Claudelle Inglish

I've come to realize that one of the genres of movies that I really enjoy is the overheated potboiler, if only because there's often so much to laugh at that the producers didn't intend to have be laughed at. An excellent example of this is the movie Claudelle Inglish.

Diane McBain plays Claudelle, a high school senior in some small town in the rural south, this being based on a book by Erskine Caldwell of Tobacco Road fame. Claudell lives with her parents, tenant farmers Clyde (Arthur Kennedy) and Jessie (Constance Ford), who, having been jilted by their respective spouses in A Summer Place, apparently decided to head south and impose their presence on this movie. Clyde, despite his best intentions, isn't able to provide much of a good life for his wife and daughter, and this has left the wife perpetually resentful.

One of Claudelle's classmates is Linn Varner (Chad Everett), whose parents are also tenant farmers like Claudelle's, both families renting land from the county's biggest and wealthiest land owner, S.T. Crawford (Claude Akins). Linn falls in love with Claudelle, and asks for her hand in marriage, with the caveat that she's going to wait until after Linn serves his hitch in the Army, this being the days of the peacetime draft. You'd think an 18-year-old who gets off the farm for his Army hitch and sees a bit of life would like something better, but Linn thinks he's going to become a father just like his father, and needless to say Claudelle's mom doesn't like this.

Claudelle writes to Linn pretty much every day, but eventually, replies stop coming, until one day she gets a letter from Linn saying that he's found another girl and is going to marry her instead. So Linn would like something better, just not with Claudelle. Claudelle, having been jilted, decides that like Miss Havisham, she's going to spend her life hurting men, which here means letting every man in the county date her just for the presents they can give her, but with no plans on the relationships going anywhere. And not telling anybody Linn has jilted her.

When I said every man, that's not quite correct. If the movie hasn't gone around the bend enough, it's about to get a whole lot crazier. S.T. Crawford decides that, like the men in Baby Doll, what he'd really like to replace his late wife is a girl who's barely of legal age, and he's picked out Claudelle, because she's making him really horny, not that he put it that way since the Production Code would never have allowed it. He comes to the Inglish house looking to take Claudelle out on a date, and Jessie thinks this is a good idea because it will allow Claudelle to escape the life of a tenant farmer's life. Never mind what Claudelle might like.

Claudelle Inglish continues on like this until the the unsurprising and logical plot development of some of the men in town beginning to fight over which one of them is going to get Claudelle. But there are some other twists as well involving Jessie and Clyde.

Watching Claudelle Inglish, it's easy to see why this one was a box-office failure back in the day and the critics savaged it. And to be fair, simply taken on an objective level it's not very good. But it's also easy to see why people consider it so much fun despite the bad critical repuation. Just when you think it's gone all the way over the top, it suddenly goes further, like the plot twist of sleazy Crawford deciding he wants Claudelle.

If there are flaws that could make the movie even more of a guilty pleasure, I can think of two. One is that the movie is in black-and-white, when it could really benefit from garish color. The other is that Claudelle doesn't get pregnant; the movie could have used a pregnancy like Susan Slade and The Best of Everything to be that much more ridiculous.

So get together with a bunch of friends and have a blast watching Claudelle Inglish.