They Were So Young

I decided to give They Were So Young a try firstly because of the short run time and secondly because it had Raymond Burr. It started off badly enough but slowly, and ever so gradually it began to draw me in. Not sure exactly how it happened but it did. To its credit the whole thing does move along at a brisk pace and is tightly directed. The story is kind of interesting and it does manage to create some real suspense. A gently love story does develop but it isn't played to hard and keep it just a supporting element to the overall story. I became involved enough to the point that all of a sudden it was over. Slight but entertaining film worth checking out.

Ninety-percent of this film is a well-made, exciting white slavery melodrama about a German girl lured to Brazil for "modeling" work but trapped in a white slavery racket. She turns to an American engineer working in Rio (Scott Brady) who initially asks for help from a powerful Brazilian industrialist, Jaime Coltos (Raymond Burr), but soon suspects that Coltos is not exactly what he appears to be. That's all developed well and acted convincingly by Burr, Brady, and newcomer Johanna Matz. Then there is a frame story explained in a talky prologue about how Coltos almost led Southern Brazil to secede from the rest of the country and how Coltos, modeling himself after Jefferson Davis and Aaron Burr (!!!) was a brilliant strategist and almost a dictator. And at the end of the film, after the white slavery plot has been resolved and you think the film is over, we go back to the two characters in the frame story--a general and an American reporter--and we learn that Coltos was eventually found guilty of high treason and sentenced to hard labor for life. While Raymond Burr's character may be a crook and control a corrupt machine, there doesn't seem to be anything "political" about his actions in the film. I wonder if the frame story was added after the fact? And I wonder why? In any event, this little-known entry in the Raymond Burr filmography is worth seeking out. Coincidentally, it was one of the last releases of Lippert Pictures, the interesting low-budget company that was a kind of PRC of the late 40s and early 50s. Lippert always padded its release schedule with imported films, including a number of excellent UK and continental crime/mystery films, some featuring American stars, and as the studio wound down to its end, more and more foreign films appeared. My review has been of the US release of this film, entitled THEY WERE SO YOUNG (AND SO IN DANGER). Perhaps someone who has the original German language version could tell us if the frame story exists in the original, or if there were political elements in the main plot that were cut out for the American release.

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.

An American engineer helps a German girl escape the clutches of a white slavery ring in South America.

The movie's a peculiar production. The origin appears West German since the names in the credit crawl are German, while the cast, except for Brady, is also German. I guess the film was released here by Lindsley Parsons' low-budget outfit. All in all, the package seems odd since not many English-language films came from West Germany during this post-war period.

Anyway, the result plays like an exploitation movie with its tawdry subject-matter (notice all the euphemisms used for the taboo word "prostitute"), plus a suggestive title that, as I recall, was heavily promoted at the time. The opening part in the city plays pretty well, but once the action moves inland, the screenplay becomes darn near incoherent with its shifting locales minus connecting segues.

Still, Matz is a spunky little number, reminding me of Debbie Reynolds with an accent, while Brady delivers a surprisingly spirited performance as the white knight. Burr turns up in a sinister role so typical of his pre-Perry Mason period; at the same time, his jumbo tropical suit suggests a younger version of the great Sydney Greenstreet.

The movie has a few good moments and some suspense, but on the whole fails to rise above the level of exotic sleaze.