Runaway Daughters

The streaming services are great for the ultra low-budget movies, although they seem to be more heavily skewed to more recent stuff that seems like it might be straight-to-video. But there was also a lot of low-budget schlock in the 1950s and before, and recently I came across a schlocky movie that was completely new to me: Runaway Daughters.

This one is interesting not so much because of the daughters, but the adults in the cast. But more on those later. The movie starts off with our daughters not yet runaways, living somewhere in northern California suburbia. Mary Rubeck (Mary Ellen Kay) is a high school senior living with her divorced father (Jay Adler). She's got a boyfriend, but her boyfriend Bob is about to join the military and... 20 years old, which is much too old for Dad. Dad is worried because Mom walked out on the two of them, and Dad doesn't want to see his daughter follow down the trampy path that Mom did.

Meanwhile, Mary and Bob are outside a house owned by the relatively wealthy Bartons, whose daughter Audrey (Marla English) is one of Mary's friends and another of the eventual runaway daughters. Her parents aren't quite swingers, but her rich businessman father (John Litel of those Warner Brothers programmers 15 years previous) and Mom (Anna Sten of all people!) host grown-up parties in which we find out each of the parents is stepping out on the others. Audrey's bofriend Tommy (Frank Gorshin!) peers into the window and sees all this, and you can bet that he's going to let everybody in the high school know about it tomorrow!

And if that isn't bad enough, the two girls have a mutual friend Angela (Gloria Castillo) who is even more of a mess. Her mom has just married Husband #3, and the newly-married couple is off on a honeymoon somewhere, leaving Angela alone for months at a time. At least Angela has an older brother. Except that said older brother Tony (Lance Fuller) just got out of prison, and has a much older girlfriend Dixie (Adele Jergens!) who works at a dance hall down in Los Angeles! It's all pretty hilariously bad already, but it's about to get a whole lot worse, both for the three daughters and for the viewers.

The three girls suffer continued indignities (the fight at school being particularly funny), and when Audrey's parents decide they'll try to buy her love with a new car, she takes off in the middle of the night, picking up both Mary and Angela and heading off to Los Angeles. Except that Audrey's parents put the police and detectives on the case, since that new car shouldn't be so hard to find. So Angela gets them mixed up in a life of crime leading them to have to hide out in Los Angeles. Dixie shows herself to be the one truly good-hearted person in the film, trying to get the girls back on the right track.

Runaway Daughters is a bad, bad, bad movie, but one that's bad in a fun way because of the juvenile delinquent theme and low-budget Hollywood's view of America's troubled teens of the times. I've mentioned the RKO current events short Teenagers on Trial in the past, but that has nothing on this. And then the oldsters who got cast as adults is just a baffling set of casting. Anna Sten had been brought to Hollywood back in I think 1934 to be the next big European actress, but that never worked out and she worked sporadically. But casting her together with John Litel? Frank Gorshin was only 23 here, but he's one of those people who looked like he was 40 when he was 20.

The result of all this is an utter mess, but of the sort that you'll have fun yelling at the screen, especially if you've got a group of friends who want to join you in laughing at a bad movie. Terrible, but highly recommended.