User Reviews

Some of the silliest movies to ever come-out of Hollywood were a string of bizarre "youth" pictures that were made in the late 1960's/early 70's.

In the late 60's, Hollywood was hemorrhaging money. Its formula of big budget musicals and lavish historical/biblical epics to compete with TV which had kept the lights on and paid the bills into the mid-60's was failing spectacularly by decade's end. The studio system, which had made stars, had collapsed and its former stars had with few exceptions faded. Yet, Hollywood knew that there was a massive audience out there of young Baby-Boomers. If only they could reach that audience with movies specifically geared towards them then maybe the financial hemorrhaging could be reversed.

The result were some laughably absurd productions such as "The Young Runaways." The idea was to make movies that addressed the young and their counterculture with hip stories with supposedly hip young acting talent. Not a bad idea, but the execution was awful because the studios would use old pro directors and writers who didn't relate to the subject matter in the slightest. With "The Young Runaways" a nearly 60 year old director and a fifty-something old writer were dragooned into making a movie that supposedly spoke to the young. And not just any young, but the hippie free spirits of the late 1960's. The results are unintentionally funny at best and cringe-worthy at worst.

The plot: three young runaways (Brooke Bundy, Kevin Coughlin, and Patty "The Bad Seed" McCormack) from safe, small, white-bread all-American towns flee to Chicago's hippie district to get away from problems at home. These characters, always impeccably groomed and dressed, face various tribulations while trying to adjust to their new surroundings. Meanwhile, various parents (one of them Normal Fell) search for their children in the midst of hippie central. Dick Sargent (aka the 2nd Darrin) plays the proprietor of a hippie hostel.

It's basically two story lines: the Brooke Bundy and Kevin Coughlin characters hook-up and live domestically by adopting traditional male-female roles with the man working and the woman cooking. Meanwhile, the Patty McCormack character sleeps around with hippie musicians. Guess who comes to a bad end? The movie flaunts the dying production code with shots of the very attractive Miss Bundy in her underwear and a plot string about high-end call girls luring unsuspecting innocents into their profession.

The funniest thing about "The Young Runaways" is the performance of young Richard Dreyfuss, fresh off his uncredited appearance in "The Graduate," as a hippie moocher, car thief and draft-dodger. His dialogue filled with late 60's hippie slang is a riot. His character's terrible fate is a warning that it's not all that "groovy" to be a mooching, car-thieving, and draft-dodging hippie.

"The Young Runaways" was just one of many laughable studio attempts in the late '60s to find commercial success by appealing to then ongoing youth counterculture. They almost all failed. Eventually, the studios threw-up their hands and decided to let young, hungry wunderkind directors to film whatever in the hopes that something might work. Thus, ushered in the reign of the auteurs and one of the artistic golden ages of Hollywood.

. . . (aka, Chicago's Clown of Death) got the idea to found his charnel house. It's patently obvious that Tracy's inspiration for his House of Horrors was THE YOUNG RUNAWAYS. Blame the Many Greedy Mobster movie studio for releasing RUNAWAYS, which blabs to the world's sects deviants that there are 15,000 stray kids up for grabs at any given moment in the Windy City. Furthermore, this film pictures a smarmy "guru" housing three dozen of these social misfits for parts unknown. Though a younger version of that CLOSE ENCOUNTERS dude burns alive, the fate of this suspect's remaining captive audience is left murky at best. RUNAWAY viewers get the distinct impression that occasional donations (with a few clown performances thrown in) to the beleaguered Chicago cops will pretty much give the donor "carte blanche" open season on a stock yard's worth of Lost Boys. After all, who will miss two or three dozen of them?

This movie seems to have vanished from the minds of most movie lovers. I really don't know how well it did at the box office when it was released in 1968 but I found it on TNT about 10 years ago and I thought it was great. It may be a little predictable but I think it has a great story and acting. Brooke Bundy is outstanding as a teenager who can't communicate with her father (Lloyd Bochner, who later gained fame for the scene in Dynasty where his character dies while having sex with Alexis Carrington, played by the under-rated Joan Collins) and so she runs away. Patty McCormack (still the bad seed!) is very good as a runaway who comes to a bad end. Kevin Coughlin (who would later die in a car accident) has a good role as Dewey, the runaway with a good heart. Also in the cast is Dick Sargeant (the 'other' Darrin Stevens) and Richard Dreyfuss as a car thief as well as a few bit players who look familiar but probably aren't. I have this movie taped if anyone is interested.