Sorority Girl

Sorority Girl is a fairly high quality teen soap opera from the 1950s. An Elizabeth Taylor wanna be is the meanest mean girl alive (seriously, we are talking personality disorder here) and she bullies a younger college freshman who is a little awkward and fuller figured, but mostly too nice for her own good. A smart girl with a hairstyle that makes her look like they somehow imported her in a time machine from 1987 tries to put an end to it all, but also finds herself foiled.

Spoiler alert: there's absolutely nothing poor about the poor little rich girl, she is just a monster.

This is another of those young people who go wrong movies that were so popular from the mid-fifties to mid-sixties, all trying in their own way to be another "Rebel Without a Cause", and few succeeding.

This one didn't succeed either, but it can still hold your interest, as you find yourself alternating between wanting to throttle the main character and feeling sorry for her.

The movie could have been titled "Lost Cause", as she seems doomed from the start, a girl rich in material things but poverty stricken when it comes to love and affection, none of which her widowed socialite mother is willing or able to give her. She takes her unhappiness out on the girls in her college sorority, and all her cruelty, scheming, and blackmailing backfire on her.

If you're looking for a happy ending, you won't find it here.

If you're looking for a great movie, you won't find that either.

If you're looking for something to kill time, you've come to the right place (I guess).

Susan Cabot stars as a spoiled rich college girl names Sabra. As an upperclassman she like to taunt and order about a fattish pledge named Ellie (Barbara Cowan), which irritates fellow student Rita (Barboura Morris). Sabra just seems to spread misery everywhere she goes.

Even a meeting with her mother (Fay Baker) leads to mama's tearing up Sabra's monthly allowance check. This just makes Sabra meaner and she eventually paddles Ellie and has a cat fight with Rita. When she learns that dopey Terry is pregnant, Sabra launches a plan to blackmail Mort (Dick Miller) and extort $1,000 from him by claiming he's the father.

Later on, at the beach, Terry goes into a funk and decides to jump off a cliff. Will anything save her?

Fay Baker is fun as the mean mama; everyone else is terrible. Cabot and Morris were also in THE WASP WOMAN together.

This is one of my all-time favorite movies. It's a masterpiece. I think Susan Cabot is right up there with Faye Dunaway in "Mommie Dearest," and Lili Taylor in "I Shot Andy Warhol" in her role as Sabra. I think anyone with any damned sense can see him/herself in this young woman. Call me disturbed, or twisted, but that's just the way it is. The scenes with Sabra & her mother are priceless, as are the interactions (and altercations!) between Sabra & Rita, her roommate. It's hard to believe Corman made this film in 1956; it holds up so well. If you miss this, you are missing out on life itself.

Whether playing Charles Bronson's tough moll in MACHINE GUN KELLEY or a beauty queen mogul turned monstrous WASP WOMAN, Susan Cabot was b-movie director Roger Corman's greatest leading lady, combining a raw, formidable prowess with brooding melancholy, often within the same character...

With dark hair and full lips, she was pretty, even beautiful, but only when she needed to be... until morphing into a bitter scowl as intense as any comparably well-known character actress...

But in Corman's SORORITY GIRL, she's simply too old for the title poor-rich-girl role, manipulating her college roommates who are actually the correct age... overall seeming more like a jealous young den mother...

Initially her most bullied victim (both emotionally and physically) is stacked ugly duckling Barbara Cowan: yet their scenes needed to be amplified and progressed... they would have probably shared homoerotic/top/bottom aspects had this been a 1970's exploitation...

Also starring regular Corman good-girl Barboura Morris, underused as a moral compass, Cabot's most vulnerable victim is Corman and fellow b-auteur Bert I. Gordon's lithe blonde-beauty June Kenney, secretly pregnant while working at Dick Miller's campus beer-hall, shown only in the first and final act...

Which has her 11th hour suicide attempt injecting suspenseful melodrama that SORORITY GIRL, the movie and the character, needed more of - to make this more of an intense thriller, which the moodily energetic Cabot seems otherwise primed for.