David M. Considine

David M. Considine is the author of The Cinema of Adolescence, from which the article below is excerpted. In it he describes the juvenile delinquency scare of the 1950s and the cycle of films that both exploited and fueled public concern about violent teenagers. Juvenile delinquency rose throughout the first half of the 1950s, and as early as 1953 critics worried that films like Teenage Menace not only portrayed wayward youth, but might also incite young viewers to violence. In 1954 and 1955, The Wild One, East of Eden, and Rebel Without a Cause, which all centered around alienated young men, came to define a new genre: the teen rebellion film. Early teen rebellion films such as The Blackboard Jungle attempted to explore seriously the causes of juvenile delinquency, but after the success of the 1961 musical West Side Story, filmmakers...