Absolutely brilliant

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

I have absolutely never seen anything like this movie before. You have to see this movie.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

I'm sure any number of prurient drive-in viewers had their appetites whetted by the title of Naked Youth, probably renamed such so a few more cars would get into the parking spaces. A little stimulus before getting down to business in the back seat. If that was the case they were disappointed because Wild Youth or Naked Youth hasn't even a hint of nudity. What this film is about is a trio youths Robert Arthur and Steve Rowland who busted out of an honor farm and Jan Brooks the girl who helped them running into a hardened killer and dope peddler Robert Hutton and his strung out girlfriend Carol Ohmart. Hutton robbed and killed a drug mule in Mexico took his supply of heroin and smuggled it back across the border before the cops on both sides caught on.Arthur and Brooks are basically decent kids, but Rowland is a punk and learns too late he's playing way out of his league.Wild/Naked Youth was shot on a chump change budget in the Southwest and no one covered themselves in any glory here.

The film could have been so much better than it ultimately turned out to be, and I blame the director for that. He had some fairly good actors to work with, he just didn't know what to do with them.For instance, Steve Rowland did much better acting in his other film roles, yet he's wooden throughout most of this one. I would have had him act much more sinister, instead of performing the pretty-boy, James Dean type role. He should have come across as a worthless scumbag kid, yet he doesn't even appear to be a smoker, a doper, or a drinker. In this movie he's simply a poster boy, complete with the tight t-shirt and windbreaker, open to his navel.Spoilers ahead....Our gangster character fares much better in his role. You believe he's self-centered and sadistic. His moll gives a good performance, though having her kill her lover seemed out-of-character, and what made him think he could take out the armed cop with a thrown knife??? I would have had the kid and the gangster kill one another in the end, but then I wasn't the director.You gotta love the homo-erotic final scene as the camera slowly pans over the body of the gut-stabbed, late-twenties teenager (Rowland)! What a classic! If you don't expect too much from this film you might like it. I liked it, despite it's flaws. It's a hoot!

"Naked Youth" generates a modicum of suspense as it intertwines two stories about criminals on the lam in the dusty southwestern United States. First, a couple of youths at a State Honor Farm--Switch (Steve Rowland)and Frankie (Robert Arthur)decide to escape and rendezvous with Frankie's cute girlfriend who has a car waiting for them nearby under a bridge to make their getaway. Second, Rivas (John Goddard) is a drug smuggler in suit and tie who kills a Mexican dope buyer with a knife at a deserted bullfighting arena and then flees Mexico with his own girlfriend Madge (Carol Ohmart)carrying a doll packed with smack in the nick of time before the authorities lock down the border. Meanwhile, tension between Switch--he wields a switchblade but appears to be all gab and no guts--and Frankie develop over his girlfriend. This tension grows after their getaway car overheats and forces them to walk the rest of the way on foot in the hot, arid desert. Goddard and his girlfriend pick them up in their station wagon so that they will look like one big happy family and fool the cops. Goddard spots a roadblock, loses his nerve, and swerves off onto a back road. Eventually, the kids and he tangle. Frankie slugs him from behind, and they rip out the distributor cap from their car and force the adults afoot, too. It seems that Switch--nicknamed for his reliance on an illegal switchblade knife--and Rivas are both edgy about blade fanatics. The chief difference is that Rivas is ready, willing, and able to stab at the least provocation. Robert Hutton, once a popular character actor in Warner Brothers' World War II movies such as "Destination Tokyo" and "Hollywood Canteen," plays a Federal agent named Maddo who tails these reprobates. This low budget juvenile delinquent/narcotics exploitation drive-in feature maintains a fast enough with okay performances and authentic on-the-road realism. Nothing in the way of memorable lines of dialogue make up for their predictable shennagians, but none of it is idiotic either. In fact, "Naked Youth" doesn't qualify as one of those "so bad it's good" thrillers with hundreds of gaffes. This represented director John F. Schreyer's only directorial outing; he was better known for editing westerns and war movies, such as "Hostile Guns," "More Dead Than Alive," and "Ambush Bay." Nevertheless, he knows when to cut back and forth between the pursued and the pursuers. You can tell that the Production Code Administration was still enforcing some of its self-censorship rules because when Carol Ohmart injects herself with heroin in the forearm, we get to see the reaction shots of those watching her shoot up. Ironically, Ohmart's character is the most sympathetic of the bunch. She guns down her dastardly boyfriend rather than see him murder a Maddo. The worst thing about this exploitation meller is that the music is a blatant rip-off of Elmer Bernstein's "The Man With The Golden Arm" and Bernard Herrman's "Vertigo." Otherwise, "Naked Youth," which boasts neither nude scenes nor sex scenes to speak of and refrains from preaching its crime does not pay message, is passable.

The most startling thing about Schreyer's drugs-on-the-run piece is the brazen 'lifting' of Elmer Bernstein's striking Frankie Machine title music, almost unchanged from 'The Man With The Golden Arm', as well as a recognisable chunk of Herrman's 'Vertigo' music .. such borrowings give this film a suggestion of artistry which it completely fails to justify.In fact it is all very humdrum stuff, neither too wild or much naked either, come to that (and the 'youths' are getting on a bit as well). The most recognisable face in this rather tedious piece is Robert Hutton, who plays the unperturbable and cop. Of course it is he who buys the Mexican dolls into which the heroin is secreted, and then transported across the border, so poetic justice demands that it is he who has to find it again. Hutton was better used in such cult films as 'The Slime People' (1962), 'Colossus of New York' (1958) and a handful of others. Here he just looks vaguely engaged.As Switch the knife happy thug on the run from the Honor Farm,(in a film in which, oddly, knives are the weapon of choice - even when a gun is around) Rowland is serviceable enough, although he could have made his performance more menacing. As it is, Switch veers uncertainly between aggression, indecisiveness and whining.The best scene? Madge's swaying vision as her withdrawl sets in, done to Herrmann-'inspired' music. But even she's seen better days in William Castle's great 'House on Haunted Hill' (1958) or Hill's crazy 'Spider Baby' (1964).A film mostly of interest for completists or those fanatical about this part of exploitation history.