The Cool and the Crazy

The Cool and the Crazy is a 1958 motion picture that was distributed by AmericanInternational Pictures as a double feature with Dragstrip Riot.

After the success of The Delinquents, Rhoden Jr. put up about 170,000 for a second film in Kansas City. Rhoden Jr. began with thinking up a title and nothing else The Cool and the Crazy and, because Altman was directing television shows in Hollywood, Rhoden Jr. hired Kansas City writer and a friend of Altmans Richard C. Sarafian to write the screenplay for the film.The Cool and the Crazy tells the story of Ben Saul, a reform school graduate who is transferred to a Kansas City high school. There, Bens clowning in class ticks off the local gang of tough guys, but he soon wins all of their admiration when he begins buying them beer, taking them to dances, giving them kicks, and then finally turning them on to marijuana. Ben is working as a frontman for a local marijuana ring, but the local police detective is hot on his trail. When a marijuanacrazed addict teenager whom Ben has sold the drug to dies trying to hold up a filling station for drug money, the police question him and events begin to spiral out of Bens control. In the dramatic or melodramatic finale, Ben ends up killing the pusher for more marijuana only to find that there is none, and gets his just deserts in a fiery car wreck. Then there is an obligatory moralizing segment, where a policeman screams at the surviving addicts, Is this what you call kicks? Sooner or later, if you dont wise up youre all gonna wind up like this, one way or the other. ........

Source: Wikipedia