From the title I was expecting some fluffy 50's style juvenile delinquency. Actually, for folks wishing to bridge the gap between conformist youth 50's style and the rebellious 60's youth, this is a good flick to catch. 50's teacher Shatner is tired of processing his high school classes into dull adult conformity. So, he tries one day to get them to discuss topics that interest them apart from the settled curriculum. It just so happens that many of the kids attended an all-night stay-over at a beach house where many boy-girl things happened. Thus sex is upper-most for many, even though that's not fit subject matter outside of hygiene class. Still, teacher Shatner wants to fudge precedent and thus has them write about their concerns. However, one thing leads to another and the innovative-minded teacher's job is jeopardized once parents learn of the assignment and take their traditionalist concerns to the principal. Things reach a climax when the kids, hungering for treatment of their personal issues, react to Shatner's dismissal.
In many ways the script confronts the cultural conformity of the 50's with issues simmering beneath the outward calm. Among them-- education is more than simply preparing students
for adult-level jobs; sex is as much a personal issue as a parental one; pressure to conform is reinforced by profits at the business level (Dunne's used car lot); real reform only comes about through mass action.
There may be more, but these are issues brought to the fore by what amounts to a daring script for its time (1961). It's also revealing that the movie was produced by independents and not a big studio. Anyway, the acting is skillfully unmannered and doesn't overshadow the important topics, while the staging uses location shots rather than studio sets giving the results a better sense of realism, even though I found the upshot to be a little too "Hollywood". All in all, the movie may be obscure; still, the 90-minutes reflects a significant undercurrent in the evolution of modern American culture. After all, Vietnam may have triggered the youth explosion, but the fuse was smoldering long before as the movie providentially suggests.
