Watch The Young Savages For Free

The Worst Film Ever

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

This is quite an entertaining film, and quite slickly done. The opening scene follows three youths that you just know are up to no good. They pull out knives and attack a blind Puerto Rican boy innocently playing a harmonica on his front porch with his sister. A clear case of premeditated murder. The assistant DA is going after the death penalty until he does some digging. It turns out the blind boy is a general in a Puerto Rican gang, and regularly pimps out his 16yo sister for $. This revelation seems to change the mind of the ADA, apparently the blind boy wasn't so innocent after all. Why was this important? It did not change the fact that the 3 went to his house with the specific intention of killing him. If anything it provides motivation. Somehow the blind boy's involvement in gangs meant his life was less valuable. While he has the boy's sister on the witness stand the ADA asks her how she earns money, reminding her she is under oath. The admits she is a hooker. "A prostitute?" the ADA wants clarification."Yes, a prostitute..." The defense attorney objects, but the ADA says he is leading somewhere. But he doesn't- he just lets the jury know she has been a prostitute since the age of 14. The jury is shown wide-eyed. Somehow this is relevant? He asks her if she was coerced into it by an older man. Apparently not, they needed money when her mother got sick. He asked what her mother thought about her being a prostitute, she said the mother wished she had died. Remember this is a witness for the prosecution. This pure 'slut-shaming' at it's best. Moral condemnation.He then goes on to show one of the 3 attackers is mentally challenged, another didn't actually stab the boy, and the third tries to dominate out of fear. essentially he does the defense attorneys job for him. The reasoning given in the film is he wanted to expose THE TRUTH. That truth being that what seems a simple case of good vs evil is more complex- this is all well and good, but there is an underlying message in the film. Initially the three white kids are presented as thoroughly evil bad 'uns. We learn they are complex and disturbed- more deserving of pity than anger. The Puerto Ricans at first seen as innocent victims are finally portrayed as morally corrupt, inferior in every way to the White Man. The blind boy's mother wants justice for her son in the middle of the film, and the ADA promises her she will get it. After he has scuppered his own case, she asks him where is the punishment promised for those that killed he son. He tells her a lot of people killed her son. He implies it was his own fault, her fault, the gang's fault, his own people's fault. He walks away proudly, a job well done. The 3 attackers avoid the death penalty- the mentally challenged one gets sent to a mental hospital, the non-stabber gets a year in juvi, (he's a good kid at heart) and the third gets life in priz. The sentence was probably a good one for the three killers. They were sent to kill the boy by the head of their gang, so although premeditated, they were pawns. There was no mention of pursuing the guy that organised the killing- the Thunderbirds gang leader.The two gangs go back to the status quo, the white middle class ADA, jury, cops and the audience are reassured minorities have no morals and white kids only err through environmental stress.

For The Young Savages Burt Lancaster went back to his roots. The actor was born and raised in the East Harlem section of Manhattan. At that time it had not become a Latino neighborhood, it was predominantly Italian where he grew up. To this day there are still a few Italian families in the area in and around Pleasant Avenue and neighboring streets. His had to be the only WASP family in the area at the time.In 1961 just as you see in West Side Story the neighborhood was divided with racial and ethnic tensions. But these kids don't sing and dance between rumbles. They are a hard bitten bunch of punks on both sides.In fact that's where our story begins as three Italian kids leave their turf and go and stab a blind Hispanic youth. It's a crime that shocks the city. Ambitious District Attorney Edward Andrews sees this as a case when successfully prosecuted could make him governor. He relies on one of his best men, ADA Burt Lancaster to bring home a victory and a trip to old Sparky as they called the electric chair in Sing Sing.Of course there's a lot more to the case than meets the eye both in the crime and in Lancaster's conflicted loyalties. He's happily married to pretty Dina Merrill from the suburbs. She's what you call a limousine liberal, one who's ideas are shaped by books instead of living the poverty she's studied in school about. I've met many like that and it really is true many conservatives are liberals who've been mugged. When one of the gangs gives her a bad experience, she sings a different tune.But where The Young Savages falls apart for me is the fact that Lancaster was once involved with Shelley Winters, the mother of one of the three defendants. I'm sorry, but right then and there Lancaster in real life would have recused himself from this case. Of course Winters appeals to him for old time's sake and Lancaster starts doing his own investigation and prods the police to do more on their end. In the film also Lancaster is from that neighborhood. His character's family name of Bell was once Bellini. Many families with ethnic names of all types anglicized them or had them anglicized by immigration officials. The film which according to a recent biography of Burt Lancaster was shot in 35 days on location in New York City. It was a project Lancaster did while waiting to do Birdman of Alcatraz. The Young Savages is notable for being Telly Savalas's big screen debut and for Lancaster using TV director John Frankenheimer on his first big assignment. Purportedly Lancaster was pretty rough on Frankenheimer, but in the end he impressed the star so that he did four more films with him including Birdman of Alcatraz. And Telly Savalas was in that one too.Though the film is based on one horribly bad premise, the acting and directing are not bad. I had the same criticism of 12 Angry Men in which another young talented director, Sidney Lumet got his first break. The Young Savages remains a graphic look at a seamier side of New York City during the Kennedy years.

