My Favorite Films, Plague Edition (Volume 11): Boys Go Wild

Zero for Conduct (Zero de Conduite) (1933)
Directed by Jean Vigo

if….. (1968)
Directed by Lindsay Anderson
Starring Malcolm McDowell

Taps (1981)
Directed by Harold Becker
Starring Timothy Hutton, Tom Cruise, Sean Penn, and George C. Scott

Here are three films, made almost a half century apart, all making the same points, and all influenced by the earlier films on the list. If you add Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies to this mix, you have a nice bundled metaphor declaiming that when adolescent boys get together, they can create their own mini-society of cruelty, brutality, and outraged sense of being wronged by the world, a society reflective of our societal ills in general. All of these films end in riots flying in the face of societal conformity, and all nicely protest societal injustices of their own era and country.

Zero for Conduct is a wild and remarkable autobiographical film from 1933, just a few years into the sound era. It depicts a French boys’ boarding school, and is remarkable in its depictions of the male teachers’ pawing of the boys, the brutality and corporal punishment of the era, and the hypocritical faculty persecution of a couple of boys who seem to be discretely in love. Besides this, director Jean Vigo (1905-34), who died of TB in his twenties, shows himself to be a quirky, innovative film stylist and a predecessor to the French New Wave directors of the 1950s and 60’s (Truffaut, Godard, Resnais, et.al.). The anarchism of this film was very threatening to the authorities of that era, so the film was promptly banned by censors. Vigo’s style features people filmed oddly, from below and from above, and in ultra-closeups. There are also  strange special-effect film cuts in which a ball that a boy is playing with seems to disappear for a moment, and a teacher who looks down at his attendance book, only to see a Disney-like animated cat. The teachers are truly creepy, most made to appear as comic fantasy figures. The headmaster is a brutal dwarf, and another teacher creeps about fondling the absent boys’ clothes. The only good teacher entertains the boys by strutting like Charlie Chaplain. The boys get more and more frustrated by their abusive life, and finally start rebelling (unheard of in 1930’s France)--first in a food fight, then a dorm-room trashing of pillows with an anarchist parade (amazing feathers falling around), a mock crucifixion (!) of a sleeping schoolmaster, then in an ending rock-throwing assault from the rooftops. This last bit is filmed with a mix of violence and triumph, as rocks descend on the staid guests at a formal school convocation. This strange gathering features gymnasts on parallel bars and is bizarrely attended by formally dressed upper crust adults, intermixed with full sized puppets. This is a prelude to the stylized, strange imagery of later French directors like Godard. The film sees adults, and French society generally, as unreal and brutal, and the film sets the precedent for adolescent boys being able to take just so much before they rise against their captors.

Lindsay Anderson’s remarkable British film if…. is heavily influenced by Vigo’s film, but is a true creature of the apocalyptic year 1968. It begins with a classic school convocation in an Eton-like school, set in a beautiful chapel, replete with Anglican finery and cherubic choir boys (the film will end there too, in much different circumstances). Malcolm McDowell, famed a few years later for his rebel turn in A Clockwork Orange, here plays the classic 60’s rebel…long hair, rebellious attitude, scornful of the conservative school masters. Like Zero for Conduct, the film again depicts the abuse of students--here not by teachers, but by other students, as seniors abuse junior boys, or sometimes use them as slaves and sexual objects (all quite real in elite “public schools” of those days). Also just like Zero for Conduct, there is an older and a younger boy who fall in love. The film flips randomly between color and black/white, initially due to a limitation of filming in the darkened chapel, but eventually used as a stylistic device by the director.McDowell’s character gradually burns in rage at all the beatings and abuse. When he and his friends (including the boy-boy couple) find armaments in the basement, they launch their own assault on a formal school convocation. This time the attendees are gathered in the beautiful chapel, with a few bizarrely attired benefactors dressed in full medieval armor. Gradually smoke comes from the basement, the attendees flee outside, and are gunned down from the rooftops by the angered teen boys.  It turns into a real 1968 Vietnam-era wingding when the adults below get their own guns and shoot back, ending the film with hateful, violent carnage combining all the generation gap and class-conflict themes of Britain in the late 60’s. It is a wonderful and remarkable film, derived from Zero de Conduite, but raising the ante in violence beyond both the earlier film and Lord of the Flies.

So it was probably time for the Americans to get in on this boy’s boarding school train. Taps (1981) is well known as a launching pad for Tom Cruise, Sean Penn (their first major roles), and a star turn for the more established Timothy Hutton (Ordinary People). Here, we are at a US military school for boys, replete with conservative values embraced by the students. Their outrage occurs when their island of tradition is threatened by the school’s closing (to be replaced by condominiums). Egged on by the camp commander (George C. Scott basically replaying his gruff general Patton character from 1970) the boys (just as in if….) seize the armory and engage in a standoff with the National Guard, with tragic outcomes for Cruise and Hutton’s characters. The film treads a fine and not always successful line between admiring the boys’ loyalty to each other and school “tradition” and seeing them as misguided crackpot conservatives. As in the earlier films, the film provides a lens into societal values, this time the American ideological conflicts a few years after Vietnam and at the dawn of the Reagan era. Much like the late 1970s that I grew up in, the film never really takes an either rebellious or anti-rebellious stance. The acting is good, however, and I enjoyed the references to the two earlier films. For example, Taps also opens with a chapel convocation service with a boy’s choir, and ends with a shootout between teens and adults. There’s no gay couple as in the earlier films (we are in the USA, after all), but lots of homophobic and homoerotic banter. Tom Cruise, for once in his career, actually plays the sociopathic bad guy. He certainly got over that soon enough. Not a great film, but a nice US stab at the same theme.

Rather like adult puppet shows, each of these films uses “mini-men” to comment on the foibles of grownups. I suppose this allows some to externalize the societal criticism implicit in these movies, but instead I found that these films amplified it. It’s a bit shocking to see what teenage boys can do when pushed just so far, and how the dis-inhibition of adolescence can erupt into grownup violence when provoked. Especially in if…. it makes me look a bit nervously at any male teenager coming up the sidewalk.