Road to Utopia

I've got a Bob Hope box set that has a portion devoted to the Bob Hope/Bing Crosby collaborations. It includes four of the "Road" movies. It's been over three years since I blogged about the third of them, so I think now would be a good time to put the DVD into the player and watch the fourth, Road to Utopia. (The box set has two earlier collaborations between Hope and Crosby, but sadly not the final three "Road" movies.)

The movie starts off in the present, but worse than that, with Robert Benchley giving us an intro that's really not relevant to the movie. Benchley also stops the action a couple of times to make an allegedly trenchant comment about the upcoming scene, but his presence is a minus in the movie since he's not playing an actual character. Back to the present and the action of the film, Chester (Bob Hope) is an old man married to Sal (Dorothy Lamour), when their old friend Duke (Bing Crosby) shows up. This causes the three of them to think back over forty years, to when there was a gold rush in the Klondike and all three of them were there for it.

Not that this was part of the plan. Chester and Duke are partners in a double act that's part vaudeville, part carnival barker dishonesty that's gotten them stopped by the police in pretty much every town they've been in, leading them to make it all the way to the Pacific. They have to make another quick escape, but this time Chester's decided he's had enough. He wants to go back to New York while Duke wants to go to Alaska. Duke takes all of Chester's money, so Chester gets on the same boat as Duke to try to get some of the money back.

Instead, the two lose all the money, so they have to work their way to Alaska which is how they come across a map when they're cleaning the cabin of two thugs, McGurk (Nester Paiva) and Sperry (Robert Barrat). 80 years on and that sort of treasure map is a nonsense plot device, but for some reason, people really bought into it in the old days. Chester and Duke, having stolen it, think this is going to make them rich, but understandably McGurk and Sperry want it back.

And they're not the only ones who want it. Larson (Douglas Dumbrille) is the sort of person making money not from striking gold, but from serving the people trying to strike gold. But he wants in on the gold too. Sal shows up at Larson's saloon, claiming to have information about that map. But she -- and nobody else in town -- know what Sperry and McGurk look like. So as you can guess, when Chester and Duke show up, they're going to get mistaken for the two baddies. The actual Sperry and McGurk are not far behind.

Now, since we know from the film's opening that Sal and Chester are married, we know that everybody escapes, and that Sal and Chester fall in love, which complicates things back in the Klondike. Sal's job, mind you, is to get the map for Larson, but once she falls in love with Chester, she's not so sure about it. In and around all of this there's the opportunity for the leads to sing several songs.

Apparently, Road to Utopia was well received when it was released back in 1946. Perhaps that's because the movie had been held for several years so it had been quite a while since the public had seen a "Road" movie. Indeed, in the intervening years, Robert Benchley had died, that's how long it was held up. I personally found Road to Utopia a fairly weak movie, with the jokes falling flatter. Benchley adds nothing, and the infighting between the Hope and Crosby characters is wearing thin.

A younger acquaintance

Another of the movies that had been sitting on my DVR for quite some time that I kind of knew a bit about going into it was Rich and Famous, which is not to be confused with the Alfred Hitchcock movie Rich and Strange. Instead, it's based on the same stage play as the Bette Davis movie Old Acquaintance, although the two versions have some differences between them.

The movie opens up at Smith College in 1959. Liz (Jacqueline Bisset) and Merry (Candice Bergen) are best friends and roommates, although Merry is about to drop out in order to elope with Doug (David Selby), which causes a bit of tension as it's implied that Doug and Liz may have dated in the past. In any case, Merry and Doug do run off, and since this is still the first reel, you know that happily ever after isn't going to be a thing. You also know that the movie is going to move quite a bit ahead in the future or else we wouldn't have that mention of 1959.

