Too Soon to Love (1960)

Director: Richard Rush
Writers: Laszlo Gorog and Richard Rush
Stars: Jennifer West and Richard Evans

Index: The First Thirty.

Jack Nicholson doesn’t have much of a part to play in Too Soon to Love, here and gone again in a few short scenes at a drive-in theatre. The rest of the cast are nobodies, as indeed he was at the time, though a couple of the supporting adult characters went on to parts of note.

The director is the other big name, though he was debuting here. Richard Rush went on to direct The Stunt Man, Freebie and the Bean and a couple of other Nicholson pictures, Psych-Out and Hell’s Angels on Wheels. He co-wrote it with László Görög, who had penned The Mole People and Earth vs. The Spider, hardly nuanced fare.

It would be easy to automatically write this off, but that would be unfair, because it turns out to be a surprisingly effective drama that persists in going further than I expected it to. I don’t know how many times I said “Damn!” during the second but it had to be quite a lot.

The two stars are Jennifer West and Richard Evans and they play a couple of believable kids who fall hard for each other and end up in the inevitable sort of trouble. Neither of them was a particularly great actor, but that lends them an innocence that’s entirely right for a story this free and loose. It’s been called a new wave film and it certainly feels like one. Had it been French, we’d probably have heard of it. Both went on to a lot of supporting roles on TV but Evans shone in at least one other feature, the gritty 1972 Billy the Kid film, Dirty Little Billy.

We learn how naïve they are immediately. A whole bunch of kids hijack a tram for a joyride and hightail it out of there before the cops get there. They only catch Cathy Taylor, who’s too shy to move, and Jim Mills, who goes back to check on her. They’re lucky to find a lenient cop, given that they’re two hours after curfew and he knows she’ll be in trouble enough back home. She says that it’s the first time her mum and dad have let her go out on her own.

By kids here, I mean late teenagers, the pair of them still in school at seventeen. Evans was really twenty-five and Cathy twenty-one, so it isn’t easy for us to buy into them as teenagers but we do buy into them being young and in love. They’re both good kids, neither of them perfect but grounded and decent. I’d be happy to know both of them. One clever approach is to tell this very much from the point of view of these kids, not quite so overtly as, say, E.T., but deliberately enough nonetheless.

We’re never let in on who Jim’s parents are, which seems odd, his only adult relationships being with his drive-in boss and a barber by the name of Hughie Wineman, who sells him a car to impress his new girl. He’s Ralph Manza, who was the actor who played the actor who played Hitler in Blazing Saddles.

We do meet Cathy’s parents, however, and we soon learn that her dad is an asshole. When we imagine the sort of conservatives who ache for society to revert back to the fifties, he’s the sort of conservative we imagine and I felt for Cathy having to put up with him. He’s unable to acknowledge that she’s out of nappies, let alone interested in boys. When Jim and Cathy are found in lover’s lane by a zealous cop who takes them in and he has to come get her, he’s angry enough to slap Jim there in the station as he leaves. No wonder she wants to escape.

By that point, Nicholson has come and gone, in quite a flurry. He gets about three and a half minutes at the drive-in, because Cathy escapes with a couple of friends from school, hoping to see Jim there. Of course, he’s busy behind the counter until the movie starts, while Virginia and Irene aren’t waiting that long to get busy with boys. There are three of them and three boys arriving in Buddy’s car, meaning that it’s a heartbeat before Cathy’s stuck with Buddy in the back seat. Of course, he has precisely one thing on his mind and he forces two kisses out of her before Jim drags him out for a fight.

It’s not much of a part, even if it involves a comic relief moment, a dramatic scene and a fight. He certainly doesn’t get any opportunity to build the character, because that’s reserved for Cathy and Jim, but he does precisely what’s needed for the brief time that he has.

The pivotal moment for the film follows, as the pair of them drive down to the coast and it’s heavily implied that Cathy allows Jim to go all the way. Of course, we’re not kept in doubt for much longer because she soon turns out to be pregnant and all the carefree scenes with a young couple shouting their love to an empty stadium are over. It’s time to pay the piper.

And, as enjoyable as the early scenes are, in their melodramatic teenage way, this is when things get serious and the script gains teeth.

There are very good scenes of tension while they try to figure out what to do. How do they get a test? How long do they have to wait for a result? What about an abortion?

The first gem of a scene may be the one that has Jim completely fail to acknowledge any of what a teacher’s telling him about college, as he waits instead for Cathy to call for her result in a public phone box.

For a while, these gems just keep on coming. Hughie sends Jim to Mrs. Jefferson, who makes illegal abortions happen. She’s Billie Bird, the grandma from Sixteen Candles, and she has an agreeably seedy outlook. Suddenly, our young couple find themselves in a back alley. They start up the stairs but there’s another young couple coming down after their operation and she’s so shellshocked that Cathy simply can’t go through with it. It’s a haunting scene.

I won’t spoil all of these scenes because they are well worth experiencing. Every time I had the level pegged, it went a step beyond. What seems painfully obvious now, in America after the abolition of Roe v. Wade, is how little help, or even information, there was available back in the fifties. Cathy and Jim are just lost.

Every adult is there to judge, except Jim’s barber friend, and that includes a doctor, who is cynical enough to create a legal loophole for five hundred bucks. The message is that girls shouldn’t get pregnant because, if they do, it’s too late for any realistic option.

This was a teen exploitation film in 1960, a surprisingly powerful one given a low budget, inexperienced cast and melodramatic script. However, it feels as much a cautionary tale for us in 2025, soon after a pivotal election, as it was back for horny teens back in 1960, merely for different reasons.

On the face of it, Too Soon for Love is merely a curiosity for Jack Nicholson fans, but it’s really a surprisingly effective film better seen on its own merits.