Teenagers on Trial (1955) User Reviews

Juvenile delinquency not as scary in '55 short film...

[Doylenf · 6/10 · 15 April 2008]

Juvenile delinquency in cites across America was becoming a problem among teens in rural and big city towns according to TEENAGERS ON TRIAL, An RKO Pathe Screenliner from 1955.

The delinquency in James Dean's REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE seems to reflect the situations presented here, showing how many teens, in order to feel part of a structure outside their homes, joined gangs while their busy parents were too occupied to care.

Shown are images of petty crimes, stealing goods, breaking windows, underage drinking at bars, all leading to a more serious incident when a police officer is hit by a teen-age driver, leading to arrest and juvenile detention.

While the problems focus mainly on the teens themselves, the narrator goes on to mention the fact that busy parents holding down two jobs were also part of the trouble--or, simply bad parenting.

Nothing strikingly new about this short on delinquency, but it does give a warning of things to come.

Not Guilty

[boblipton · 5/10 · 21 October 2023]

This RKO short subject considers juvenile delinquency, and offers several thoughts as to its threats and, ultimately, its causes. It hints at solutions but never comes to any clear conclusions.

We start out by looking at gangs of kids, some from the good part of town, others from..... elsewhere, meeting on a hill filled with rubble to fight with each other. A policeman is killed. A pair of kids are interviewed in jail. What causes this?

Eventually the movie settles on schools: classrooms filled with more than 50 students instead of 25, classes taught by teachers who are teaching another class at the same instant, classes without prope equipment.

A lot of these problems are the same today, and things seem even worse. I wonder what the solution might be.

what scares them

[SnoopyStyle · 5/10 · 21 October 2023]

It's a quiet street in a peaceful small town. There are a rough element in the younger set and these 'gangs' are causing trouble. They are vandals, shoplifters, gamblers, car thieves, and drinking out at night. Some drinkers are laughably young. The kids are out of control. A couple of kids come in front of a judge, but he has to send them to an adult jail.

This is an RKO-Pathe short. It's the 50's and this is what is scaring middle America during this time. It gets ridiculous. Many of those kids partying at a bar look barely in their teens. It's just funny. I am surprised to spot a couple of black kids in the sea of white faces.

It's all the teachers' and parents' fault!

[planktonrules · 2/10 · 14 August 2010]

"Teenagers on Trial" is a well-meaning but stupid educational short about juvenile delinquency. I say stupid because there are two major flaws with it--it is exploitational in style and its conclusions are simplistic...to say the least. As far as exploitation goes, at times it seems as if the film is more concerned with scaring the viewer than critically examining juvenile crime. And as far as its conclusions go, it blames school over-crowding, teachers and parents for the problem--thereby absolving the kids from any responsibility. Plus, over the years teachers have been very convenient whipping boys, so to speak. It has, at times, been the popular object of blame--regardless that kids come from broken homes, indifferent parents and can't read or write (which, despite what many say, is the responsibility of the parent to teach, not the school). As an ex-teacher, this just irritated me and think the film is pretty much a waste of time except as a time capsule on the 1950s. In addition, even if you buy into the blaming game, the narration and style are just doggone dull.

An urgent plea to nip the "Baby Boom" . . .

[oscaralbert · 6/10 · 6 January 2015]

. . . in the bud, the TEENAGERS ON TRIAL here look overwhelmed by the giant snowball barreling downhill just above them. When the TEENAGERS ON TRIAL entered their courtroom in 1955, the oldest Boomers were just 9. But there were just so many of the little tadpoles underfoot that the schools were overcrowded to the breaking point, as TOT illustrates. Parents were too busy changing diapers and attaching training wheels to have ANY time left over for supervising their teens. These neglected kids already sensed that they'd get the short end of the stick in all of Life's contests. To take the most obvious example, squeezed between the heroic WWII generation and the burgeoning Boomers, all they had to anticipate was 32 years of being ruled by the so-called "Greatest Generation" (the seven presidents from 1961-1993), followed by who knows how many years of Boomer Reign (so far, from 1993 through 2017 under three presidents). When it came to leaving their mark on History, the "Beatnik Generation" on trial here turned in a blank page. Posterity has convicted the TEENAGERS ON TRIAL here as being a "Lost," or at least "Misplaced" bunch of people. If the narrator is trying to deliver a subtle message to newly married couples to stop the Boom before it's too late, the plea fell on deaf ears in the absence of "The Pill."