davidvmcgillivray-24-905811 Review of Too Young to Love

Too Young to Love (1960)

Scorching courtroom drama is one of the most explicit British films of its time

[6/10 · 13 January 2016]

The title tells all. This really is a film about underage sex, but made in the UK in 1959. I can't think of another British film of the 1950s with such explicit dialogue. It's based on a 1944 play, "Pick-Up Girl", which had to open at a theatre club in London in 1946 because theatre censor the Lord Chamberlain objected. Only after finding royal patronage did the play transfer to the West End. After reading a screenplay, the BBFC refused to allow a film to go ahead. By 1959 film censorship had relaxed considerably. Censor John Trevelyan was favourably impressed by the film's social message, that parents should be held responsible for their children's delinquent behaviour. He passed remarkably frank dialogue. A 15-year-old girl, Elizabeth, is brought to juvenile court because she's been found naked in bed with a middle-aged man. She reveals in her testimony that previously she had sex with a sailor, got pregnant and had an abortion. Now she has syphilis. She doesn't like one of her would-be suitors, Larry, because he indulged in what would now be called revenge porn. He wrote over her front door that she "laid a sailor." Even Elizabeth's nice boyfriend Peter is willing to break the law to help her escape from court. There is one reference to "marijuana cigarettes" (the first time in a British film?) Apart from perfunctory flashbacks almost all the action is confined to the courtroom and this seems not to have appealed to audiences or critics. British audiences surely must have felt that this type of delinquency was quite alien. Why was a film set in a New York juvenile court made in the UK? It can't have been easy. But in fact it's pretty convincing. I doubt that the film was shown in the US (it must have broken almost every rule in the Production Code). But if it had been I expect few Americans would have guessed that the studio was not in Hollywood but Boreham Wood. Thomas Mitchell was brought over from the US to play the judge and does so with great gravitas. Elizabeth is played by Pauline Hahn, who had been in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" on Broadway. The rest of the cast mostly comprises UK-based Yanks and Canadians. Jess Conrad and Vivian Matalon are Brits but they look very American. (Conrad is dubbed). Hahn and Sheila Gallagher are two more examples of actors who played only one leading film role and then never appeared on screen again. Far more shocking than the theme for today's viewer is that the middle-aged man is released without charge while Elizabeth gets three years detention! A strange record of the way things were.