Abstract
In the opening scene to the 1956 educational film Boy with a Knife, the Phillips family sat around the dinner table. Jerry, a teenage boy, listened to his stepmother as she berated him in front of his father and half-brother. She recited an unending list of chastisement for Jerry’s wrongdoings at school. She refused to continue to take care of Jerry because he was unmanageable. When Jerry asked to speak alone with his father, she interrupted and reprimanded him once again. He was in enough trouble already. As she began to clear the table of plates and silverware, she lovingly stroked the hair of Jerry’s half-brother and said: “Our son turned out alright. How do you explain that?” At this, Jerry got up from the table in a hurry and ran out the door. Once outside, he paused in front of the front door of the home, looked out into the distance, and reached into his back pocket. Jerry had a knife. The camera angled up at Jerry, dressed in jeans and a checked button-down shirt, and he looked powerful—his hurt feelings swiftly transformed into fury and resentment. He touched the knife with his fingers before, menacingly, plunging it into the front door of their house. The camera closed in on the knife, a symbol of Jerry’s ire, as intense music played in the background and the title appeared on the screen: Boy with a Knife.
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Notes
Thomas Patrick Doherty, Teenagers and Teen-pics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in Popular Culture (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 58;
Laurence Miller, “Juvenile Delinquency in Films During the Era of Film Noir,” in Images of Youth: Popular Culture as Educational Ideology, eds. Michael A. Oliker and Walter Krolikowski (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 56;
David M. Considine, The Cinema of Adolescence (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1985), 155–157.
Robert Brent Toplin, “Cinematic History: Where Do We Go from Here?” The Public Historian 25 (Summer 2003): 79–91;
Adam Golub, “They Turned the School into a Jungle! How The Blackboard Jungle Redefined the Education Crisis in Postwar America,” Film and History 39 (January 2009): 21–30;
Jason Barnosky, “The Violent Years: Responses to Juvenile Delinquency in the 1950s,” Polity 38 (July 2006): 314–334; Considine, The Cinema of Adolescence, 156;
Peter Biskind, “Rebel without a Cause: Nicholas Ray in the Fifties,” Film Quarterly 28 (Autumn 1974): 32–38;
Beth McCoy, “Manager, Buddy, Delinquent: ‘Blackboard Jungle’s’ Desegregating Triangle,” Cinema Journal 38 (Autumn 1998): 25–39;
Barbara Jane Brickman, “Riots in Girls Town: Remaking, Revising, and Redressing the Teenpic,” Journal of Film and Video 59 (Winter 2007): 20–36.
James Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 13;
William Graebner, Coming of Age in Buffalo: Youth and Authority in the Postwar Era (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 88; Doherty, Teenagers and Teen-pics, 45;
Ronald D. Cohen, “The Delinquents: Censorship and Youth Culture in Recent U.S. History,” History of Education Quarterly 37 (Autumn 1997): 251–270.
Larry Cuban, Teachers and Machines: The Classroom use of Technology since 1920 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1986), 18.
Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Strieble, “A History of Learning with the Lights Off,” in Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States, eds. Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron, and Dan Strieble (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 24.
Elizabeth Ellsworth, “I Pledge Allegiance: The Politics of Reading and Using Educational Films,” Curriculum Inquiry 21 (Spring 1991): 41–64;
Elizabeth Ellsworth, “Educational Films against Critical Pedagogy,” Journal of Education 169 (Winter 1987): 32–47;
Brian J. Low, “‘The New Generation’: Mental Hygiene and the Portrayals of Children by the National Film Board of Canada, 1946–1967,” History of Education Quarterly 43 (December 2003): 540–570;
Richard Meran Barsam, “‘This is America’: Documentaries for Theaters, 1942–1951,” Cinema Journal 12 (Spring 1973): 22–38.
