A Film Canon

A precursor to the 'teen angst' film, Kings Row explicates that genre as a melodramatic combination of family saga, neighbourhood drama, comedy and horror. Structured around two acts of violence - one merciful, one malicious, but both committed by parents, and sanctioned by a parental generation - it identifies adolescence with (nostalgic) adulthood, adulthood with (blissful) dementia, and early childhood with the pinnacle of life - both personally and historically - as evinced in the reflection that, for all their lack of technological and social advancements, the Middle Ages were at least simpler than the cusp of the twentieth century, if only because they hadn't yet conceptualised adolescence. As this might suggest, Casey Robinson's script suffers from precisely the excessive discursion that characterises adolescence, to the extent that one of the characters is forced to reiterate that "There's no one listening but me", to soften the blow of a speech aimed directly at the audience. This, in turn, leads to a series of fairly one-dimensional leads (Ann Sheridan, Robert Cummings, Betty Field, Ronald Reagan), while the secondary cast (Claude Rains, Judith Anderson, Charles Coburn) are only charismatic by virtue of their relative distance from the script, and proportionate ability to invoke other, more memorable performances. The result is a narrative stripped of any ingenuity, replacing breadth with confusion, and tension with the laboured development of two secrets, as if the burgeoning field of psychoanalysis, against which the narrative unfolds, were the true parental culprit: "Why do any of us have to cry, you or me? What have we done?...I hate it - I hate everything!"