The Strange Ones (1963) belongs to an
evergreen genre of classroom movie, the stranger-danger picture, in
which kids are taught tips for avoiding kidnappers and molesters.
Many films and videos have been made on this theme over the years,
some of them unintentionally
funny in dark, weird ways. But The Strange Ones stands
out.
That’s partly because of the sheer nightmarishness of it: the
shadows, the creepy music, the narrator who constantly wanders into
horror-movie territory. “Most people in the world are good and
nice, but unfortunately, there are some strange ones,” she tells
us. And: “You never know when there might be a Strange One around.”
And: “Even if this little boy had seen the man, how could he know
that he was a Strange One? There’s no way to tell. The Strange Ones
look just like everyone else.”
Yet watching this in 2014, that atmosphere of dread seems to
have settled in a world where people are remarkably level-headed
about
the risks families face. There’s no need here for someone like
Lenore
Skenazy and her Free-Range Kids movement: It’s
taken for granted that boys and girls will run errands for
their parents, walk home from school on their own, go to the park
or the movies without an adult, and play unsupervised in public.
Even when the narrator suggests that children should not go
someplace on their own, she doesn’t say they should stay close to a
grown-up; she tells them to “take along a friend.”
They’re also told they shouldn’t hitch-hike. This advice is
offered as we watch footage of a young boy thumbing a ride.
Evidently, half a century ago it was sufficiently common for
pre-adolescents to hitch-hike that someone felt the need to make a
movie telling them to stop.
The Strange Ones was directed by Sid Davis, a stuntman
turned classroom-film auteur whose movies have attracted a small
cult following. (His most infamous effort is probably Boys
Beware, on the threat purportedly posed by lurking
homosexuals.) After he died in 2006, I wrote that
he
occupies a gray area in mid-twentieth-century America.
On the one hand, he was an independent filmmaker with his own
vision, shooting ultra-low-budget pictures with few constraints. As
[film historian Ken] Smith wrote, “Society’s discomfort with
Davis’s dark world gave him the freedom to do pretty much what he
wanted. No committee of educational advisors oversaw his work, no
peer group condemned his excesses.” But it was educators who bought
his movies, and it was schoolchildren who watched them; his films
were frequently narrated by government officials or other authority
figures, and they weren’t averse to speaking the psychiatric
language of the time. Davis might not have been a part of the
social-engineering community, but he certainly was part of the
social-engineering complex. There’s a complicated relationship
between the supposedly scientific interventions of credentialed
experts and the more nakedly paranoid world of grassroots moral
panics. Sid Davis was a bridge from one to the other.
Bonus link: A few years after The Strange
Ones came out, Davis released a quasi-remake—the
soundtrack is the same, but the old black-and-white images have
been replaced by new color footage. Comparing the two will give you
a quick lesson in the evolution of American fashion, architecture,
and automobiles.
(For past installments of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)
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