Arthur Bartley and Janet Willard are fresh-faced teens in 1950s America. Arthur shoots the breeze with his friend Ernie drinking, smoking, and playing poker. Janet enters their basement hideout. Ernie forges a permission slip for her. Arthur and Janet start a relationship which culminates to a desperate need for an abortion.

There are limitations for its time. There is no way to show the sexual encounter and the word abortion is never mentioned. It's already pushing the envelop to touch upon the subject matter. It is exactly what one expects from a 50's movie dealing with teen sex and abortion. The movie has one major change from the play that speaks to the public sensitivity. As a movie, it is very much a 50's movie. It is old fashion melodrama. The young actors are all capable. The two leads are very young and fresh-faced. It's like a better made PSA movie. That's giving it short shrift. It's better than that. There is real tension in the drama. The most compelling section is Arthur trying to tell his parents. The ending is the safer choice which is as much as can be expected for its time. While the attempt is commendable, it cannot escape the melodramatic style and the moral restrictions.

Coming out the same year as the much more scandalous (and colorful) "A Summer Place", this adoption of a successful Broadway play takes a while to build up. It features sincere performances by Brandon DeWilde and Carol Lynley as basically nice teenagers who sleep together and decide to have the big "A". That word isn't even uttered in the 90 minutes running time, only insinuated when DeWilde asks friend Warren Berlinger the name of a doctor who perform such procedures. There's a lot of discussion over the moral responsibility and the fact that they are too young, and when they do try to get a marriage license, they are treated with disrespect not only by the license bureau employees but adults waiting to get licenses as well.

Veteran actors MacDonald Carey and Marsha Hunt play DeWilde's parents, struggling with their own days of their lives and an engaged daughter who fortunately doesn't go through the same ordeal. It's like "Father of the Bride" finds out that he's going to be a grandfather from one of the two sons, but here, when he tries to get help from his parents, he's treated like a child and not taken seriously.

It's obvious in the late 1950's that even with the code still in effect, Hollywood was trying to get past it in dealing with certain themes that society was dealing with and couldn't properly discuss without facing the wrath by the Catholic legion of decency. This film is obviously well-intentioned, but shows that the generation gap was really responsible for creating more problems than teams were finding as they grew up both physically and emotionally. This is not exploitive like other teen dramas, but doesn't have the lushness of the more popular and well remembered Sandra Dee / Troy Donahue film.

Arthur Bartley and Janet Willard are fairly typical 1950s teenagers. Their lives are turned upside down however when Janet becomes pregnant. Desperate to tell his parents of the predicament they find themselves in, Arthur finds that he cannot do so.

These sort of films are fun. Today (2017) it would be very realistic, not at all a fun movie. In the 1930s, it would be all fun and not at all realistic, using crazy scare tactics. But the 1950s had a bit of a middle ground. You could not be so blatant about things, and yet you still wanted to be serious... so you get this half-baked middle ground.

On some level, though, you have to admire them for even making the film (despite changing certain elements to make it pass the censors). We are often lead to believe that the 1950s was a decade of family values, and surely people were not getting their high school girlfriends pregnant -- and there is no way abortion existed. But, of course, these things did exist. (Often if you do a little basic math, you will notice how common it was for babies to be born less than nine months after a wedding in those days.)