Annie, Are You Okay?

BY Rowena Robertson

They’re juvenile, delinquent and angry as hell ­– they’re the reform school kids of 20th century America. Their parents and society didn’t want to know about them, but they were adopted by something much more glamorous – something called popular culture.

While their adoption by film, TV and music put reform school kids on centre stage, it’s debatable as to whether the relationship between ‘guardian’ and ‘charge’ was entirely healthy. The representation of reform school kids did confer on them a significance denied them in the real world; but in most cases the portrayals stopped short of transcending real-life inequalities. Female rebellion was generally trivialised and/or fetishised, while the males’ sense of alienation from society was taken far more seriously.

Pop-cultural representations of reform school kids exploded in the 1950s, with the first wave of what were known as juvenile delinquent exploitation movies. And in many cases, exploitation was definitely the operative word. Films from this era, such as Reform School Girl (1957), So Young, So Bad (1956), So Evil, So Young (1957), Riot in Juvenile Prison (1959) and Kitten With A Whip (1964, starring Ann-Margret), focus almost solely on female juvenile delinquents, who were usually depicted in an overtly sexual way. In Riot in Juvenile Prison, for example, female delinquents are sent to a male reform school, and it’s made clear that they’re up for anything.

In contrast, Dino (1957), starring Sal Mineo as a troubled young man sent to reform school, is infused with a gravitas missing in the “reform school girls” films. The same more reverent treatment is given to the 1983 film Bad Boys, starring Sean Pean as young man sent to reform school after he runs over and kills a young boy. Here, as in Dino, there is a quality narrative and a pervasive sense of seriousness. This was Penn’s first major role after his breakthrough performance in Fast Times At Ridgemont High, and undoubtedly helped to set him up for future success.

In the 1970s the reform school girls popped up again, and this time round they showed greater agency. In the sitcom Happy Days (which was set in the 1950s), rock star Suzi Quatro had a guest role as ex-reform school girl Leather Tuscadero. Leather fronted an all-girl band and was smart-mouthed and sassy. The Runaways, the all-girl rock band led by Joan Jett, were the archetypal unashamed bad girls. Songs like “Dead End Justice” depict the nightmarish reform school experience while also conveying the humanity of female delinquents: “You can’t turn off the tears / They crawl in juvenile hall / Cruel reform schools / They don’t smile, they got no bail or jury trial / Joan, let’s break out tonight/ Okay Cherie, what’s the plan?”

In 1986, Plasmatics singer and the “Queen of Shock Rock” Wendy O Williams starred in Reform School Girls (not to be confused with 1957’s Reform School Girl, which was remade in 1994). Here we return to the overly sexualised depiction of reform school girls, with Williams parading around in leather and undies for most of the film. There’s a connection between art and real life here: while Williams was never sent to reform school, she was indisputably rebellious, being arrested and charged for obscenity on several occasions.

The Preston School of Industry in California was a real-life institution for delinquent young men, but took on pop cultural cachet after being namechecked in a string of movies and TV series, including Dragnet. (More recently, the school even got indie cred when ex-Pavement founder Scott Kannberg named his band after it.) There must have been a strange serendipity between the school’s pop cultural status and the fortunes of its real-life inhabitants, since many of its ‘alumni’, including Eddie Anderson and Merle Haggard, went on become significant pop cultural names themselves.

In a way, this cultural adoption allowed reform school kids to go full circle. The bad boys and girls who populated the juvie halls of America inspired a sometimes exploitative but potentially humanising encounter with pop culture – and in a twist, they could even end up acting and singing their own stories.