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By entering your email address you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy and consent to receive emails from Time Out about news, events, offers and partner promotions. Thanks for subscribing! Look out for your first newsletter in your inbox soon! Defining moment: In a field of daisies overlooking a vast military cemetery, Maude explains her philosophy of life. Age shall not wither them The hippy era was full of movies that attempted to confront square society, to shock viewers into some undefined form of action.
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Billed as "a brass-knuckle punch in its startling revelation of teenage savages" and based on the book of the same name by Evan Hunter — aka crime writer Ed McBain — who drew on his own experiences as a teacher in the Bronx — Blackboard Jungle ushered in the age of the teenage delinquent. In London, Brooks's film attracted crowds of Teddy Boys, who slashed cinema seats, danced in the aisles and actually started a riot. The reason for such shocking behaviour wasn't so much the film's content, which today garners a more sober 12 rating, but because of the use of Bill Haley and the Comets' early rock'n'roll hit Rock Around the Clock, which played over the opening credits. Today, it is the least shocking aspect of a film that touches on knife crime, drug use and even rape within the state school system, but back then it was a touchstone for disaffected youth, never mind the fact that Haley was a journeying white musician in his 30s and the song was already a year old. Nearly 60s years later it still packs a punch, with Glenn Ford's Richard Dadier so called mainly to allow the jive-talking students to call him "Daddy-O" struggling to control his pupils at the fictional North Manual high school. Others try and fail, like the pitiful Mr Edwards whose prized 78s are smashed by his class in a symbolic and still upsetting act of rebellion, but hope exists in the form of African-American Gregory Miller, who finally responds to Dadier's patrician authority. Nevertheless, for all its postwar morality, Vic Morrow's surly Artie West is the film's real antihero, leather-jacketed and blank, the logical heir to Marlon Brando's Wild One of just two years earlier.
Young love — especially when it's with the star of the football team — can make a girl crazy. In pre-Depression, small-town Kansas, good-girl Natalie Wood is so tortured by her sexual urges for beau Warren Beatty and conflicting pressure to be moral that she attempts suicide after a school dance and ends up in a sanitarium. It's the ultimate depiction of overwhelming first love, and — sorry, religious right — a chilling PSA against the dangers of teen abstinence. There are many reasons 10 Things I Hate About You stands the test of time better than most of its contemporaries in the glut of late '90s teen flicks, but we'll name two of them. For starters, child-star-made-good Joseph Gordon-Levitt turned in an understated, endearing performance as a lovelorn and totally undercover hot geek. The film also served as a breakout role for a then little-known Aussie named Heath Ledger, who sung, danced, and smirked his way into the heart of ice queen intellectual punk Kat Stratford Julia Stiles. That's without mentioning a stellar soundtrack, its brilliantly caricaturish deconstruction of high school cliquery, and a house party worthy of the name Bogey Lowenstein. Every generation has its variant on the girl-dresses-as-boy, girl-as-boy-falls-for-boy, boy-freaks-out tale.