Accent on Crime

TCM ran a spotlight last summer on "Teens in Trouble". One of the movies they ran was an ultra-low-budget film from PRC, Delinquent Daughters. Since the synopsis sounded interesting, and I'm always up for low-budget exploitation stuff like this, I decided I'd record it so that I could eventually watch it and put up this post.

At what looks like a nice high school in one of those small cities that populated America, a group of the female students are discussing a shocking incident that occurred: one of their female classmates committed suicide by jumping off a pier! The various students have different attitudes. One, June, is sad; one is ditzy; a third, Sally, doesn't want to talk about it either with her classmates or the authorities and is incredibly truculent about it. Sally is obviously not one of the Good Girls.

This is further made clear by the fact that Sally has a boyfriend, Jerry, who owns one of those hot-rod type cars that can go just as fast as any police car. Not only that, but on the way to take Sally and one of her classmates home, Jerry stops and holds up a candy store! The kids also like to spend their evenings at a place called the Merry-Go-Round, a nightspot that is certainly not like anything Andy Hardy and his friends would have gone to to get a milkshake. Instead, it's run by the worldly Mimi (Fifi D'Orsay) and her friend Nick who is clearly connected to the local crime scene. Indeed he suggests to Jerry a good way to get rid of a car so that the police won't be able to recognize it.

Meanwhile, June is continuing to get herself in trouble by hanging out with the wrong crowd at the Merry-Go-Round. Her boyfriend Rocky brings a gun to the place to try to get in good with Nick, while Sally fakes her mom's voice to tell June's dad that they're studying at Sally's house. June's dad actually calls Sally's mom to confirm, finds out this is a lie, and basically throws June out of the house, which is a sure way to get June into deeper trouble.

There's a lot more crime to come, but Delinquent Daughters is one of those morality tales where the adult criminals are going to get caught, the kids are going to learn a lesson, and the "good" adults are going to change the Merry-Go-Round into something more benign. But there are a lot of twists and turns to get there.

Unsurprisingly, if you were to rate Delinquent Daughters on a technical scale, it's not a particularly good movie with its bad acting and shoddy production values. It's also hard to figure out what audience PRC intended to bring in to ensure that the movie would turn a profit. I can't imagine the teens of 1944 watching this one, and only a small set of do-gooder parents would think of watching it.

However, watching it 80 years on, all of the things that make Delinquent Daughters a technical dud make it fun to watch just as a time capsule of how the adults of 1944 considered the teens of the day. It's also interesting to see how there's basically no mention of that pesky little war raging on over in Europe and the Pacific.