Mannequins für Rio

This was presented to me as a film noir. It is not. It's an international cast in a flimsily plotted low-budget melodrama.

Raymond Burr is an icon of the second half of the last century because of his work in "Perry Mason." We noir fanatics know him also to have done some excellent work on the other side of the law in movies. If this was the direction his film career was going, "Perry Mason" kept him from ending up in Doris Wishman flicks.

The plot is a hodgepodge about prostitution and white slavery in Brazil. The German actress who gets top billing is attractive. Scott Brady is in it, too. He plays a good guy.

At first I thought this was my imagination. Then I noticed it with more than Ms. Matz and Brady: The actors often seem to be holding back laughter. They have constant half-smiles.

It's not so bad it's good, though. It isn't offensive. It simply offends the upstanding name of film noir.

...or whenever. By which I mean it's mediocre but enjoyable if you aren't too demanding. Some reviewers were apparently hoping for something better and were disappointed, but after reading their reviews I knew not to expect too much. That said, the plot is reasonable, Scott Brady is as good as he pretty much always was, Johanna Matz is very believable if not outstanding and the rest of the cast does what they need to do in order for this to be a mildly fun little adventure. The sets were better than one often sees in this sort of 'B' grade flick and there were only two or three sequences when I thought it dragged a bit. I'd give it a 5.5 if that was possible, but I couldn't quite give it a 6.

The so-called future models are trained in Paris, which is not a coincidence: white slave trade was more often the subject of a movie in France ,in the thirties and mainly in the fifties; in 1936, film noir past master Robert Siodmak ,had already broached the topic with "le chemin de Rio"

It could be subtitled "the perils of Pauline" , the heroine ,a naive German girl falls from the frying pan ( the house where the girls are here to satisfy the wealthy men's whims ) into the fire ( Raymond Burr ,a perfect villain ,in his desirable mansion with his favorite -whom he will ditch when he gets tired of her ) .

Her attentive escort (Scott Brady) is almost as naive as her : in the first half of the movie, he's subject to gaffes -entrusting his protégée to the white slave big boss by no means the least- and as a mining engineer ,he's rather gullible .

The story is action-packed, full of sudden new developments ,with exotic settings and thus never boring.

They Were So Young (1954)

An early widescreen movie. It's low budget (showing how mainstream the format had become this first full year of its use), but has some terrific scenes and a fun twist of a plot about a scheme to trap young European girls into a modeling gig in Rio that turns into a kind of prostitution slave-girl trade.

The big star is Raymond Burr, who is excellent in his brief appearances, but the main man is a likable Scott Brady, who is an archetypal nice guy American who sees trouble in this foreign land and saves the damsels who would otherwise perish. It's an odd twist that the bad guys in Brazil are actually American, too (Burr), but that's probably good, not to typecast the South Americans as the bad guys.

Director Kurt Neumann is famous for the idiosyncratic and important original version of "The Fly" as well as the notoriously awful "She-Demon." The long list of his films includes a lot of dregs, including a series of half-length movies (called streamliners) that were super low budget fillers. But because of all this work he was an experienced pro by 1954, and adapted to the wide screen exotic scenario here pretty well. The story, however streamlined itself, is a believable and frightening one. If the outcome is too predictable, that's true with half of Hollywood, so just go for the ride.

They Were So Young (aka: Violated, aka: Party Girls For Sale) is an exotic and entertaining late film noir (broadly speaking), set in Brazil, produced in Germany, and featuring second-tier American stars Scott Brady and Raymond Burr. Apparently American pictures were so popular abroad in the 1950's, a couple of Hollywood players at the top of the bill, even lesser lights like Brady and Burr) would ensure better box office both over there and over here. In the English-dubbed version it's obvious only the two American actors are actually speaking English, and were no doubt dubbed over in the original German. Not that you ever forget this is a German production! Most of the characters have Portuguese sounding names but look about as Brazilian as sauerkraut. Michael Jary's full-bodied score sounds like Wagner frolicking about South America. But it works for the best, as all the villains except for Burr are played by Germans such as Gert Forbe. And those Teutonic types -- let's face it, they're not good at anything if not good at sinister! A kinky middle-age dame with the mouth-full handle of Gisela Fackeldey plays a menacing madam in charge of the exploited models to which the title refers. If she had still been in the pink in the 1970's, she would have been the perfect cruel women's SS camp commandant in that shabby species of exploitation films.

This movie teaches two basic morals. Numer one, some guys are turned on by getting crowned on the head with a water decanter. You will have to watch the picture to discover how that one works. Number two is stated in the above summary. Watch out for newspaper ads that promise too much! That's how a covey of pretty and shapely young models are lured to Rio De Janeiro, supposedly to model high-class duds, but in reality to become high-class call girls. Nasty things happen to those unfortunate lasses who try to back out. Our heroine, very comely Johanna Matz, is more determined than most. She enlists the aid of good guy Brady, a mining engineer in Rio looking for a good time. Follows an action-filled, suspenseful and atmospheric adventure in jungle roads, rivers, and villas. Particularly atmospheric and exciting are the climactic scenes on board and around a broken-down tub of a river boat, which is actually a sleazy floating bordello.

Too much ink has been vainly spilled over whether this picture, or various others, qualifies as a film noir. A noir picture does not have to have starkly shadowed and obliquely angled cinematography, or a femme fa-tale, or a morally ambiguous protagonist, though all of these elements are frequently seen. A dark, seamy story will do. But then the more discerning cinema critics confess that "noir" is not actually a genre but more of a style or better yet a mood. It springs from the dark, doom-laden, uncertain, bitter-sweet, dream-like -- even nightmarish -- ambiance of the 1940's. In that decade almost every Hollywood picture produced reflects at least a touch of that mood, even the Westerns. It bleeds into the early 1950's, but it was fading by the time of They Were So Young. Though the term "film noir" was hardly even known to movie makers or audiences of the time, who knew these pictures simply a "melodramas" or "thrillers", it may well be that film-makers in Europe at least, such as They Were So Young's producer/director Kurt Neuman were self-consciously attempting to capture the mood.

They Were So Young captures enough of the noir mood and has enough of the traditional noir elements that it can't be said VCI Entertainment misrepresents the case including the picture in its nicely restored "Forgotten Noir Double Feature" DVD. Attractive lead players, stalwart villainy, atmospheric, suspenseful and entertaining. Better than many of the similar Hollywood efforts of the time, I regret to say.