National Probation and Parole Association, Boy in Court (Willard Pictures, 1940), from the Prelinger Archive, MPEG video, https://archive.org/details/BoyinCou1940;
National Women’s Christian Temperance Union, That Boy Joe (Chicago Film Library, 1944), from the Prelinger Archive, MPEG video, https://archive.org/details/ThatBoyJ1944;
Irving Jacoby and Alexander Hammid, Angry Boy (Affiliated Film Production, 1950), from the Prelinger Archive, MPEG video, https://archive.org/details/Angry_Boy;
Laslo Benedek, Los Angeles Community Chest, Boy with a Knife (Dudley Pictures Corp., 1956), from the Prelinger Archive, MPEG video, https://archive.org/details/Boywitha1956
Geoff Alexander and Rick Prelinger, Academic Films for the Classroom: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2010), 101.
Young America Films, Other People’s Property (Centron Corporation, 1951), from the Prelinger Archive, MPEG video, https://archive.org/details/0119_Other_Peoples_Property_E00939_09_45_34_10-0018;
David A. Smart, Right or Wrong: Making Moral Decisions (Coronet Instructional Films, 1951), from the Prelinger Archive, MPEG video, https://archive.org/details/0122_Right_or_Wrong_Making_Moral_Decisions_E01196_12_18_34_00;
Hal Kopel, Why Vandalism? (Encyclopedia Britannica Films, 1955), From the Prelinger Archive, MPEG video, https://archive.org/details/WhyVanda1955;
Young America Films, What about Juvenile Delinquency? (Centron Corporation, 1955), from the Prelinger Archive, https://archive.org/details/WhatAbou1955
B. Edward McClellan, Moral Education in America: Schools and the Shaping of Character from Colonial Times to Present (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999), 46, 72–73.
William Graebner, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1991), 146.
James Gilbert’s study of the reactions to juvenile delinquency in postwar America included the work of the branch of the federal government, the Children’s Bureau (CB). The CB was a branch of the US Department of Labor created in 1920 to deal strictly with issues that affected children. In the 1940s and 1950s, the CB dealt with juvenile delinquency by recommending that supervised activities would combat the problems associated with juvenile delinquency, Gilbert, A Cycle of Outrage, 172. For a history of the CB see Dorothy E. Bradbury, Five Decades of Action for Children: A History of the Children’s’ Bureau (Washington, DC: Children’s Bureau, 1962).
In 1955, the Community Chest of San Fernando Valley premiered the film Boy with a Knife at its 1955 annual campaign. The organization made the film available to clubs and organizations from the entire Los Angeles area through screenings in local theaters. Roscoe C. Brown, Jr. and Dan W. Dodson, “The Effectiveness of a Boys’ Club in Reducing Delinquency,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 322 (March 1959): 47–52.
Jerold Simmons, “Violent Youth: The Censoring and Public Reception of The Wild One and Blackboard Jungle,” Film History: An International Journal 20 (2008): 381–391.
Paul C. Reed, “The Curriculum Clinic: Notes about Sponsored Films,” Educational Screen 25 (January 1946): 26–27.
Ken Smith, Mental Hygiene: Classroom Films, 1945–1970 (New York: Blast Books, 1999), 89–98, 99–100, 107–112.
L. C. Larson, Carolyn Guss, and John Fritz, “Evaluation of New Films,” Educational Screen and Audio-Visual Guide 36 (5) (1957): 246.
Paula Fass’s study of youth in the 1920s demonstrated that fears over youth became less manageable and more pronounced in the 1920s when urban, middle-class youths were considered “at risk.” Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 128–129. In addition in the 1950s, in particular, the public outcry over juvenile delinquency only occurred when elements of African American culture began to seep into the white suburban neighborhoods and youth culture became distinctly different. Graebner, Coming of Age in Buffalo, 88.
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© 2015 Sevan G. Terzian and Patrick A. Ryan
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Martinelli, A. (2015). Fears on Film: Representations of Juvenile Delinquency in Educational Media in Mid-Twentieth-Century America. In: Terzian, S.G., Ryan, P.A. (eds) American Education in Popular Media. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137410153_6
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