The mid-Fifties were a strange time, with most of the elder population being terrified of ' delinquents '. This was a broad word which covered the truly criminal, the outsider and those who society chose to be afraid of. Among these paranoid and fear mongering films were ' Rebel Without A Cause ', ' The Wild One ', ' Blackboard Jungle ', ' The Young Stranger ' and this very good film ' No Time To Be Young'. Of all of the listed above it is the least known, and yet in one actor in it there was another potential James Dean, Tom Pittman. He was as quirkily beautiful as Dean, and his sensitive acting superb and he met the same fate as Dean in a car crash while still very young. There are basically three stories in this scenario, all relating to the lives of three men barely out of their teens. All three have psychological needs and no one really cares about them, and for a rare change it is the men in this who suffer emotionally most and not the women. From a non politically correct point of view the women seemed either sexually predatory or success oriented wanting these young men to be stronger than their fragile selves could cope with. The inner claustrophobia of their lives build to a terrible climax, and an unhappily believable one. All of the relatively unknown cast were good, and it saddens me that in the UK it was double billed with a second rate horror film called ' The Strange World ' and was given the banal and untrue title of ' Teenage Delinquents '. By what I see on the BBFC site it was cut to shreds and for no good reason that I can understand. Crippled by this it was still given an X certificate. And so a film comparable to those I have listed has been more or less lost. In its structure it made me think of ' No Down Payment ' in its implicit criticism of society and I wish more people would track it down. A minor masterpiece of excellent film making and acute perception. If it had had a little less melodrama at times I would have given it a 10.
Review of No Time to Be Young
