Melodramatic films with dire warnings about the next generation really have fallen out of fashion, huh? I suspect that Corman didn't mean the earnest warnings here, instead falling into the fad of the time and making something exploitative that he could sell quickly. I mean, this is kind of ridiculously presented with a gaggle of girl toughs who all look like they could be competing for prom queen acting like they'll cut you. However, there is an attempt at real character, filtered through heavy-handed warnings about contemporary youthful indiscretion, but Charles Griffith's troubles with structure make the film feel off balance when just a bit of tweaking at the script stage would have improved the film a good bit.
One of the members of the Black Widows, a female gang, is found dead on the ground in an alley. Barbara (June Kenney) is seen running from the scene by the Black Widows, and Barbara is a known member of the rival gang The Vandals (this one is co-ed). The first half of the film is, oddly, the Black Widows all going home and stealing things from their parents. This gives Corman opportunity to show the myriad ways that society is failing these girls, like Helen (Fay Spain), the purported leader of the Black Widows, finding her father with another woman when she gets home and blackmailing him out of the cash he has on him. These little vignettes are melodramatic and over-the-top, but they do make an effort at individualizing the girls to some degree. I don't think it quite works, and none of it really ends up mattering by the finale, though.
The focus is on Barbara, why she pushed the girl off the roof, and her quest to first get home to her policeman father, Harold (Damian O'Flynn). However, when the Black Widows show up at her door, Barabara knows that she needs to run to her errant boyfriend, the leader of the Vandals, Eddie Rand (John Brinkley) for protection. The portrait of Barbara as this girl looking for a safe harbor is the best part of the first 2/3 of the film. Kenney is good at playing distraught without overdoing it. The movie actually looks good in black and white with Corman acting getting the kind of extreme contrast the medium demands which also helps the sense of dread over the action. It's solid stuff. It's just countered by all of the other girls stealing money for ultimately no reason (there's dialogue about using it to pay off Rand to get Barbara, but it never comes to anything).
The film actually comes together quite well in its finale when the gaggle of girls that is the Black Widows zeroes in on Barbara's position at The Vandals' hideout. They bring in their affiliated boy gang, The Tarantulas, and we get this big fight where there's actually a fairly clear emotional throughline focused on Barbara through it all. It's actually quite exciting and probably the best single sequence, in context, of Corman's career up to this point.
And then...despite the Black Widows being little more than faceless since their little vignettes, they get the focus in the very end. I mean, I get it. There was work done to individualize them, but then they got lost. The story isn't theirs, it's Barbara's. It's mostly a structural thing (and length, this many characters with an actual attempt at characterization is hard to do in 70 minutes). It's not that I don't think it works, that if you recut the film to essentially cut Barbara down to little more than a plot device, that the focus wouldn't work. It's just that...it's not their story and ending on them is weird.
Anyway, it's kind of minor. This movie is fine. It's not quite good, but it represents, I think, Corman and Griffith hitting some kind of groove. They're not quite hitting goodness, but they do seem to be hitting some consistent level of basic competence across an assortment of genres. The most amazing thing, though, is how fast they were working. They released 8 films in 1957. That's a lot.
