Born Reckless (1958)

Mamie Van Doren starred in quite a few movies that are such a mess that they're fun because of it. A movie that has her in an odd (for her) role is one that's really not such a mess: Born Reckless.

Van Doren plays Jackie Adams, a trick rider in rodeos and a singer in the bar/nightclub after hours. She sings one of her songs one night, and all the guys are taken with her because, well, she has those assets. One of them tries to proposition her much father than she's willing to go, so a fight breaks out among all the rodeo guys in the bar.

Jackie escapes by hiding in the back seat of a car owned by rodeo rider Kelly Cobb (Jeff Richards), who travels the circuit along with his companion and mentor, "Cool Man" (Arthur Hunnicutt). Cobb isn't exactly happy to have this stowaway, although he's also protective of her. And, of course, you know that by the end of the movie, the two are going to fall in love.

Jackie falls in love with Kelly first. He's got more on his mind, particularly trying to save up enough money to buy a ranch that he can work with his friend, Papa Gomez (Nacho Galindo), a Mexican-American with a large family whose relationship to Kelly isn't quite clear. The rodeo is just a means to an end. But Jackie and the Gomezes find each other plain good folks. Getting back to Kelly, he gets fleeced at one rodeo and is too blind to see Jackie's love for him, deciding to spend an evening with another woman. It all goes on like this for 80 minutes, with a lot of songs both from Mamie and from various cowboy like groups doing rock versions of their songs, since this was released in 1958.

I suppose you could say Born Reckless is a mess, like I implied about a bunch of the other Van Doren movies, but this one is a mess in a different way. It's a movie that doesn't really know what it wants to be. In theory you could think of it as a movie about the rodeo, but that's belied by the poor cinematography using bad angles of Richards riding the broncos and bulls, with other rodeo scenes being obvious stock footage from somewhere else since the picture quality looks much different. At other times, it seems to want to be a musical, considering how many songs there are. The movie isn't helped by the fact that everybody's performance is pretty much bland.

Born Reckless is an intersting idea, and a daring step for Mamie Van Doren, but one that doesn't really add up to much of anything. It's available on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so you can watch and judge for yourself.