THE YOUNG DON'T CRY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 39, Issue 988, 25 July 1958, Page 26

THE YOUNG DON'T CRY

(Columbia) A Cert. O put it baldly, The Young Don’t Cry is about an adolescent’s journey, in a few climactic days, from adolescence to manhood, and it is the film’s only considerable fault that it does put it baldly. This is a pity, for what it has to say was worth saying, and for much of the distance its fresh, attractive settings and the best of its players create a quite remarkable feeling of reality. Sal Mineo is the adolescent for whom temptation is the proposition that only a sucker sticks out his neck to help other people, and for whom home is an orphanage to which an old boy returns with proof of a substantial kind that the proposition works in the workaday world. Some of young Mr Mineo’s early scenes are a bit self-conscious, but the best of the film, in which he gradually becomes involved in a jail break, is very well done. So are the scenes of the prison work gang and in the prison itself, with J. Carrol Naish as a bullying superintendent and James Whitmore and Leigh Whipper oddly moving as the escapees. A film I would have liked to praise unre- servedly, The Young Don’t Cry might have suryived its self-conscious preoccupation with a theme if it had not been marred again by this flaw right at the = Even so, it is well worth seeing. Alfred Werker directed.