HIGH SCHOOL BIG SHOT (1959) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Joel Rapp
Tom Pittman, Virginia Aldridge, Howard Veit,
Malcolm Atterbury, Stanley Adams, Byron Foulger
A smart but impoverished high-school kid, the only one in his class who digs Shakespeare, engineers a heist that could net $1 million and (he thinks) solve all of his problems. Considering its title and the fact that it once showed up on MST3K, this is a better movie than you might expect, or at least a more interesting one: a juvenile film noir with a teen protagonist and a teen femme fatale. Tom Pittman, who plays the lead, has real presence and an instinct for understatement that make you wonder where his career might've gone if he hadn't died in a car crash before the movie's release. Malcolm Atterbury, who plays the kid's troubled dad, would get a moment of immortality that same year, as the man at the prairie crossing in "North By Northwest" who spots the crop-duster and observes that it's dusting crops where there ain't no crops.
