John Frankenhimer made his feature film debut in 1957 with "The Young Stranger" after which he returned to television for four years before coming back with "The Young Savages", another film about teenage delinquency only this time the delinquents were the 'savages' of the title, seen knifing a blind Puerto Rican boy to death in the film's opening scene. Burt Lancaster is the prosecutor whose job it is to send the killers to the electric chair despite the fact that the mother, (Shelly Winters), of one of the killers used to be his girlfriend.
It's a melodramatic story told melodramatically and unconvincingly and despite some excellent location work it's hard to believe this came from the same man who made "The Manchurian Candidate", "Birdman of Alcatraz" and "Seconds". Capital Punishment and racism are the films big themes but while Frankenhimer's heart may have been in the right place he really couldn't do very much with the material as presented. Watchable but far from memorable.
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