Two years before producer Albert Zugsmith had Sex Kittens Go to College, he went undercover in High School Confidential! (Exclamation his.)
A juvenile-delinquent exposé of sorts, the film centers on snot-nosed transfer student/perennial senior Tony (Russ Tamblyn, Satan’s Sadists), who arrives at Santa Bellow High with a wad of cash and a roll of weed. As the faculty members get schooled on the ravages of marijuana addiction, Tony tries to claw his way to the top of the town pushers’ org chart, as well as into the pants of not-so-good girl Joan (Diane Jergens, Island of Lost Women), the main squeeze of BMOC J.I. (John Drew Barrymore, Death on the Fourposter). Ironically, the woman who really wants to bed Tony is his soused ’n’ sexy aunt (Mamie Van Doren, 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt), whose home apparently came prebuilt with its own wah-wah-wah soundtrack.
Helmed by Jack Arnold (The Incredible Shrinking Man), High School Confidential! is one of those teen pics in which all the students are played by actors at least a decade removed from the classroom. It’s also quite the time capsule, with an overuse of “crummy” (second only to the narration of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye) and slang weighing down every line of dialogue, e.g., “That’s the way the bongo bingles.”
In other words, I loved it! Both the Fast Times of its day and Reefer Madness if made by skilled craftsmen, the film is a now-alien world of crew cuts, Beat poets and race-ready jalopies. Tamblyn is delightfully smug; Van Doren is off-the-charts sexy; and the ace cast also includes Teenage Werewolf Michael Landon, Plan 9’s Lyle Talbot, The Little Shop of Horrors shopkeeper Mel Welles, Charlie Chaplin sidekick Jackie Coogan and Jerry Lee Lewis as himself, singing and playing the piano in the back of a moving pickup truck and probably hoping for a Junior High School Confidential! This one’s tops, chum. —Rod Lott