HE’S SICK OF MEAN SCREEN TEENS

I could be wrong, but I don’t think movies were nearly as nasty before Hollywood discovered it could reap profit from the socially ambivalent behavior of teen-agers, something most civilized societies keep hidden from view in hopes conditions will improve.

Once the studio moguls, baby and otherwise, realized young people will stand in line for hours to see themselves made foolish on screen, it was only natural to extend this masochistic pleasure to older audiences.

I hope to grow older gracefully without ever again spending negotiable currency, foreign or domestic, on films screened beyond a marquee with names like Ally, Kevin, Judd or any girl’s name with an i where a y should be.

Just to be safe, I have also eliminated all movies about sports and physical afflictions, anything with a sound-track album that record stores care to mention in their advertisements, and horror films at camp, a sorority house or in commemoration of any holiday except Whitsunday--and only that in odd-numbered years.

Finally, I avoid all motion pictures whose writers, producers or directors have ever dined in Beverly Hills to discuss what “the kids are looking for these days.” Such mischief-makers are easily identified by cross-checking restaurant reservations with current readers of Rolling Stone and Marvel Comics.

Understand, I have nothing against real teen-agers; it’s the mean-spirited ones invented in films I despise. They’re just plain nastier than necessary. Their ultimate solution to any problem seems to involve some form of throwing food, drilling holes in girls’ restrooms, flatulence and wrecking cars.

As a teen-ager in the ‘50s, I could understand rebellion. James Dean and Marlon Brando were my kind of guys, mumbling anthems of youthful resentments. Up against dad’s wrath, I found it safer to mumble, too. Still, properly inspired, I spent a lot of time in detention hall in high school, combing my duck tail and adjusting my leather jacket.

But we teens were never nasty like the whiners in “The Breakfast Club,” forced to stay at school overtime--according to the script--because their parents were less than perfect. Like any self-respecting juvenile delinquent of that age, I was quite capable of getting into trouble on my own.

As the heroines always discovered, Jimmy and Marlon were really nice guys beneath their anti-social exteriors; so were we, though the girls were less inclined to care. We attached cardboard noisemakers to the spokes of our bicycles and roared down the road on imaginary Harleys, maybe thinking it might be fun to terrify just one tiny little town of adults before admitting we were sorry for the whole thing.

But it never occurred to us to swipe one of our father’s Ferraris to take a day off with Ferris Bueller, thumbing our noses at the common folks. None of our fathers owned a Ferrari. (Bobby Tom’s dad did buy a new pickup once and we considered sitting in the back without permission. But you couldn’t get much teen-age appeal out of that today without throwing in a mattress and a girl taking off her top to protest mother’s disinterest in training bras when she was 4.)

I’ve never admitted this before, but I was uneasy in the ‘60s watching a reasonably contemporary Dustin Hoffman make such a fool of himself in “The Graduate.” Given the context, it wasn’t so terrible that he disrupted the wedding and upset Mrs. Robinson. But I had a feeling this would encourage other young clods and I was right. In the years since, the ultimate plot solution in films of so-called youth appeal has been to trash whatever the elders thought important enough to pay for . . . to poke fun and in effect put down what many of us value.

Leaving aside Huntz Hall and the Bowery Boys, the admirable thing about the pre-Vietnam generation is we can take younger people to the video store and prove how wonderful and sensible we were at their age, as evident by the movies that were then popular.

“The Thing,” for example, was a well-behaved monster. In keeping with today’s issue-oriented audiences, we were far more concerned that he killed one sled dog than 10 arctic scientists.

Still, we knew he was but an alien trapped out of time and there was no need for Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd to show up to distract us with one-liners and a scene about how cheating on exams is OK if you’re funny.

We and the accountants at Paramount Pictures were thrilled at the idea that Elvis Presley’s mountain-grown charm could disarm villains not prepared for the wink and wiggle that would soon undo their dastardly plots. And Elvis got the girl to boot, a perfectly beautiful lass who never once wondered if she could cancel her Ms. magazine subscription without dishonoring mother, who had been a comptometer operator (anyone old enough to know that a comptometer was an adding machine is too old to relate to today’s teen-age films) for a hateful boss.

My favorite of all, though, was little Patty McCormack in “The Bad Seed.” Dressed in starched white, she was everybody’s idea of a perfect daughter, a pride for her mother and nice to all the neighbors except for the dipso mom whose son she happened to murder.

Though given to temper tantrums, Patty was never rude or unruly, even when setting the handyman on fire. And at the end, she went off the pier with nary an unkind word for her upbringing, the PTA, driving school, sexual preferences in Mexico or the President of the United States. For a kid, Patty had class, something that’s sorely missing in the nasty movies now on the screens.

Better than that, she had good manners.