TEENAGE WOLFPACK (Georg Tressler, 1956)

A distressing trend in Hollywood beginning in the 1950s with Nicholas Ray’s worst, least interesting film, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and reaching its apotheosis with West Side Story (Jerome Robbins, Robert Wise, 1961), grossly sentimentalized teenaged punks and antisocial youth. These films remain awash in whining self-pity, without any purpose apart from flattering its target audience: not juvenile delinquents, who were too busy committing crimes to go to the movies, but bourgeois aspirants to the label. It is difficult to process that the man who made such genuine films as In a Lonely Place (1950), Johnny Guitar (1954) and Bigger Than Life (1956) also made Rebel Without a Cause—although each of the worthy films by Ray here noted, and all of his others, including the remarkably sensitive They Live by Night (1947), admit mawkish accents.
     Undoubtedly influenced by Rebel, West Germany’s Die Halbstarken (The Half-Strong?), written by Will Tremper and brilliantly directed by Georg Tressler, is different. It is hallucinatory though rivetingly real, totally unsentimental: a portrait of youth in stark black and white that captures their rudderlessness and recklessness in the absence of an authoritarian national figure such as Hitler, the blow to German patriarchy dealt by Germany’s defeat in the war, and German preoccupation with pursuing the “Economic Miracle” that left West German youth in the streets on their bloody own. Like their elders, these kids go after money any way they can.
     Tressler unerringly employs the atmospherics and techniques of film noir to suggest an American hand in guiding West German adolescent behavior and to suggest, for most of these youngsters, a comfort zone in the dead of night.
     And Tremper and Tressler had a brilliant ace-in-the-hole besides: the ferocious performance that made Horst Buchholz, as gangleader Freddy, a star.