This is one of those social conscience movies that were popular in the 50s and early 60s. This is not an especially good example of the genre. It follows prosecutor Burt Lancaster's investigation into a gang killing. The movie seems to be designed around a series of points the screenplay wants to make about the nature of slums and gangs and whether the death penalty is a good thing and that sort of thing, but it approaches all this in an unconvincing, mechanical manner. While the movie isn't all bad throughout, and seems vaguely interesting most of the way through, the trial at the end is so utterly absurd that it ruined what little momentum the movie had going. This is standard Hollywood law, in which Lancaster exhibits fairly incompetent prosecutorial behavior in his quest for "the truth." The movie is sincere and has good credentials, so it looks like it should be a good movie, but it really isn't.

***SPOILERS*** 1961 motion picture loosely based on the notorious August 30,1959 Salvador Agron "Capeman killings" in New York City's Hells Kitchen. The movie has the racial backgrounds of victim and killer reversed which made the film a bit disingenuous to the movie going public back then in 1961, just two years after that terrible event. The killer Salvador Agron was Hispanic and his two teenage victims, Anthony Krezsinski and Robert Young, were white. Three members of the white Manhattan street gang The Thunderbirds cross into Spanish Harlem on the turf of the local Puerto Rican gang The Horsemen and zero in on young and sensitive harmonica playing Roberto Escalante, Jose Perez,knifing him to death. Caught minutes after the killing are the three gang members Reardon Di Pace & Aposto, John David Chandler Stanley Kristien & Neil Nephew. With the city D.A Daniel Cole, Edward Andrews, wanting a first degree murder conviction of the three teenage assailants, to give him a boost in the upcoming gubernatorial elections, he put's his best prosecutor on the case Asst. D.A Hank Bell, Burt Lancaster. With the three defendants claiming that they killed Roberto in self-defense their excuse falls apart like a house of cards when it's shown that he was totally blind and a threat to no one, much less themselves. It now starts to look like D.A Cole would get the first degree murder conviction that can send the three youths, all under 18, to the electric chair. Bell who at first had no idea who the three defendants were soon realized that one of the accused killers, Danny Di Pace, is the son of a woman Mrs. Mary Di Pace ,Shelly Winters,that he was in love with years before he got married to his present wife Karin, Dina Merrill. This made prosecuting Danny very difficult and painful for him.Slowly getting all the evidence in order and at the same time being attacked,far worse the his wife was earlier in the film, by gang members for doing his job Asst. D.A Bell finally gets to the bottom of the case. Bell finds out the real reason for Roberto's killing and it totally throws him off to what he's supposed to do in the case; get a verdict that would strap the three into the electric chair, regardless of their guilt or innocence, in order to further his boss' D.A Cole political career. A bit ahead of it's time "The Young Savages" goes into the mental mindset of the three accused killers of blind Roberto Escalante and comes up with some startling conclusions; all three were not in full control of themselves or in what they did so a first degree murder conviction was unable to be reached by the jury. Not that they got off Scot-free for their actions and Roborto himself was anything but the innocent bystander that he was made out to be by his friends family and the liberal newspapers.A cowardly bully with a deep inferiority complex who was the leader of the pack Arthur Reardon is given 20 to life. A mentally retarded and delusional Anthony "Batman" Aposto, who thinks that he's the Batman of comic book fame, ends up in an institution for the criminally insane until he's seen fit, by a battery of psychiatrists, to again become a member of society. It was Danny Di Pace who got off from getting heavy jail time, Danny got a year in Juvenile Hall, for just wanting to be a member of a street gang to have the family that he never knew but that involvement lead to Roberto Escalante losing his life.Hank Bell threw away whatever future he had in the New York State D.A's office by looking at the facts and perusing Justice instead of letting the three gang member fry for the sake of his, and D.A Cole's, future in state or national politics.