Delinquent Daughters

A young girl commits suicide which sends shockwaves through the small town. Detective Hanahan investigates. Most of her classmates are concerned but Sally Higgins is a rebel. This is low-budget exploitation film from a lower rank studio. The film quality looks bad. The production is bad. The acting is generally bad although Teala Loring has some charisma. She has some good sass for her role. Some of this is almost unwatchable. It runs out of steam before it really gets going.

This was on the compilation DVD, Cult Classics. The transfered print was awful. There was a big scratch running through print for about fifteen minutes. About fifteen minutes of the night material was so dark that you might as well be listening to the radio.

What can be seen is quite poorly written. We are talking Ed Wood bad here. A woman pulls a gun on a man. The man says, "What have you got there." She answers, "Something that goes boom, boom, boom!"

Teara Loring is interesting as a real sociopath. She really enjoys lying and stealing. Mary Boward gives a cute performance as a blond airhead, more blond and more airhead than anything in movies until Marilyn Monroe's comic performances.

Fifi D'Orsay is funny as a French woman.

Other than a few interesting performances, the bad dialogue and inane plot make the film difficult to take seriously. It is only redeemable for a few camp moments.

This one must be a real primo, getting a 3.2 rating on imdb, although that is only 200 votes, as of today. When a high school student commits suicide, a local reporter and the town want to know what happened. June Carson is... June Thompson. Fifi D'orsay is... Mimi. And local "businessman" Nick is involved in all this somehow. Count the number of times they say Aw Gee, and Swell. Like an episode of Leave it to Beaver. A PRC production. According to wikipedia dot com, they were one of the cheesier studios, low budget, churn out the B movies as quickly as possible. The acting is terrible, and the script stinks. So many screechy, giggly girls. Although... those sweater girls dress and act like its 1954, not 1944. In 44, we were still in the middle of WW II. This has the feel of a much later film. But it's still cheesy. Directed by Al Herman. Had done a lot of short films with mickey rooney. Written by Art St. Claire, whose own wife had committed suicide.

Another day, another juvenile delinquency film courtesy of poverty-row American producers. This one concerns a couple of girls who get caught up with some low rent criminal types and end up going on something of a crime spree. It's a little like a low key BONNIE AND CLYDE except made without any discernible scripting, characterisation, or narrative drive.

Indeed, this is poverty-row filmmaking at its nadir, and there's little here to tempt fans of the genre. The dialogue has been written by somebody with a tin ear and the acting is hardly up to scratch. These films always seem to have some boring reporter guy who goes undercover to bring down the criminals at large. But the worst thing about DELINQUENT DAUGHTERS is the quality of the public domain print in circulation; half the scenes have a massive scratch running down the middle of the screen, while the rest are so dark you're staring at a black screen.

The film is more than Delinquent Daughters, there are also Delinquent Sons. They could have called it Delinquent Youth/Teens. The one main delinquent daughter is Sally Higgins. Sally is the one that really loves the bad life (crime, stealing, guns, the mob). The other kids started going down the wrong path but they are fairly easy to correct... but Sally is still mad that her parents wouldn't let her see her boyfriend and the boyfriend ended up leaving town. Sally's father also hits her, leaving marks and constantly pushing Sally away from her family. - Sally is still sore about it all.

The suicide at the beginning of the film is what kicked off the police officer and reporter getting involved in the teens. The parents of the teens aren't good (example hitting the kids which pushes the kids away even more instead of drawing them in closer).

It's not a great film - but it's better than the rating suggests it is.

4/10