Someone had the brilliant idea of casting Lisa Gaye as a 26-year-old high school cheerleader named Dixie Ann Dikes. Make up your own jokes.
In the opening, Dixie is assaulted by the high school football star. Since her foster parents want nothing to do with her, she is sent to a "school for girls," but ends up as a roomie to Linda, an "alumna" of the school. Linda takes Dixie to meet her boss, who immediately decides that she should enter the Miss Colorado Beauty Contest. This makes perfect sense, since the movie was shot in Indiana.
Dixie wins the contest, becomes an instant celebrity, and meets Chuck (William Campbell). After a week together, they decide to get married. But this poses a problem for Dixie. Contestants in beauty contests are not allowed to be married, so the marriage is kept a secret. Another issue is that Chuck is a crook, but Dixie is too dumb to realize how her husband makes his money. He is supposed to be an escaped convict, yet he just comes and goes as he pleases, has a boat, swimming pool ... what the hell is this?
Things go downhill quickly, and that's just in the audience. After Chuck's plan at a kidnapping goes awry, Dixie finds out the truth. Somehow she becomes a blonde and ends up working in a seedy joint, where she is promptly slugged by a scumbag. When she recovers, she needs $40 in rent money. Her landlady looks her up and down and suggests she could probably make that amount in two hours. That's the only believable line in the film.
Dixie buys a gun, considers offing herself, then robs a drugstore instead. The courtroom finale is not to be believed.
I've seen Gaye in several movies, and her widow's peak has always bothered me. Here, she still has it, but in several scenes, it's barely noticeable, so that's a break. And she looks good in a bathing suit. Campbell is as repulsive as ever. He barks at one of his gang: "You keep your mouth shut and do what you're told or I'll cut your liver out." Personally, I would have liked to have seen that.
The rest of the cast is played by justifiably unknowns, like Sammy Mannis, who croons the equally unknown "Don't Ever Change."
The film is narrated by columnist Earl Wilson, who is saddled with crappy lines like this while describing Dixie: "The fears were gone now and so was the hurt, and there was a happy sense of belonging in the world. But yet, she still couldn't help but feel that she had been amputated somewhere."
The paying customers probably felt the same way.
