BECAUSE THEY’RE YOUNG, a 1960 drama about a beginner high school teacher and his students is well-intended but campy; “dated” doesn’t cut it, “prehistoric” is closer. Paul Wendkos, who’d surfed a teen hit with Gidget, directed. James Gunn’s script was based off  “Harrison High”, a novel written by 20-year-old John Farris. Along with some chuckles at the fossilized earnestness, the 102 minute package holds cine-sociological interest for its cagey agglomeration of personalities; cultural insight graded on the curve.

“Now, Dad, don’t give me any of that malarkey about cold showers and stuff.”

Newbie history teacher ‘Neil Harrison’ has full but hopeful hands taking on not just his students and their assorted problems, but hidebound policies, touchy associates, a knockout secretary nicknamed “Ice Queen”, local punks and his orphaned grade-school nephew—orphaned because Neil was at the wheel of the car that killed Neil’s brother and sister-in-law. At least there’ll be football games and a prom!

“Look, we don’t love people because they’re perfect. If we did, you’d soon find out there’s nobody to love at all.”  That lesson, which is really a T/F situation, is immediately followed by “Try to remember that the next couple of minutes.”  

The overloaded and undercooked script lowers the grade to a C-minus, though proficient director Wendkos and his cameraman Wilfred M. Cline (The Last Wagon, The Killer Shrews) bump it a notch. The reason to watch is who plays who. This time the fresh recruit teacher isn’t Blackboard Jungle‘s durable Glenn Ford but screen novice Dick Clark, 30, four years into hosting the phenomenally popular American Bandstand. Most of the grownups flunk the cool test, except for intuitive and desirable (called as seen) Victoria Shaw, 24, fresh from Edge Of Eternity. The young and restless are covered, with varying degrees of intensity by Michael Callan, 23 (“a refugee from the switchblade set”), Tuesday Weld, 16 (already pegged as a hormone hurricane), Warren Berlinger, 21, Doug McClure, 23, Chris Robinson, 20, and Roberta Shore, 16. John Williams (billed Johnny) manages his first score for movie, and the opening credits run with the title number that became a hit for guitar legend Duane Eddy, 21. He shows up–as himself, at the prom, with his “Rebels’, and play “Shazam”. Tagging along, also as himself, at the prom, is James Darren, warbling a song. Harrison High is clearly in the game when they can have a teen idol pop in at their dance. *

Clark’s okay, but chemistry with the lovely and intriguing Shaw isn’t generated. It’s kind of cruel to stick Weld with Berlinger (dream on, frustrated male screenwriters). Callan does well as the Lothario punk (‘Griff Rimer’) who’s ‘known’ Tuesday (on Saturday night) and needs wising up via slaps, punches and a variety of assault & battery. All ends as it should, in a 1960 movie about high school.

“Don’t touch me. You’ll get dirty just like me…just like my mother is…”

Other adults who just aren’t hip to the beat: Linda Watkins (Berlinger’s cackling, slattern mother), Wendell Holmes (snide principal), Rudy Bond (icky butcher who has a homoerotic thing for Griff, eeeuw!), Philip Coolidge (Griff’s jerk dad), Paul Genge (creepy football coach, eeeuw!), and John Zaremba (later to aid Whit Bissell tweaking The Time Tunnel; paging James Darren as ‘Tony’). Dick’s nephew is played by Stephen Talbot, who a generation of seniors will fondly recognize as ‘Gilbert’ from TVs Leave It To Beaver. Box office placement was #105, with a gross tabbed at $1,800,000. **

Marching with brave naivete into the pre-Nam 60s

* Eddy’s instrumental version of the title track reached Billboard’s #4 for the year, his best-ever charting. Just to be precise, the version used over the credits is not the one that played in transistor radios and on 45 rpm flippers; in the show Darren sings it in his cameo: the number is, uh, decidedly better as an instrumental.

** Rock Czar Clark, pitching in: “Most pictures about teenagers are wrong. They are older people’s concepts of how teenagers act… I doubt if there ever can be a truly honest portrayal in films. Not all girls are beautiful and all boys handsome, as they are in films…the script is fairly true to life. Most teenagers are normal.”  “an extraordinary experience. Columbia really laid it on; they rented a house in Bel-Air owned by Mercedes McCambridge, provided a maid, a butler and a chauffeur, and gave me a hundred dollars a day in expenses.”