Val Lewton's Youth Runs Wild (1944)

You are seeing pretty nearly the only writing and acting and directing and photography in Hollywood which is at all concerned with what happens inside real and particular people among real and particular objects.
-- James Agee on Youth Runs Wild

Agee was writing when the film came out, during WWII,  Most movies at that time stressed the heroics of the soldiers and the important sacrifices made by the workers at home.  What Lewton stressed was the impact on the children whose parents were either away or at home fighting the war.  It is an intense psychological portrait of children on their own, trying to find excitement in a time of food and gasoline rationing.  Teenage boys steal tires to make enough money to buy their girlfriends presents while the girls take dubious jobs to buy clothes; there are no scenes in school, which is largely ignored.

Lewton was a master of the subtle horror film (I Walked With a Zombie, 1943, and The Cat People, 1942) and was usually allowed to do what he wanted, as long as the budgets were low and the grosses acceptable.  RKO was concerned, however, about Lewton applying his dark and baroque sensibility to a contemporary story and they not only re-cut the film, taking out the part where a boy kills his sadistic father, but added a fatuous ending where kids become well-behaved by using youth centers (too late for the three boys in the film who were sentenced to "forestry camp").  RKO refused to honor Lewton's request to have his name removed from the film.

Still, what remains are all the contradictions of small-town-life during the war, filmed in a neo-realist style (cinematography by John J. Mescall) with only a few shabby sets and Lewton's stock company of actors, including Jean Brooks and Kent Smith.  Generally I find the director the most important part of the creative team on a movie but Lewton was a producer who worked closely with his writers and directors to produce a vision of his own.  His best films had the best directors, particularly Jacques Tourneur, but Mark Robson, who directed Youth Runs Wild, did a creditable job with it and with Lewton's marvelously eerie The Seventh Victim (1943).