Delinquent Daughters

1st watched 1/22/2007 - 3 out of 10(Dir-Albert Herman): Mediocre, at best, juvenile teenager drama which starts at the onset of a high school girl killing herself with the authorities trying to find out why. Of course, the kids remaining aren't much help as they were all out partying together the night before and don't want their parents to find out. None of the kids show much sympathy, which appears to be the point of the movie -- if you're a bad girl and party you lose all your sensitivity. Although later in the movie, the tables turn and the parents are shown to blame -- which was a nice turn(with a good scene with the judge helping the parents understand where they were going wrong), but it comes too late in the movie(about ¾ of the way thru). For the most part the acting is pretty bad and the lighting on some scenes is so horrible that you can barely tell what's going on(this may have just been the age of the movie, though). Besides this, the movie tries hard from a story perspective, but turns out to be pretty much a snoozer that you're just waiting on to end.

PRC was just about the last studio on poverty row. Expectations for one of its productions were about rock bottom, and for the most part this exploitation quickie lives down to that well-earned reputation. The sets are cheap and few, the script darn near incoherent, the lighting and camera work fit for a bat's cave, and the acting wildly variable. Actually, some of the performances are pretty good-- Dawson and Loring are believable toughies, while Carlson and her swain come across as genuinely nice kids. However, D'Orsay's French accent is about as good as mine, at the same time Bovard's silliness is enough to make you reach for a stick.

One reason to check out a dead-ender like this is for its glimpse of teenagers past, that is, of how Hollywood framed teens during the stressed-out war year of 1944. Note how much of wanton teen behavior is blamed on the parents. Much of that behavior is obviously hyped for exploitation purposes (the gun battle, the stick-up), but the question of responsibility remains valid. What surprises me is that there is no mention of the war that was still raging in 1944. Youth Runs Wild, a more serious RKO teen film from that same year, shed a lot of light on how gas rationing and 24-hour factory shifts, for example, affected young people's behavior. None of that here. These youths and their parents appear to exist in an historical vacuum, and I'm not sure why. Maybe the producers thought war concerns would complicate the titillating plot. Whatever the reason, the only value to scoping out this ultra-cheapie is curiosity for curiosity's sake.

This is a bad movie that purports to be an educational film designed to warn America about the menace of teenagers running amok thanks to uninvolved parents. However, like almost all the so-called "educational" films of the 30s and 40s, it was really a shabby little film designed to be snuck past the censors of the Hays Office. In 1934, the major studios all agreed to abide by the dictates of a stronger Production Code--eliminating sex, nudity, cursing and "inappropriate" plots in films (these had actually been relatively common in films in the early 30s). However, in an effort to sneak in smut, small studios created films to shock adults when they learn about terrible social ills, though they were REALLY intended to titillate and slip adult themes past the censors! Such films as MARIJUANA, MAD YOUTH, REEFER MADNESS and SEX MADNESS were all schlocky trash that skirted past the boards because they were supposedly educational. Even though they were laughably bad, they also made money due to low production costs and because they often offered nudity, violence and sordid story lines--all in the name of education!

Unlike many of these films, DELINQUENT DAUGHTERS didn't have nudity, but it sure had lots of sleazy story elements that were sure to titillate. In this film, teens drank, used drugs, committed pointless robberies and assaults and drove like maniacs--all apparently the result of poor parental guidance. And as a result, kids died in this movie--and in the most spectacular ways! The acting and writing were almost universally bad, though the sequence where the judge tells off the parents of these punks actually was amazingly good--too bad everything else was pretty lousy. In fact, one character was so bad, so annoying and so gosh-darn awful, I nominate the ditsy blonde as the most annoying character of the 1940s--she was THAT bad!! Her voice was more grating than Olive Oyl's and she was practically sub-human in her stupidity!

The film is more than Delinquent Daughters, there are also Delinquent Sons. They could have called it Delinquent Youth/Teens. The one main delinquent daughter is Sally Higgins. Sally is the one that really loves the bad life (crime, stealing, guns, the mob). The other kids started going down the wrong path but they are fairly easy to correct... but Sally is still mad that her parents wouldn't let her see her boyfriend and the boyfriend ended up leaving town. Sally's father also hits her, leaving marks and constantly pushing Sally away from her family. - Sally is still sore about it all.

The suicide at the beginning of the film is what kicked off the police officer and reporter getting involved in the teens. The parents of the teens aren't good (example hitting the kids which pushes the kids away even more instead of drawing them in closer).

It's not a great film - but it's better than the rating suggests it is.

4/10

The newspaper-ads promotional material for this film featured a series of Coming Soon theatre script-written teaser-ads comprised of daily entries in "The Diary of a Delinquent Daughter." June writes:

Wednesday: "Had my first drink of whiskey today. Tastes awful...but what a wallop! Guess I passed out. If Dad knew what I was doing I'd get trounced! Gosh...wonder if he really cares what happens to me?"

Thursday: "Nick wants me to run away with him. Says I'm old enough to know my own mind. I'm sixteen, but I look older when I use makeup...Wish I could confide in Mom or Dad!"

Friday: "Can you keep a secret, diary? I'm going to slip away tonight. Dad will probably be tight as usual and Mom out painting the town (also as usual.) So it shouldn't be too difficult. I'm scared a little bit but I just can't stand things here!"

Saturday: "I'm on my way to the big city with Nick. That's the fellow I met at the dance. I'm in love with him, I guess, but he makes me awfully jealous. Always making passes at some other girl when I'm around. But anything is better than what I left behind."

Sunday: "What a big baby I am...I've been crying. I'm not homesick, just a little bit scared. Nick accused me of flirting and hit me. Just found out he's broke. We've got to get some money some way, and fast!"

The only reason to see the movie after that series of ads ran was to find out if Nick had figured out by Monday a swell way June could make them some money...from real-friendly strangers...fast.