The Young Savages (1961)

Directed by John Frankenheimer. Starring Burt Lancaster, Edward Andrews, Dina Merrill, Telly Savalas, Shelley Winters, Pillar Seurat, Stanley Kristien, Larry Gates, John Davis Chandler, Neil Nephew, Roberta Shore, Milton Selzer, José Pérez, David J. Stewart.

Lancaster is a NYC assistant district attorney assigned to prosecute three youths who knifed a blind Puerto Rican boy to death, despite his objections on the grounds that he was once romantically involved with the mother of one of the kids. Ambitious social analysis diminished by its slew of trite aphorisms and black & white approach to grey-area morality; director Frankenheimer tries to breathe life into the flat, overly cozy scripting with showy camera angles and mean-streets humidity, but too many stretches feel tedious, even pat. Suffers from the expected dated elements for an “incendiary” message drama—the racial pleas are especially outré in the face of such inconsequence, and those leather-clad punks wouldn’t even scare a glee club today. Lancaster often overcomes the deficient writing, but Winters and Merrill (Lancaster’s wife) are left out to dry, and the gang juvies border on hysterics when they’re not merely aping the rebels without cause to come before them. Savalas’ film debut as a Kojak-esque police detective.

54/100