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.