Sure enough, 10 years pass as Liz shows up on a college campus in Los Angeles to do a speaking engagement. Liz has become a famous writer thanks to her one novel as well as a bunch of essays of the sort that wind up in magazines for the smart set, or the people who think they're the smart set. Merry lives in Malibu with Doug and their daughter, and know a bunch of Hollywood types. Indeed, Merry, inspired by Liz's success as a writer, decided that she too should try her hand at writing. But where Liz wrote a critically-acclaimed and award-winning book, Merry writes something that Liz considers not very good writing, and incredibly trashy subject material about all of Merry and Doug's thinly-disguised Hollywood friends. Merry gets Liz to present the novel to her agent Jules Levi (Steven Hill).

As you can guess, Merry's novel becomes a trashy hit, while Liz is still suffering from writers' block as she tries to complete that second novel. On the other hand, Merry and Doug's marriage is falling apart and Doug loves Liz, something that's really going to piss off Merry when she finds out about it, which she's going to in the mid-1970s when she's in New York to do a TV appearance with Merv Griffin.

The final segment of the film comes in 1981 when Merry has finally written a novel that not only gets some critical acclaim, but short-listed for the same award that Liz won all the way back in the 1960s. Liz is on the committee to select this year's winner, and unsurprisingly Merry tries to use her friendship with Liz to get Liz to select her book as the winner. Liz's personal life, meanwhile, is going down the tubes. She's supposed to do an interview with Chris (Hart Bochner), a writer for Rolling Stone, but they end up having a bit of a romantic relationship that's complicated by the fact that Merry's daugher Debby (Meg Ryan) wants to leave home and spends some nights first on the couch in Liz's hotel suite followed by the couch in Chris' suite.

Rich and Famous is a mess of a movie, and it's easy to see why it was neither a critical nor box-office success when it was originally released. Parts of it rise to the level of trashy fun, notably Bergen's horrendous accent in the more melodramatic scenes. But it doesn't rise to the final scene of the original Bette Davis/Miriam Hopkins version.

Rain Around the Soldier

Another of the actors honored in this year's Summer Under the Stars was Steve McQueen, which gave me the chance to record one of his films that I hadn't seen before: Soldier in the Rain.

McQueen plays Sgt. Eustis Clay, an army drill sergeant somewhat reminiscent of William Holden's operator character in Stalag 17 except that, where Stalag 17 was set in a World War II POW camp, Clay was part of the peacetime draft and seems to be counting down the days until his time in the Army was finished. He's got much bigger schemes planned for when he gets out of the army. Clay serves under MSgt. Maxwell Slaughter (Jackie Gleason), a career soldier who, based on the time the film was released and Gleason's age, was probably drafted in World War II and never found anything better to do than stay in the Army after the war. He's trying to make life as easy for himself as possible before he hits his 20 and out.

Slaughter likes Clay for whatever reason, although Clay looks up to Slaughter more than he probably should. Not that Slaughter is a bad influence; it's that Clay seems like a bit of a naïf and that nobody should look up to another human being the way Clay looks up to Slaughter. Slaughter is married to the Army, and doesn't have a wife or kids, so Clay finds a young local woman off-base, Bobby Jo (Tuesday Weld) and introduces her to Slaughter.

Slaughter eventually develops a liking for Bobby Jo becaue she turns out to be brighter than she looks, although she seems much too young for Slaughter: she's presented as a high school student who's barely legal. You'd think Slaughter's superior officers like Lt. Magee (Tom Poston) would put the kibosh on such fraternizing, but apparently no.

As I said earlier, Clay is a smooth operator type who among other things is trying to pass off PFC Meltzer (Tony Bill) as a sprinter who's going to be able to run the first three-minute mile, at a time when the mile record would have been around 3:55, not that the mile is run much any more since metric distances are more generally run. This is presented as one of the comic schemes Clay is involved in, although it also leads to a traffic incident that Slaughter has to bail Clay out of.

Slaughter will have to bail Clay out for the film's climax, a much more dramatic scene when Clay finds out his dog died. A couple of MPs decide to beat the crap out of Clay at a bar for some reason, and Slaughter has to save Clay's butt.

