Upon its release, numerous parallels were drawn by almost every critic and filmgoer to the Nazi rise to power in Germany with many citizens passively allowing the brutality to escalate around them. However, the film is actually a faithful adaptation of the 1906 novel The Confusions of Young Törless by Austrian writer Robert Musil, who is best known for his epic, unfinished three-book volume, The Man without Qualities. The universality of its story becomes quite chilling in this context as it can also be seen to apply to many other atrocities throughout history both past and present.
In his essay about the film for Janus Films, Timothy Corrigan draws a comparison between this film and some of the other boarding school dramas in film, a setting essentially abandoned in films today: "Like other films with similar boarding-school plots, such as Jean Vigo's Zéro de Conduite (1933) and Lindsay Anderson's if.... (1968), Young Törless investigates the social rituals that shape and repress adolescents in a rite-of-passage drama. But unlike those other two films, there is no rebellion against the institution in this German drama but instead a frighteningly stoic withdrawal." This approach proved to be quite well received in Germany where the film won three German Film Awards in 1966, with Schlöndorff also netting the FIPRESCI Prize that same year at the Cannes Film Festival (where it was only the second German feature to play in competition).
Cast in the crucial role of Törless was the young German-born actor Mathieu Carrière, whose fluency in both German and French led to a very productive acting career. This was only his second film, and his performance proved impressive enough to keep him in demand for decades with major roles in Malpertuis (1971), Eric Rohmer's The Aviator's Wife (1981), Alain Corneau's Police Python 357 (1976), and a pair of Roger Vadim films, Don Juan (Or If Don Juan Were a Woman) (1973) and Charlotte (1974). In the supporting cast, perhaps the most surprising name is the actress playing Bozena: Barbara Steele, the English-born star of several pivotal Italian gothic horror films like Black Sunday (1960) and Castle of Blood (1964), who also appeared in 8 ½ (1963) and Louis Malle's Pretty Baby (1978) among many others.
The 1966 opening of the film in Paris was a significant cinematic sensation with The New York Times offering a transatlantic review calling it "the best film to have arrived from any quarter in a long while... To the thoughtful spectator it offers much, recreating a vanished civilization and its codes and presenting a fascinating dramatic conflict. It is beautifully acted and its direction, intelligent and firm, extracts from a difficult subject an inkling of tragic destiny."
However, it wasn't until August of 1968 that American audiences were really afforded a chance to see it in theaters when Kanawha Films Ltd. released it, sometimes under the title You Are a Man, My Boy for territories where the title might be difficult to pronounce. Oddly enough, their sensationalist ads relied on a Time quote calling the film "an orgy of cruelty... Perfect and perfectly chilling," promising a somewhat different experience than what the film itself actually delivers. More apropos was this assessment from Variety: "This is both artistically and technically a well-made film and certainly a very impressive directorial debut... Film also shows how physical superiority and respective arrogance can lead to sadism and brutality." Sadly, that demonstration remains all too relevant today.
By Nathaniel Thompson
