Dance, Little Children

Dance, Little Children (1961)

** (out of 4)

Another educational picture from director Herk Harvey who is best remembered today for the cult classic CARNIVAL OF SOULS. The story here is pretty simple as poor, average looking Lynn is excited that the rich, good looking Hal has asked her out to a dance. Feeling she has to give in to whatever he wants, Lynn decides to sleep with him on the first date. Her low self-esteem takes another hit when it turns out that Hal was with a hooker a few weeks earlier, picked up a venereal disease and has now passed it on. At 25-minutes this film is way too long but I'll give the director a little credit for at least making it look professional. Yes, the film is still cheaply produced but it's certainly much better than your average educational picture out there. The biggest problem is that the film is simply way too long with the message just getting beat to death as we get one speech after another. The film goes into a lot of details for young viewers who watched this back in the day and it makes sure to let you know that anyone can catch these diseases no matter how rich or poor they are. The performances are about what you'd expect from this type of film. Overall, this is certainly well-made but more times than not people are going to want badly-made but entertaining films and this here doesn't reach that level.

This was yet another social conscious documentary from Centron, directed by Herk Harvey who gave us Carnival of Souls. In this outing, children and young adults are warned about the dangers of venereal disease. The acting is OK, with Herk playing an insensitive father of a teen boy. There's a very funny scene in a doctor's office where our heroine has just left. She had a rash and the doctor left alone has an internal argument with himself on whether it could have been sex related. I can't help thinking that with a little more guts, it could have been truly scary to kids rather than coming off as a Dragnet episode. The film is included as part of the supplementary material on the Something Wierd Video title Teenage Gang Debs/Teenage Strangler Drive-in Double Feature.

This film covers a doctor investigating an outbreak of syphilis locally. It looks a lot like a police procedural, and the constant, gloomy, serious voice-over narration gives it a feeling like an episode of DRAGNET: it's almost funny.

While we get to see the youths who are getting the dread disease, there's a lot of it with parents' reactions: incredulous, threatening, even proud that little Hermy has the gumption to get himself some. There are also threats about the doctor sharing information to get the outbreak under control. It's a pity that the handling makes it, at times, comical. Too bad.

This film will have very limited appeal to the general public but those interested in public health or STDs may enjoy seeing how public health activities were conducted 40 years ago. As a retired trainer of Disease intervention specialists I recommend this to all my trainees.

Dance, Little Children(1961) was one of the films that I viewed in Personal and Community Health at Monmouth College, now Monmouth University (New Jersey). It was very helpful in warning of the dangers of venereal disease. AIDS was then unknown, but syphilis and gonorrhea WERE prevalent. Many dopes assumed that those were okay diseases because they respond to penicillin. FLUSH THAT! There is NO SUCH THING AS AN OKAY DISEASE! Penicillin itself is all very well for me, as I am not allergic, though I would be better off having penicillin TABLETS or injection in the ARM; I am terrified of injections in the BUTTOCKS because such a shot would impair ability to sit. The film was helpful, but will not do the job alone. Most important is to recognize that sex is God's gift to us, meant to be PARTNERSHIP between the sexes, NOT CONTROL AND DOMINATION! Promiscuity (which increases risk) is part of control-and-domination approach (NOT the way sex is meant to be),but the film showed that one can contract disease from someone CLOSE as well as from a stranger. All in all, a very he