The Delinquents

Penned by Mac Gudgeon and Clayton Frohman and based on a novel by Criena Rohan this story of star-crossed teenage love set in the late 1950s is a well-made film with impressively detailed production design and nicely lensed by Andrew Lesnie. Unfortunately it is dramatically inert.

Kylie Minogue, in her first big screen role, does quite a commendable job, particularly in portraying the young girl brought too soon to maturity by life's hard knocks. She is much better in this respect than in handling her schoolgirl persona with which the film begins. Less successful is the young American actor, Charlie Schlatter, presumably imported to give the film a wider demographic appeal, but who brings nothing to the film other than boyish good looks. It was a disastrous decision however and the film flopped, becoming the first really big turkey funded by the Australian Film Finance Corporation. Had the film concentrated on a genuinely Australian story with Australian actors and given it less production gloss it may well have succeeded. Homogenized and sanitized as it is, it speaks to no-one (the makers would have been advised to spend more time studying The Wild One, a film which is extensively referenced here).

A teen audience would have been frustrated by the time given over to serious issues concerning the social mores of the time and Minogue, in the absence of any natural chutzpah, needed to have more star-treatment than she is given here in order to bring her to her fans. A more demanding audience would have found the conventional aspects of the story a betrayal of the film's swing at dramatic realism. On both counts, as pop-confection or "adult" drama the films fails, falling somewhere between the two.

 

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