Boys in Brown

Amazon notwithstanding, a DVD of this is available and I recently ran across it. The story is pretty basic and not very believable but you do learn quite a bit about the time in which it happens. Unlike the US where kids were already defining their own style of dress, their own music and gathering places devoid of adults, the British kids dress like miniature adults with clean white shirt, tie and dark sport coat....even when robbing stores! You get the feeling that success for them means getting what the adults already have rather than renouncing the world of their elders. And they are comfortable hitting a pub for a drink. It's no big deal. I guess the British drinking age is a bit lower than that in the US. But while the British world might have welcomed the youngsters into the fold, the British film industry took things to a ridiculous extreme; all the borstal "kids" are old enough to be guards themselves. Check the biogs of the actors. Several of them are in their 30's, playing teens. Hanley, playing the part of Bill Foster, is 32 and sports an enormous belly. He is almost old enough to have a son of his own in a borstal. Attenborough and Bogard are a little less obvious, but not much. Apparently Rank, like American International and Roger Corman, had difficulty finding suitable juvenile actors and simply used adults dressed as kids. After a while you get used to it since the teens act like little adults anyway. Actually a rather interesting picture from a historical aspect. If you can find it.