Sorority Girl

I expected this story (about a female sociopath in college) to be bad-good. Surprisingly it was just good! Susan Cabot gives a very strong performance in the lead. She shows the pain of the lead character who ruins people's lives but can't understand why. It's very short (60 minutes) and moves quickly. Not a hard-hitting expose on sociopaths--just an interesting little film about them. Worth watching.

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.

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 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.

Corman is just here to inform of real social dangers, not to exploitatively take advantage of a trend to quickly sell a frugally made film and make a profit as swiftly as possible. He's here for the social good! Okay, he's not. However, I will say that the script Corman is working from, written by Leo Lieberman and Ed Waters, is more grounded than the work that Charles Griffith had been writing. It's also kind of confusing with a couple of characters that probably should have been combined while also being ultimately purely exploitation just underneath the surface. It exists in this weird middle ground between serious drama and exploitation that neither the script nor Corman really know how to bridge. It's interesting and kind of works, but that dichotomy undoes the film to a certain degree.

At an all girls' college, Sabra (Susan Cabot) belongs to a sorority and is roommates with Ellie (Barbara Cowan). Ellie's mousy and reserved. Sabra is pretty much psychotic but very composed about it. Sabra just likes to hurt people, and the film is about her exploring that, fighting it, and just kind of doing it even when she's helping. Sabra as played by Cabot is really the heart of the film, and had it been given the proper central focus and depth of writing necessary, it would have been a great rock to build a very good film. Instead, there's no real depth to the character and it's ends up a decent rock on which to build a kind of interesting film.

Sabra ends up with a key antagonist in Tina (June Kennedy), a girl running for class president and with the boyfriend Mort (Dick Miller). Tina views Sabra's mistreatment of Ellie, in particular a hazing moment where Sabra just straight up spanks Ellie with a paddle emblazoned with the Sorority's Greek letters (not exploitation, social commentary this is). Sabra decides to take out her anger on Tina by stealing her boyfriend.

Confronted with her bad behavior, Sabra runs to her mother (Fay Baker), looking for understanding or an explanation for her sadistic behavior who offers none. She's then presented with the troubles of Rita (Barboura Morris) who has gotten pregnant (the scandal! In the 1950s) and convinces her to blackmail Mort into giving her $1000. Everything goes wrong, there's a suicide attempt. And we end with Sabra being faced with her own comeuppance.

It's decent. The writing is something of a mess. I think Tina and Ellie should have been combined into one character because separate they don't really do that much narratively. I also think more of Tina's time should be focused on Rita since Rita ends up the focus of the final long stretch of the film. It ultimately feels like there's just this indecision about where the central conflict is, probably stemming from the idea that Sabra's anger is omnidirectional. However, you can still sell that with smaller vignettes as long as there's one central focus for the audience to latch onto, and since Rita ends up last and with the biggest drama around her interactions with Sabra, it should be Rita.

So, once again, a film almost works but is held back by the writing. Corman shows his craft once again, though. I was struck by a series of shots late in the film with a group of girls advancing on Sabra with matching, opposite camera movements that really complimented each other. That feels like something he just came up with on the day because it looked good and he could pull it off quickly, and it works.

So, another middling overall effort that could have been more had Corman allowed more time to further address issues with the script. I really wish he would slow down, but I am getting towards the end of 1957, the year he released eight films. Hopefully the slowed output of 1958 will show the kinds of care and attention he needs to take things up just that one more notch.