Soldier in the Rain is one of those films that's more episodic than having a traditional full-movie arc, and it's a movie that doesn't really work. It's partly because the episodes don't quite fit together but more because Steve McQueen took his character in a direction that doesn't work. McQueen plays Clay much too broadly, as a sort of Southern stereotype. It's supposed to be broad comedy, I suppose, but McQueen's performance makes it look almost as though McQueen is a lousy actor, which isn't the case. Supposedly this was because McQueen felt like Gleason was stealing scenes or at least coming out on top, but it doesn't work and the director probably should have spotted it. In any case, it makes the movie rather grating whenever McQueen is on screen, which is a lot.

At least I've gotten Soldier in the Rain off of my list of movies to watch. But, as always, watch and judge for yourself.

Waiting for a star to fall

Another of the movies that I had sitting on my DVR for a while that I finally got around to watching was Boy Meets Girl. Considering the cast involved and the fact that this was made at Warner Bros., I was kind of surprised that I hadn't seen this one before.

As the movie opens, agent Rossetti (Frank McHugh) is taking his client, cowboy star Larry Toms (Dick Foran) to Royal pictures to talk about a comeback. Rosetti thinks that Royal's writing team of Law (James Cagney) and Benson (Pat O'Brien) has a script ready that would be perfect for Toms, although it turns out they've been lying because they're the sort of people who always seem to be trying to come up with some angle. It's the sort of role that had this been a 1940s picture would have been perfect for Jack Carson, except that this is also the sort of movie that wouldn't have been made after the US entered World War II in December 1941 since it's very much a product of its time.

Studio producer C.F. Friday (Ralph Bellamy) is none too happy with this. Meanwhile, he orders the studio equivalent of room service, which is brought up by commissary waitress Susie Seabrook (Marie Wilson). She faints in Friday's office, which as it turns out is because she's pregnant, which is rather shocking since she's not married and once the Production Code kicked in the idea of an unmarried woman being pregnant and it not being a big moral failure is something you don't expect. In any case, when they find about the pregnance, Law and Benson have a brilliant idea, which is to promote Susie's unborn child as the next big star, to be paired with Larry in a series of movies. Meanwhile, showing up at Friday's office when Susie is recovering from fainting is an English extra, Rodney Bowman (Bruce Lester), who is going to show up later in the plot.

Susie's kid Happy does in fact become a star, bigger than Larry. This ticks Larry off, so Rossetti plans to get Larry and Susie married off so that Susie and Happy will retire. But this is bad news for Law and Benson. They need to come up with a way to break up the relation. Their plan is, at the premiere of the next Errol Flynn movie, they'll have some guy show up claiming to be Happy's father who didn't really die at all. Their plan hits a snag, though, when they hire extra Rodney Bowman to play the part of the man claiming to be Happy's father. They don't know that Happy and Susie have already met.

So Law and Bowman have to come up with another plan that will save the studio. Their plan is to make it look like the British Teddington Studios (an in-joke, as Teddington was in fact Warner Bros.' British arm to make pictures satisfying the British quota system) is going to be buying Royal Pictures in order to get Happy under contract. This brings everybody back to Royal Pictures, and things are concluded more or less happily.

Boy Meets Girl is a movie I had a lot of problems with, mostly down to the script. The screenplay requires everybody to be incredibly loud and obnoxious, as well as dishonest with trying to scam one another. This is supposed to be a comedy, but the characters just aren't very sympathetic in my book. Still, everybody here is professional and do the best they can with the material. Maybe audiences of the late 1930s would have appreciated Boy Meets Girl more than I do in 2026.

Somebody at least had a navy

During World War II, the US military worked with Hollywood to put out a bunch of rah-rah stuff focusing on various sections of the military to promote themselves as well as build morale. A lesser known section that got such a movie was the dirigibles, in the movie This Man's Navy.

