Many years ago, a friend of mine coined the term "The Coppola Line". An artistic equivalent of baseball's Mendoza Line (the .200 batting average below which a hitter is considered detrimental to his team despite any defensive abilities he might possess), the Coppola Line was the point at which someone's bad work outweighed the value of his good work. If you made six good movies and five bad ones, you were above the Coppola Line; if you recorded three good albums and four bad ones, you were below it. It was named, of course, for Francis Ford Coppola, the man who best epitomized this dreadful ratio, who made some of the finest films in American cinema in the 1970s before cranking out dud after dud in the 1980s and 1990s. With his eagerly anticipated movie, Youth Without Youth — releasing this Friday — he hopes to become the first filmmaker named Coppola to rise back above the Coppola Line after sinking below it. The motion picture business, only slightly less a youth-centered industry than the music biz, has always been obsessed with youth, so if Youth Without Youth turns out to be another stinker, here are some 'youth movies' that will help make up for it.
ASSASSIN OF YOUTH (1937)
Lest you think that anti-drug hysteria is a relatively recent development in American culture, look back to this grade-Z production from the Depression, when apparently people didn't have anything to worry about other than the notion that smoking the devil weed might turn their children into murderous zombies. Starring a cast of no-names in roles so flat they can't even be called caricature, Assassin of Youth can still be enjoyed on an ironic level, preferably while stoned: it's the kind of raving, no-budget hackwork that makes Reefer Madness look like an even-handed documentary.
SPIRIT OF YOUTH (1938)
Widely considered one of the greatest boxers of all time, Joe "The Brown Bomber" Louis only appeared in one film, which should clue you in that he wasn't quite as gifted as an actor. Still, there're a few reasons to recommend this film, which was meant to be a loose parallel of his fighting career and was released during his second year as reigning heavyweight champion. Louis has no chops talking in front of the camera, but he's grace in motion when he gets the chance to fight, and the movie is one of the few where Mantan Moreland is given the opportunity to show some actual acting skills and not just behave as a comic stereotype. The DVD release of Spirit of Youth can be seen all over America, unlike the movie's theatrical release — it was not shown in many Southern theaters for fear that the audience would become enraged at the sight of a black fighter defeating white opponents.
NO REGRETS FOR MY YOUTH (1946)
An early film from Akira Kurosawa, this one is known as Waga seishun ni kuinashi at home, but in any language, it's a prime building block in what would become one of the greatest careers in cinema. The story of a college professor who is removed from his post for opposing the war against China, No Regrets for My Youth is one of the first Japanese films to speak out openly against the fascist regime that took power in the 1930s — and that's not the only taboo it breaks, as it deals, as openly as possible given the time and place of its making, with homosexuality. As if all that's not enough to tempt you to hunt down the DVD, it also features a character nicknamed "The Poisoned Strawberry".
SWEET BIRD OF YOUTH (1962)
Hollywood generally didn't know how to handle Tennessee Williams. Much of the sexuality (especially homosexuality) in his plays had to be removed or toned down to placate the censors of the time, and unless handled just right, his florid dialogue, so powerful on stage, could come off as campy on screen. Writer/director Richard Brooks did a pretty decent job in this adaptation, abetted by a great cast that included a young, handsome Paul Newman as a zooted-out drifter, Geraldine Page (light-years removed from her later dowdy-matron roles) as a sex kitten, and Ed Begley and Rip Torn gnawing on the scenery as a powerful southern lawman and his jealous son.
YOUTH OF THE BEAST (1963)
Seijun Suzuki's Yaju no seishun (usually translated as Youth of the Beast) is one of his finest slices of deranged yakuza action — and as such, it's one of the movies that helped get him blackballed from the industry for decades. Like most of his films, it's a demented ball of non-stop energy, filled with fantastic eye candy, crazily giddy performances (especially an all-time classic role from Jo Shishido as the relentless young gangster of the title), and stylistically sexualized violence. Recently released in a jam-packed Criterion Collection edition, Youth of the Beast is living proof of why the Japanese film industry couldn't figure out what do do with Suzuki for the longest time.
— Leonard Pierce