Juvenile delinquent

Before the biker film and the beach film, there was the JD picture: exploitation aimed at, and about, delinquent teenagers, riding the 1950s moral panic about a new and frightening thing called the teenager.

The moment

Postwar prosperity created, for the first time, teenagers with money and time and cars, and the culture promptly panicked about them. Hollywood made the prestige version (The Wild One, Rebel Without a Cause, Blackboard Jungle, all 1953 to 1955), and the exploitation industry made the cheap version and sold it to the very teenagers it was warning about.

The films

High School Confidential (1958), with its reefer and its hot rods. Girls Town, The Violent Years (written by Ed Wood, about a girl gang), Hot Rod Girl, Teenage Doll. American International Pictures built its early business almost entirely on this audience, double-billing JD pictures for the drive-in.

Why it matters here

This is the drive-in's founding genre and the direct ancestor of everything that followed: the biker cycle, the beach party film, and eventually the whole youth-market exploitation machine. AIP learned here how to make a film cheap, title it loud, and sell it to teenagers in cars.

Where to start

High School Confidential for the definitive article, The Violent Years for the Ed Wood strangeness.