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Sal Mineo was one of a brace of young actors to come up in the late 1950s -- some of the others were Michael Landon, Dennis Hopper, Corey Allen, Tommy Cook, Gary Clarke, Paul Carr, Nick Adams, Robert Vaughn, and Robert Blake -- as seeming successors to Marlon Brando and, even more immediately, James Dean, as the screen embodiment of restless, troubled youth. Ironically, in Mineo's case, his actual background was closer to that of John Garfield, in that he was the real article, a kid who came very close to spending his life on the wrong side of the law, and was rescued by acting. And Alfred L. Werker's The Young Don't Cry was one of a pair of delinquency dramas starring Mineo that were released in 1957 -- the other was Tommy Carr's Dino. Both are good movies, with strong acting, but The Young Don't Cry is the better of the two for sheer ambition, to which it lives up -- shot on location in rural Georgia, it gets closer to reality than most Hollywood movies, and the performances have a gritty impact that makes one shudder at some of the violence, and the violence of the emotions at work. J. Carroll Naish, for one, as a sadistic and relentless warden, delves into scary method acting territory, at least in the intensity of his work, while Mineo and James Whitmore, as an ultimately irredeemable convict, light up the screen with their scenes. Some of The Young Don't Cry does seem arch and artificial today, but enough of what is here works beyond any reasonable expectations, that it carries all of it successfully. This was also the final film of director Alfred L. Werker, who died in July of 1957, and who had enjoyed a very uneven career across 30 years -- but he went out a winner on this one.