I think the real lesson of THE VIOLENT YEARS is that girls make really stupid criminals. Robert DeNiro's gang in HEAT is torn to pieces after the cops show up during a major-league bank heist; the same thing happens to spoiled rich girl Paula and her crew, only it's because the cops interrupt them while inflicting minor, easily reparable damage on a schoolroom. This action (sort of) set piece is a hoot to watch: the girls go wild, erasing the blackboard and ripping up the desktop blotter and turning over the chairs, but then as one girl contemplates desecrating the American flag the cops show up. Rather than face a juvenile hall stay for breaking windows, Paula and the gang do what any smart criminals would do: get out their irons and start blasting. Paula further demonstrates her criminal smarts by killing a cop, then demanding payment for the botched job from her boss--who, because she is also a female criminal in the world of THE VIOLENT YEARS, instead of playing it safe and playing for time, promptly turns her back on the desperately stupid brat brandishing a gun and an inflated ego.
You have to give Paula this, anyway; she's smarter than Jimmy Wilson in I ACCUSE MY PARENTS. But then he at least had genuinely bad parents. Paula's folks are kindly and ridiculously generous, plying her with new dresses and a new car *every year*. But her dad was always so busy at his job and her mom so engaged in her charity work (remember that, mothers: having an outside interest means your child will turn to crime) that attention-starved Paula was forced to take up petty theft. She's almost adorable with her affected snarl and tough-girl talk as she struggles valiantly to strike a fearsome pose. To make herself feel better she takes care to surround herself with only with pathetic lowlifes and third-raters; in one hilarious bit, a reporter visits her (very tame) birthday sleep-over and drops one of her male friends with a single punch. It all makes for an entertaining ride through the laughable career of one of the dumbest crooks ever to star in a movie.
Well, almost. The movie rolls along until the last act, when it suddenly freezes in its tracks to mete out poetic justice and endless lecturing from a judge who tells us that the only way to stamp out youthful crime is with corporal punishment in the "old fashioned woodshed" and with regular church-going. (As Mike Nelson summarizes, "Beat the love of Jesus into them!") Not content to punish Paula with a life sentence and death in childbirth, the movie then punishes both her parents *and* her baby daughter by refusing the parents custody and sentencing the daughter to life in a state home. Mike and the 'bots salvage some entertainment from the droning moralizing; I can scarcely imagine what it must have been like to watch in the movie theater. Ironically it might have been better in the hands of Ed Wood, who supplied the story but not the direction. THE VIOLENT YEARS is competently directed as Ed Wood could never have managed but at least Eddie had the sense to keep his pontificating short. Even the ridiculous "pornography is worse than dope peddling" scene from THE SINISTER URGE is over with in less time than it takes for the hectoring judge in THE VIOLENT YEARS to tell us what time of day it is.
You have to give Paula this, anyway; she's smarter than Jimmy Wilson in I ACCUSE MY PARENTS. But then he at least had genuinely bad parents. Paula's folks are kindly and ridiculously generous, plying her with new dresses and a new car *every year*. But her dad was always so busy at his job and her mom so engaged in her charity work (remember that, mothers: having an outside interest means your child will turn to crime) that attention-starved Paula was forced to take up petty theft. She's almost adorable with her affected snarl and tough-girl talk as she struggles valiantly to strike a fearsome pose. To make herself feel better she takes care to surround herself with only with pathetic lowlifes and third-raters; in one hilarious bit, a reporter visits her (very tame) birthday sleep-over and drops one of her male friends with a single punch. It all makes for an entertaining ride through the laughable career of one of the dumbest crooks ever to star in a movie.
Well, almost. The movie rolls along until the last act, when it suddenly freezes in its tracks to mete out poetic justice and endless lecturing from a judge who tells us that the only way to stamp out youthful crime is with corporal punishment in the "old fashioned woodshed" and with regular church-going. (As Mike Nelson summarizes, "Beat the love of Jesus into them!") Not content to punish Paula with a life sentence and death in childbirth, the movie then punishes both her parents *and* her baby daughter by refusing the parents custody and sentencing the daughter to life in a state home. Mike and the 'bots salvage some entertainment from the droning moralizing; I can scarcely imagine what it must have been like to watch in the movie theater. Ironically it might have been better in the hands of Ed Wood, who supplied the story but not the direction. THE VIOLENT YEARS is competently directed as Ed Wood could never have managed but at least Eddie had the sense to keep his pontificating short. Even the ridiculous "pornography is worse than dope peddling" scene from THE SINISTER URGE is over with in less time than it takes for the hectoring judge in THE VIOLENT YEARS to tell us what time of day it is.