Wallace Beery plays dirigible pilot Ned Trumpet, who's such a serial fabulist that you wonder how he wasn't pensioned off when he hit his 20 years since it's not as if anybody would want such a story-teller in a position of command, I don't think. Maybe Pearl Harbor hit before the 20 years and they still needed him. In any case, one of the things he makes up is the wife and kid he supposedly has, somthing you'd think that records would easily disprove. Part of the responsibilities of the dirigible unit is to patrol for submarines, since the U-boats didn't really have the sort of missiles that could take out things in the air.

Anyhow, another part of Trumpet's duties, serving with his friend Jimmy Shannon (James Gleason), is to teach the new recruits both in blimps and balloons. When talking with a recruit in the basket of a balloon and discussing hand-to-hand combat, Trumpet gets knocked out of the balloon. Fortunately he's got a parachute on him, and he lands on a ranch owned by Maude Weaver (Selena Royle) and her son Jess (Tom Drake). Jess isn't serving in the war because he had an accident with one of the horses that left him with bad legs using crutches. But Trumpet sees an opportunity. Jess could become the sort of foster son he never had, which would satisfy all the people in the Navy who think he's been lying about having a son. Meanwhile, this would enable Jess to get surgery courtesy of the military and possibly be able to serve if he doesn't need the crutches any more.

So now we get a sequence of the recruits going through training, which is part of the propaganda that movies like this were designed to be at least from the point of view of the military. At the end of the training, Jess decides that he's going to take up training at Pensacola, which is an air station for regular planes, not blimps. Poor Trumpet is disappointed, especially because he's got his own problems. However, he is given the chance to redeem himself when the Navy sends him over to British India to work with the British to send blimps from India to western China from where the Chinese are fighting against Japan.

And then things get terribly unrealistic. Weaver is on a mission, when his plane crashes. Trumpet gets the idea that because of the dark and the fog, he can actually get a blimp through to pick up the stranded pilots before the Japanese get to them. This even though planes can fly much faster than blimps. But considering the sort of movie this is, we know that Trumpet is going to be able to save the day even though the Japanese are going to be shooting at him all the way back to India and frankly should be able to destroy the blimp the way it's a sitting duck.

I'm sure air buffs will enjoy seeing the blimps in action, although the story is a fairly weak one. Wallace Beery's character is rather a blowhard and if there weren't a war on it would be hard to be sympathetic to him. Tom Drake is also not the most charismatic actor out there. But once again audiences of the day probably enjoyed the morale boost that came with the depiction of the military.

Another Two for One repeat

I mentioned last week how TCM is re-running the spring season of Two for One in the fall, and how this is giving me the opportunity to put up a couple of posts on films that I recorded the first time around and am now able to watch to do these posts. The guest for tonight, Sept. 19, is actress Sheryl Lee Ralph, and one of her selections is one of her first movie roles, in support of Sidney Poitier in A Piece of the Action at 10:00 PM.

An introductory sequence shows Dave Anderson (Bill Cosby), master safe-cracker, getting into the Chicago headquarters of a loan corporation where they keep the safe full of cash. Dave gets into the safe, steals a large sum of money, and is able to get away by jumping out a window into a truck below and driving off.

Cut to a completely unrelated crook, Manny Durrell (Sidney Poitier). He's studied the movements of illegal bookmker Mr. Bruno (Titos Vandis), and uses that to set up what looks like a police raid of Bruno's upscale home where the books and a lot of cash are kept. Bruno fills a briefcase full of cash and gives it to the maid to take to a trusted source. In fact, the maid is working for Manny and she's the one with the cash that Manny is bilking out of Bruno, which would also explain why she didn't get pinched while leaving the house when the police were surrounding it. Those fake police were also working for Burrell.

Meanwhile, during the raid, Bruno calls his mole in the police department to find out what's going on. That mole talks to Det. Joshua Burke (James Earl Jones), which is how Bruno learns it's a fake raid and is going to get whoever is responsible. Meanwhile, Burke is set to retire in a few months. When he does, the first thing he does is write a couple of anonymous letters, to Manny and Dave, as well as a third. Manny and Dave's notes inform them that somebody knows about those jobs we saw at the opening, with a threat to send the two of them to prison if they don't meet the writer at a certain hotel suite. The two men are then directed the next day to a restaurant where they'll learn what their "punishment" entails.

