Classic 1950s films about teens like The Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause were the tip of a very large cinematic iceberg. Major studios and (especially) small-time independent production companies cranked out dozens of teen-oriented films a year: rock-and-roll films, juvenile-delinquent films, surfing films, high-school melodramas, hot-rod films, and science-fiction/horror films. Most of them were shot with low budgets, no-name casts, and tight schedules . . . and most of them fell somewhere between competently formulaic and jaw-droppingly awful. Teens were the most reliable movie-going audience in 1950s America, however, and even formulaic teenpics drew substantial audiences and turned respectable profits.

Thomas Doherty’s Teenagers and Teenpics is, by far, the best book available on 1950s teenpics. It traces the changes in Hollywood, and the changes in the wider culture, that made them a viable genre, and breaks down each of the major teen subgenres that flourished in the 1950s. Doherty is more interested in analyzing the films than in cataloging them, to the book and reader’s benefit. The book doesn’t list every significant teen film of the era (or try) but it covers enough ground to clearly set the teenpics in the context of 1950s Hollywood and 1950s culture in general. The last chapter – the only one that breaks from this pattern – is, tellingly, also the weakest. Trying to survey the development of teenpics from the end of the fifties into the then-present day (late 1990s), it sacrifices insightful analysis for mere base-covering, and feels unsatisfying by comparison.

The book as a whole, though, is both analytically satisfying and smoothly, accessibly written. It’s a rewarding read for anyone with even a passing interest in Hollywood film or 1950s culture, and a must-own for anyone with a serious interest in either. ( )