Director:
Chris Thomson
Starring:
Kylie Minogue, Charlie Schlatter, Bruno Lawrence, Angela Punch McGregor
As a young boy who was awfully fond of Kylie Minogue, I implored my parents to purchase a copy of The Delinquents when it hit VHS in 1990. As a young boy seeking the colourful, fizzy instant gratification of the music videos for ‘The Loco-motion’ and ‘I should be so lucky’, I never made it past the first 15 minutes of said VHS, thus squandering my parents’ hard-earned funds. As an adult who’s willingly sat through the stately Barry Lyndon on multiple occasions, I’ve no current gripes with the pacing of The Delinquents, which positively rollicks along in comparison.
Lola (Minogue) and Brownie (Charlie Schlatter) are teenagers living in Bundaberg, Queensland in 1957. They meet cute outside a cinema after being turned away from a packed screening of The Wild One—which both have seen multiple times already—and bond over books and rock & roll. Both are without fathers, feel too big for their town, are avid readers and derided for it, and love to dance. Brownie is also an American, adding to his outsider status. They fall in love, and when Lola falls pregnant they leave town together, beginning a journey on which they’ll brush repeatedly against the conservative mores of the era.
The Delinquents isn’t the first film about teens and young adults I’ve spotlighted on Down Under Flix: see also BMX Bandits, The Year My Voice Broke, The Big Steal, and Youth on the March, among others. Like The Year My Voice Broke, The Delinquents is a period piece, and is saturated with the music and popular culture of the era. The Wild One is a telling choice of featured intertext, and not just for its cultural longevity—it was harnessed for parody as recently as last week—or perennially quotable take on delinquency: “What are you rebelling against?”; “Whaddya got?” Pointedly, the film debuted overseas in 1953; while the choice of film could be a detail originating in the source novel, or explicable as a revival run, the fact it’s screening in Bundaberg in 1957 hints at how distant/behind they are from the wider world.
Alongside The Wild One, Romeo and Juliet, which Lola is reading at film’s start, is another fitting intertext: Lola compares their situation to Shakespeare’s doomed teenage lovers, and The Delinquents has some of that same melodramatic, overblown, but ultimately empathetic vibe as Shakespeare’s play. As a cynical adult, hyperbolic teen emotions can seem preposterous onscreen, but the best teen films (for examples of recent vintage, see The Edge of Seventeen and The Perks of Being a Wallflower) capture and bottle that heightened quality and make it seem authentically felt, as does this film. Given the film’s 1950s setting, Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause, though never namedropped in the film, is another unavoidable intertext. Like the “rebels” of that film, the “delinquents” of the title are more misunderstood victims of dysfunctional families—here missing father figures (also a plot point in Youth on the March), there with father figures who are either pitiful role models (see James Dean’s dad) or unreciprocating objects of Electra-esque crushes (see Natalie Wood’s dad)—and processing feelings far outsized for their teenage frames.
Director Chris Thomson (whose credits include local TV staples like A Country Practice and The Flying Doctors and a handful of films including The Perfectionist and The Empty Beach), cinematographer Andrew Lesnie (who later shot the Lord of the Rings series), and crew succeed in evoking an authentic sense of time and place, aided by the soundtrack. On the spectrum of American imports appearing in Australian films—see also Kirk Douglas, Stacey Keach and Jamie Lee Curtis, William Holden and Ricky Schroder, Dennis Hopper and Melanie Griffith, Alan Arkin, Eric Roberts, Willem Dafoe, Johnathon Schaech, John Goodman, Peter Dinklage, Michael Vartan, etc.—Charlie Schlatter (at the time best known for 18 Again! with George Burns, but later finding syndication fame as Dick Van Dyke’s sidekick in Diagnosis Murder) sits at the far end in terms of star wattage, but is credible as Brownie and has nice chemistry with Minogue. Minogue is given much more to do, emotionally speaking, in long stretches where she struggles under house arrest and juvenile detention, and does strong work. Thought I’ve enjoyed seeing her in smaller roles in subsequent years—in films as disparate as Bio-Dome, Street Fighter, Cut, Sample People, and Swinging Safari—it’s safe to say The Delinquents showcases her most rounded and emotionally varied big screen work.
The Delinquents was the second release from Village Roadshow Pictures—a label that remains resilient today, most recently accompanying the trailer for The Matrix Resurrections—after Phillip Noyce’s Dead Calm. This film had a bit more marketing muscle than the standard Australian release, bolstered by Minogue’s ascendant star status, and did respectable business. But while it cracked the Centenary montage—see a distraught Minogue smashing the side of a phone booth between snippets from Dead Calm and Death in Brunswick—and still has its fans, the film seems to have evaded critical respect, earning lukewarm reviews on release and no attention from the Australian Film Institute Awards. It could be that The Delinquents was perceived as too base in its melodrama, too familiar in its story beats, too satisfying and comforting in its denouement, and too laden with the baggage of a cheesy imported heartthrob and a former soap and rising pop star, to warrant serious consideration. While it remains ultimately a footnote in both Australian film of the era and its star’s meteoric musical career—not dissimilar to Desperately Seeking Susan and Madonna—The Delinquents is an earnest and rewarding little film … and well worth pushing past the 15 minute ceiling.
Ben