‘Hollywood High' Review: How Teens Took Over the Screen

Wall Street Journal

06-06-2025

Reality shapes the movies, and the movies reshape reality, which makes its way back into film. In the 1950s, for instance, widespread dismay, sensational media coverage and even congressional hearings revolved around the crisis of juvenile delinquency, which yielded a spate of what's-wrong-with-young-people features, many of them cheesy and laughable. Among the few that gained a hold on the public imagination was 'Rebel Without a Cause' (1955), a fairly terrible teen soap that became iconic because its point of view was sympathetic to its desperate youth and because its charismatic young lead, James Dean, had died in a car wreck less than a month before it was released.
The car Dean's character drove, a Mercury, became the hot-rodders' 'vehicle of choice through most of the 1950s,' writes Bruce Handy in 'Hollywood High: A Totally Epic, Way Opinionated History of Teen Movies.' A hoodlum in 'American Graffiti' (1973), another defining movie about youth, made a generation later, also drove a Mercury. That film takes place over a single night in 1962, and the choice of car was a joke on its driver, an illustration of a comical urge to cling to a faded past even among young people.
'Rock and roll has been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died,' the film's gearhead hero, John, observes; 1973 looked back to 1962, when everyone was sighing about 1959. Most of the songs on the celebrated soundtrack were already oldies on the night it takes place. The movie harbored a droll sensitivity for early-onset nostalgia.
Mr. Handy's teen-mag title and his book's colorful packaging belie the author's seriousness about his subject. A veteran magazine journalist whose credits include a stint at Vanity Fair, he writes with the lively appreciation of a fan rather than with condescension or academic pedantry, combining astute cultural analysis with fascinating trivia.