Far from the wide, multi-character canvases he would eventually pioneer and master, one couldn’t ask for a more uncharacteristic debut from Robert Altman than what was delivered with The Delinquents. Shot in 1956 but not released until the following year, the enterprise was the result of Kansas City theatrical exhibitor Elmer Rhoden wanting to get in on the juvenile delinquent movies that were printing money due to the monster popularity of Rebel Without a Cause. It just so happened that local talent Robert Altman, a thirty-year-old Air Force vet and industrial filmmaker, was wanting to graduate from the shorts he was grinding out for the KC-based Calvin Company to feature films.
Whether Altman was ready for such a thing is another call entirely as The Delinquents is a movie that feels like two parts of an educational film warning against the dangers of being an obnoxious teenage reprobate. The story concerns itself with the tragic romance between Scotty and Janice (pre-Billy Jack Tom Laughlin and KC native Rosemary Howard, respectively), two high school kids who are having trouble taking their relationship to the next level because Janice’s totally square parents feel that a girl of sixteen is FAR too young to be going steady, and, naturally, they explicitly forbid them to see each other. Enter a gaggle of rough young thugs, led by the smarmy Cholly (Peter Miller), and his toadie, a slippery wise-guy punk named Eddie (Dick Bakalyan). After involving an unwitting Scotty in a drive-in rumble, Cholly hatches a plan to help him out of his dilemma with Janice. Cholly will pose as Janice’s date to her parents and will bring her to Scotty after picking her up. And, of course, this leads to all kinds of trouble which includes a police raid on a party in an abandoned house, a lot of booze, a gas station robbery, an attempted sexual assault, and, finally, a knife fight.
Aside from being Altman’s feature debut, The Delinquents is notable for the weirdly intense performance given by Tom Laughlin as his style aggressively clashes with the very beige Rosemary Howard exactly in the same way that predates the identical awkwardness that would materialize when he would insist on casting Delores Taylor, his non-actress wife, in gigantic and difficult roles in his stupid Billy Jack movies. And I suppose there is a camp quality to be had here. After all, deep in the third act, Laughlin’s emotions get so out of hand that it looks like he permanently damages Dick Bakalyan’s cervical spine when the former drags the latter down to the ground in a headlock that would get you ejected from most wrestling matches. And in the film’s climax soon afterward, a hotted up Laughlin gets into a fight with Peter Miller’s character that looks like it wasn’t completely covered or cut correctly. The result is a lot of jagged editing which has Laughlin oscillating between looking like he’s going to either destroy Peter Miller or vomit all over him. It is no surprise that, in Altman on Altman, the director recalled Laughlin as a real pain in the ass.
Containing a mix of passable and stiff performances, some nice Kansas City locales, some crisp black and white photography by Charles Paddock, and an unintentionally hilarious wraparound monologue that was tacked onto the film without Robert Altman’s knowledge or permission, The Delinquents is fairly middling, but it’s far from unwatchable. And while it was good enough to land Altman a job with Alfred Hitchcock on the latter’s top-shelf anthology series, other than co-directing the somber documentary The James Dean Story in 1957, Altman spent the next decade honing his skills in the world of television. And, for whatever it’s worth, it’s a more auspicious debut than Kubrick’s Fear and Desire. So it’s got that going for it.
Also, regardless of its merits as a narrative feature, it’s worth noting that with The Delinquents, Altman beat John Cassavetes to the big screen by two years, netting writing, producing, and directing credits. So every independent filmmaker who feels a debt is owed to John Cassavetes, the patron saint of American independent filmmaking (and a massive debt most certainly is owed to him), some of that gratitude should also be funneled toward the memory of Robert Altman. who, while retaining the attitude and actions of a maverick until he passed away in 2006, grew a larger and arguably more varied resume out of the humble seeds he planted in Kansas City fifty years prior.
(C) Copyright 2025, Patrick Crain
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