In fact, they don't meet the letter writer, but the recipient of the third letter, Lila French (Denise Nicholas). She runs a community center that is trying to help inner-city youth by doing things such as finding them jobs, even though these are clearly embittered youths. (Sheryl Lee Ralph plays one of the youths.) The letter writer has put Dave's name to the letter, saying that Dave and Manny would be happy to "volunteer" an extremely generous amount of time to the center, which they're forced into doing although Lila doesn't seem bright enough to figure out there's some sort of blackmail going on here.

At this point, the movie really starts to sag as the inner-city youths seem like a bunch of stock character types; I will admit however, that I have no idea whether inner-city adolescents would in fact have acted like that. They come across as being as much of a stereotype as the Sweathogs on Welcome Back, Kotter. But Dave and Manny have an obligation to help them get jobs since that will keep them out of jail. They also use their in at the improvement center to try to figure out who exactly is blackmailing them. Meanwhile, Bruno is busy looking for the people who robbed him out of all that money, and he's going to figure it out in time for the movie's climax....

A Piece of the Action is another of those movies that sounds like a good idea on paper, but doesn't quite work in practice. One is that I've already mentioned how the young people don't quite seem real here. There's also the fact that it's trying to be a drama with some comedy when it should really be a comedy with some drama. I have a feeling that Sidney Poitier, who also directed, wanted to have the movie serve as social commentary on the issues of the inner city. But the biggest flaw is that the film sags at a massive 135 minutes, which is really much too long for the material. It's the sort of film that should really be clocking in at an hour and a half or so.

Still, I'm sure there are people who will enjoy A Piece of the Action more than I did, since it's one of those movies that has its heart in the right place.

Over the Moon

Merle Oberon was TCM's Star of the Month some time back, which gave me the opportunity to record a couple of movies that I hadn't seen before. One of them was Over the Moon, an early Technicolor movie out of Britain.

Oberon stars as Jane Benson, a young woman living in Yorkshire at a time when Yorkshire was a bit of a backwater. She's helping take care of a rich distant relative since she doesn't have all that much money of her own. She's got a local doctor, Freddie Jarvis (Rex Harrison), interested in her to the point that he's about to sell his local practice for £5,000 in part so he can pay for a honeymoon in Monte Carlo before trying to get a practice in London after the wedding.

And then the relative dies. He had owned coal mines and, unbenknownst to anybody, bequeaths his entire estate to Jane, a sum of £18 million, which was vast for about 1938 when the movie started production. (Despite the political situation in Europe at the time, especially considering the movie didn't get released in the UK until after World War II started, there's no mention of politics in the movie.) This new-found wealth causes problems. Jane has never had any wealth, and would like to live a little, if not a lot. After all, being worth eight figures in 1938 pounds sterling is nothing to sneeze at. But Freddie is displeased with it, because he's got the good sense to realize that this sudden wealth is going to cause issues in their relationship.

Meanwhile, a couple of grifters show up in Yorkshire claiming to be distant relatives of Jane's from London. They claim they're going to look out for her interests, but it should be clear to any normal human being that these are not people to be trusted. But they plan to take Jane down to Monte Carlo in search of that wealthy husband and have just the man for her. As for Freddie, he goes off to Switzerland to work at one of those alpine private clinics for the wealthy that were a thing in the pre-war years. He becomes quite the hit with the ladies, although he's oblivious to the extent to which they moon over him.

When Jane gets to Monte Carlo, she has not two, but three men pursuing her. Two of them are the con-artist partners of the women claiming they're trying to "help" Jane, while the third is man with a phony name (Robert Douglas) who is in fact the son of one of Britain's wealthiest men and worth even more than Jane. He knows that wealth brings as many problems as it solves and is there to warn her. Surprisingly, nobody recognizes him as the son of an extremely wealthy man.

