The Violent Years

Never let it be said that Ed Wood was afraid to tackle some burning social issues and he does so again here with his usual skill. The Violent Years talks about female delinquency as wealthy, but bored Jean Moorhead gathers around her some followers and they form a girl gang. These chicks are out for action and with them being masked, the law thinks that it's after your typical male holdup gang as the girls start going through all the local filling stations.

But these brazen harlots don't stop there. Unmasked they terrorize couples in a frequented lover's lane and tie up the women and then force men to their sexual wills. I don't know about you, but that's normally the kind of thing that is not best done under pressure at the point of a gun.

In the end Moorhead is pregnant and commits murder and the wages of sin are exacted by the long arm of the law in the person of noted character actor I. Stanford Jolley who looks like he's needing some laxative as he intones the sentence and his views on parents who do not give good supervision and values to their kids. Poor Jolley who is the only person in this cast who has a decent resume probably fired his agent after he signed him up for this.

Ed Wood, they'll never be another like you.

Thoroughly entertaining for most of the time, this is the story of a bored, wealthy young woman who forms a gang with like-minded friends and has a whale of a time robbing gas stations, trashing schools and making men sexual offers they can't refuse. They are occasionally employed by Sheila, a splendid older gang moll in a tight sweater, whose appearance sadly only lasts a couple of minutes prior to her being gunned down. The plot runs from one absurdity to the next including two cop cars racing to a disturbance at a school and going in with all guns blazing, as if Bonnie and Clyde were in there. Unfortunately Mr Wood seemed to forget what the audience had paid to see, and devotes nearly a fifth of the running time to the patently phony moralizing required to justify everything else. This provides some fun in itself, with the veteran actor playing the judge clearly reading his interminable lines, while the distraught mother bemoans giving her errant daughter Paula 'a new dress instead of a caress'. In fact Paula, played by the glamorous Jean Moorhead, looks ravishing in the one-piece she wears at the pajama party, no doubt from 'Victor Most of California', who gets a credit. Pity the film was so short and the ending such a washout.

Ed Wood, purveyor of class and dignity with a veneer of exploitation, gives us a great story about the consequences of parental neglect, albeit wrapped in nice, tight sweaters.

The movie deals with a newspaperman's daughter (who looks about the same age as her parents) who has become a wild child because her father is too busy at work to notice that he keeps giving her the same birthday present every year. In addition, her mom's continuously on the charity circuit, so she's never around for those heart-to-heart talks that young women need. So, left to her own devices, she has a gang of other females in need of thrills who rob gas stations and rape young men.

While this tragedy is at times overly done, the point is still well made that parents need to be involved in their children's lives. Sterno says give The Violent Years some time from your life.

Proving Ed Wood can write just as well as he can direct, his script The Violent Years is brought to life by another director, and the result is still not good. The Violent Years comes out of an age-old theme that people mistakenly think is recent- "Today's kids are out of control and it wasn't like that when I was that age!" Except, people have been saying that forever. Check the date of the film- 1956, remembered now as a golden, Leave It to Beaver age. Like the later A Clockwork Orange, this has a gang of four teens robbing and raping- intriguingly, these four are all girls, which makes it harder to sympathize for the man who is raped- this is more male fantasy than horror.

The film starts with the girl's parents up in front of a judge, who speaks about how hard it is to try a good friend. This is indeed hard, because judges can't do it at all- they have to recuse themselves. And since when can bad parenting be punished by the law? Much of what follows is ham-handed exploration of the kind of parenting that breeds delinquency- a mom who says her daughter's issues can't be all that important. And, skipping your kid's birthdays causes crime. The girls attempting to be bad leads to leaden dialogue and acting and cheesy lines. One woman needs to be told by the man that the girls are pointing guns at them, at which point the girls compliment him for being observant. The worst the woman who gives the gang its jobs can call the girls is "jerks."

Of course, it all ends with more "If only I had..." mourning from the parents, reflecting a morality play with all the subtlety of being hit over the head with a hammer.

This film is pretty steady and mediocre (you can tell Ed didn't direct it), lacking the weirdness and spastic nature of Wood's other films. But, it also happens to be the only film you'll ever see where a MAN IS RAPED BY A GANG OF GIRLS! A truly unique moment in film history.