Damaged Lives

Lyman Williams is engaged to Diane Sinclair, but it's to be a June wedding, so he goes home with Charlotte Merriam and goes offstage behind a closed door, leaving his jacket on top of her wrap. Now that he's a man, he's not interested in Contract Bridge, so he and Miss Sinclair elope. However, when Doctor Jason Robards Sr. summons him to Doctor Murray Kinnel's clinic, he gets a freak show of people suffering from.... an infectious disease. It will be two years' worth of treatment for Williams and the missus, but the baby will be all right, because that's what happens when you leave your jacket on a woman's wrap. Men Beware!

It's Edgar G. Ulmer's first film as director (not counting being one of several of PEOPLE ON SUNDAY). Up to then, hs day job had been set designer for people like Max Reinhardt and Cecil B. Demille, and the set design on this movie is great. When it comes to dialogue, it's somewhere between coyly banal and puerile, and the acting.... well Robards is good, but I don't know how he wound up being in this movie.

It's an exploitation movie that tries desperately to have it both ways: cover a worrisome public health issue like gonorrhea and syphilis before the Production Code clamps down, but not show or say anything that could upset anyone. The result is a stupid and annoying movie.