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Teenage Doll (1957)

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Teenage Doll

7 reseñas
6/10

It could not be pretty...and still be true!

Reasonably fun, trashy melodrama from the redoubtable team of screenwriter Charles B. Griffith and producer / director Roger Corman. June Kenney, receiving an official "introducing" credit, is appealing as Barbara Bonney, an upper class kind of gal who believes that she's committed murder. A girl gang called The Black Widows spends the night relentlessly tracking her down, while she tries to make it to what she perceives as safety.

This amusing Corman quickie purports to be touching upon the "important" real life topic of juvenile delinquency, but in reality it's not really something to be taken all that seriously, despite that opening text. It *is* entertaining, and Corman keeps the pace reasonably taut so that the story clocks in at just around 68 minutes. It's got solid atmosphere, some humour, and a respectable rumble during the finale.

The pretty Ms. Kenney makes a noble effort at acting her heart out, particularly when she's required to recite her story in front of a crowd. John Brinkley makes the most of his role as confident, swaggering male gang leader Eddie Rand. There are solid actors in the supporting cast, consisting of Corman regulars like Barboura Morris, Richard Devon, Richard H. Cutting, Ed Nelson, Bruno VeSota, and Paul Bryar. But this little movie truly belongs to a memorable Fay Spain, as Black Widows leader "Hel". She sinks her teeth into her role and dialogue, and is the most entertaining person to watch here.

Far from Cormans' best, but it does just fine for a nights' viewing.

Six out of 10.
  • Hey_Sweden
  • 4 mar 2016
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5/10

1950s mean girls

This Roger Corman film, Teenage Doll from 1957, is a hoot.

The Black Widows, a teenage girl gang, discover one of their find one of their members dead from a fall off of a roof. They are pretty sure the villain is Barbara (June Kenney), as the two women were fighting for the affections of a real prize - Eddie (John Brinkley) of the gang Eddie and the Vandals. If there was ever someone not worth committing murder for, it's Eddie. But there we are.

I didn't think it was possible to see a film where I hadn't heard of anyone - but turns out I did remember the head of the Widows, Faye Spain, who plays Helen (aptly nicknamed Hel). She did a lot of television. Also Richard Devon, who played a detective, from Yancy Derringer. Misspent youth.

Hel (Spain) sends everyone home to find money or something Eddie would want - they need a signed confession from Barbara, and they figure she ran to Eddie.

We get to see each girl's home life. Hel's father entertains prostitutes while her mother works a night shift. Another girl lives in squalor with a little sister she yells at. On the way out, she finds a box of crackers to give her. I do hope a social worker intervened. Another girl's father is a cop, so she gets his gun, which Eddie will consider the ultimate prize.

Barbara lives in a decent home with strict parents. The Widows didn't think she would be stupid enough to go home, but she was. Her mother wears pigtails and a big bow on her head. I'd rebel too.

Barbara sneaks out and makes her way to Eddie's clubhouse behind an auto shop. She's forced to tell the story of the death in front of everyone. It was an accident. The victim accused her of doing terrible things with Eddie. I suppose he put his tongue down her throat. June Kenney's acting is appalling.

The gangs - the Widows, the Vandals, the Tarantulas, gather in the auto shop for a rumble.

Pretty bad, and not well structured. There's a caution in the beginning about female delinquency that some reviewers laughed off. If you watch true crime, you know teen girls kill other teen girls and it's usually no accident. And it's horrible. Mean girls exist. And they come from better homes than this crowd.
  • blanche-2
  • 9 jun 2025
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6/10

The girls are not alright!

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.
  • davidmvining
  • 6 feb 2025
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3/10

Dumb but watchable.

  • planktonrules
  • 9 jul 2009
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1/10

Ranks among the rank.

  • mark.waltz
  • 6 nov 2015
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3/10

"This story is about a sickness, a spreading epidemic" (No, not COVID)

  • scsu1975
  • 26 nov 2022
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9/10

Desperate young beauty spends all night fleeing from street gang's vengeance

  • mlraymond
  • 20 oct 2006
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