The 1950s were awash with movies warning about the dangers of spoiled teenagers becoming juvenile delinquents and wreaking havoc on society. Although they inherently verged on exploitation of the audience's desire to see girls being bad, they were supposedly serious and undoubtedly did reflect real concerns people had, however muddled their transition to the conventions of 1950s film-making was.<br /><br />"The Violent Years" shows one of the worst examples of the trend. Here, we see lower-class male criminals (what people really feared) represented as upper-class females on screen, creating an absurd and utterly implausible plot. The delinquent teenager movies of the 1950s always played on the fear that one small mistake, one step away from conformity, would lock a youth into an inescapable path toward total moral ruin and life in prison. The motivation for this belief was undoubtedly fear of communism in the 1950s, with the idea being that if we veered away from being good Americans we'd lose the cold war, but "The Violent Years" makes the ludicrous connection much more blatantly than any other film I've seen. The film inadvertently shows how silly a lot of the fears of communist plots were: the viewer is asked to take seriously the idea that international communism is hiring upper class schoolgirls to break into their classrooms and destroy American flags.<br /><br />"The Violent Years" is riddled with implausible characters and situations, broken only by a monumentally boring, laughably moralistic speech by the judge about how following the 10 Commandments will solve everything.<br /><br />If you want to watch a genuinely good 1950s juvenile delinquent moral panic movie, check out "Caged" (1950). If you want a laugh, try "The Violent Years", but make sure it's the MST3K version, otherwise you'll probably be bored to tears.