The Strange World of Planet X

Some time back, I did a post on a British sci-fi movie that got picked up by Warner Bros. for distribtuion in the US, Satellite in the Sky. Another movie with a similar provenance, albeit with a much smaller budget, was Cosmic Monsters, also known as The Strange World of Planet X.

Alec Mango plays Dr. Laird, who is doing experiments for the British Ministry of Defense in one of those old manor houses in a small countryside village where the basement has been converted into a laboratory with suitably photogenic equipment. However, something goes wrong with the experiment, leading to an explosion, which really gets the attention of the military types in London. To that end, they send a computer expert, although this is the primitive sort of computing since it's the 1950s, named Michele Dupont (Gaby André). The problem, at least in Dr. Laird's estimateion, is that Dupont is... a woman! Shock! Horror!

Anyhow, also in the group of scientists is an American Gil Graham (Forrest Tucker), who is probably there to make distribution of the movie in America more palatable for American audiences. Anyhow, the merry band of scientists -- or not so merry band because the next experiment also goes wrong and has the scientists bickering at each other -- continues the experiments in electromagnetic fields. As I said, the experiment goes wrong, causing a briefcase to go flying across the lab and nearly clocking Michele. Gil saves her. If the experiment that caused London to send Michele to the lab got the attention of the folks in London, this one really does, because it gives them the impression that something about the apparatus could be weaponized.

Not that anyone in the general public knows what's going on in that laboratory, but this second failed experiment also gets their attention, since it caused lightning storms, a seeming meteorite, and other such fun stuff. Graham also determines there's something not a part of their experiment that may still be providing power to the apparatus.

And then a "Mr. Smith" (Martin Benson) shows up in the village. He's clearly an outsider, since there's so much about local life that he doesn't know, although he knows enough about electromagnetism that it's obvious to anybody who knows about the experiment why he's shown up in town. But what does he really want?

As I said, Cosmic Monsters is a fairly low-budget affair, and has a lot of the tropes of American B sci-fi of the era. The exception is that, having been made in Britain, there's something just slightly enough different as to make it noticeable. It's interesting, but not nearly as good as another country life sci-fi from the Britain of the era, Village of the Damned.

The Last of the Mohicans (1936)

One of those books that's relatively well-known as a book, and which has had multiple adaptations to film, is James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans. Surprisingly, I had never read the book or seen any of the film adaptations until TCM ran the 1936 version of The Last of the Mohicans. With that in mind, I recorded it and finally sat down to watch it.

In 1757, it was the second year of the Seven Years' War, which was fought on multiple continents among all the great European powers. The North American portion of that conflict is generally called the French and Indian War, fought because France and Britain disputed the boundary in the Mississippi River watershed among other things. France used its allies among the various native groups to harass British settlers, especially in the more northerly colonies since native tribes could come down from French Canada as well. The British have set up Fort William Henry at what is now the southern end of Lake George in New York, with Albany being the gateway to the Adirondacks as well as the Mohawk valley. The British want the settlers to help them fight against the French, but the settlers understand that their real conflict is not with the French but the Indians and want British help to go after the Indians.

Alice (Binnie Barnes) and Cora (Heather Angel) Munro are the two adult daughters of Col. Munro who is stationed at Fort William Henry. The want to go from Albany to the fort to be with him, and set out with British officer Maj. Heyward (Henry Wilcoxon) to get to Lake George. It's a dangerous overland trip, and sure enough Magua (Bruce Cabot), a Huron Indian guiding the British, turns on them. The British are saved by Natty Bumppo (Randolph Scott), better known as Hawkeye. Hawkeye is working with a rival but dying tribe, the Mohicans, and he's traveling with the Mohicans Uncas and Chingachgook.

When everybody gets to Fort William Henry, it's soon besieged by the French, with Magua planning to take the Hurons and murder the defenseless settlers. Hawkeye learns of this, and defies direct orders from the British and removes the settler militia to go defend the other settlers. This can be seen as insubordination, or worse, desertion, and is an act that could carry the death penalty. Except that there are more pressing matters to deal with before there can be any court-martial.

