a fight at the movie theatre, he finds the adult world arrayed against him. Neither his father nor the cops will believe that he only hit the theatre owner (Whit Bissel, the mad scientist/bad adult of every I was a Teenage… shocker) in self-defence, after the first blow had been struck against him. Hal's father, a movie studio executive, uses his influence to get the theatre owner to retract his complaint, but this display of adult hypocricy only makes things worse…
The Young Stranger was all but disowned by its director, the late John Frankenheimer, who apparently felt it to be more or less an apprentice work in which he tried to get accustomed to the working methods of film – as distinct from television – production.
Really, however, it it's not as bad as this self-critical assessment would suggest. While perhaps too obviously tied to its small screen origins, The Young Stranger is basically a competent piece of craftsmanship.
Yet the film also lacks much to interest most contemporary viewers, unlikely to see anything other than an transparent rehash of Rebel Without a Cause hearkening back to a more innocent age when the worst someone or something could be was "crummy", the drug problem meant the odd "hopped up" beatnik and the notion of guns in my school nothing but the fantastical propaganda of anti-american pro-Red scaremongers.
For the very same reasons, sociologists, cultural historians and readers of Peter Biskind's Seeing in Believing will find the film of considerable use as an examplar of mid 20th century discourses around conformity, concensus and the teenager.
Image quality on this Region 2/4 DVD from Partner Entertainment is acceptable. There are a few scratches and blotches from time to time and some evidence of artefacting with testing textures and patterns – slatted windows etc – but nothing too bad, considering the film's vintage and origins.
Sound is clear enough, if flat.
There are no extras – not even a biography/filmography of Frankenheimer.
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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