The Young Savages *** (1961, Burt Lancaster, Dina Merrill, Edward Andrews, Shelley Winters) – Classic Movie Review 8519

Director John Frankenheimer’s second movie The Young Savages (following The Young Stranger in 1957) is a smartly handled, sincere courtroom drama with a lot of social conscience and a small slice of romance.

Burt Lancaster stars as Italian American slum-born New York district attorney Hank Bell, formerly Bellini, who prosecutes three Italian American juveniles (John Davis Chandler, Neil Nephew [Neil Burstyn], Stanley Kristien) after a blind Puerto Rican boy is stabbed to death. But Lancaster finds evidence to show one of the Italian American boys was actually not involved after all and thus endangers his political career.

The romance is in the hands of Dina Merrill as Lancaster’s highborn wife Karin and Shelley Winters as his old love Mary diPace. It is Telly Savalas’s second film as a cop, police detective Lieutenant Gunderson, after his feature film debut as Lieutenant Darro in Mad Dog Coll, which was also John Davis Chandler’s film debut.

Good though this movie is, carefully tackling a sensitive race issue, as well as issues of love and loyalty, the screenplay wears is heart a bit too much on its sleeve, and perhaps director Frankenheimer would have been better advised to leave the messages to Western Union, good hearted and relevant though they are. The screenplay by Edward Anhalt and J P Miller is based on Evan Hunter’s novel A Matter of Conviction.

Also in the cast are Edward Andrews, Larry Gates, Vivian Nathan, Pilar Seurat, Jody Fair, Roberta Shore, Milton Selzer, Robert Burton, David J Stewart, Luis Arroyo, José Pérez, Richard Velez, Stanley Adams and Leonard Cimino.

Frankenheimer told Merrill at the end of a days’ filming that she was the worst actress he had ever worked with and she went home in tears. One morning Lancaster ridiculed the directors’ ‘good mood’ in that he hadn’t insulted Merrill yet that day.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8519

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