Magua has fallen for Cora, although she and Uncas of the Mohicans also have a thing. Meanwhile, Alice and Hawkeye are in love with each other. So Magua kidnaps the two women in order that he can have the bride he wants on one hand and an important hostage on the other hand. News comes that the Huron are planning to burn Alice alive at the stake. Hawkeye and Maj. Heyward both know that the one real way to save Alice is for one of them to sacrifice himself and take Alice's place at the stake, leading to a climax that certainly would have excited audiences of 1936.

The one big weakness of this version of The Last of the Mohicans is that it's the sort of movie that hasn't aged terribly well. It's got Hollywood's inaccurate view of the native tribes, something that's probably going to bother at least a certain portion of audiences in 2026. The "location" shooting, in various parts of California away from Hollywood, is about the best Hollywood could do in those days since location shooting someplace more distant would probably have been a logistical nightmare. On the plus side, Randolph Scott gives another fine performance showing that he was a pretty versatile actor before he decamped to westerns in the last 15 or 20 years of his career.

I still haven't read the book, and also haven't seen the Daniel Day-Lewis version of the movie, so I can't compare. But this version of The Last of the Mohicans stands on its own as a pretty good movie with some flaws.

Teenage Doll

Tomorrow afternoon, Sept. 16, sees a lineup of movies starring actresses who were discovered young. One of them who didn't exactly go on to big things was June Kenney. She appears in the trashy Teenage Doll, which concludes the afternoon at 6:45 PM.

The movie opens with credits of a woman falling from the roof of a building to her death, much like Eva Marie Saint's brother in On the Waterfront. The young woman is a member of a girls' gang called the Black Widows, led by Helen (Fay Spain). She suspects that the dead woman was pushed by one of her fellow gang members. Or at least, that's a convenient excuse, since what would any normal person be doing in this sort of place at this time of night. And with the police coming, Helen needs to think fast. Thankfully, she's got just the idea of how to deal with this.

The Black Widows are sort of the women's arm of a fellow gang called the Tarantulas. The one exception is Barbara Bonney (June Kenney). She's closer to a "good girl" who's new to the area and somehow fell in with the wrong gang, pun intended. But she also had a relationship with Eddie Rand (John Brinkley), which is more of a problem. Eddie isn't a member of the Tarantulas, but a rival gang called the Vandals. As such, it would be convenient for Helen and the rest of the Black Widows to turn Barbara in to the police and make her the scapegoat. And Helen is none too circumspect about it, telling Barbara right out that this is what she plans to do, so Barbara should just give up right now.

At this point, the movie develops by going to the back-stories of several of the girls and how their lives probably made them want to join a gang. Helen has a mother who works all night because Dad is supposedly on disability, but he's seeing other women on the side. Another lives with her kid sister, and has decided to go out on a date with her boss because she knows it will be financially remunerative. A third, a girl of Mexican heritage, is supposed to be working at the family business but steals money from the cash register. Barbara has "good" parents, although Barbara's mom had a boyfriend during Prohibition who got killed in one of the gangland killings of the 1920s and doesn't want Barbara to end up like that. Barbara's father is at heart not bad, but it stupidly strict and ignorant of what his daughter does.

Barbara, being in danger, runs out to the Vandals' headquarters in the hopes that Eddie can help her, although if anything her actions are simply putting herself and the Vandals in greater danger because it's obvious that the Black Widows and Tarantulas are going to find them. It all leads up to a finale that I suppose satisfies the Production Code while at the same time being suitably lurid for the teen audience.

Teenage Doll was produced and directed by Roger Corman early in his career. Objectively, it's another of those movies that's not very good. But Roger Corman knew what to do even on a limited budget, and he's able to take material like this and turn it into something entertaining because of just how trashy it is. June Kenney never became a big star, and frankly it's not that hard to see why. Still, Teenage Doll is dumb fun, and definitely worth a watch.