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They Were So Young (1954)

An early widescreen movie. It's low budget (showing how mainstream the format had become this first full year of its use), but has some terrific scenes and a fun twist of a plot about a scheme to trap young European girls into a modeling gig in Rio that turns into a kind of prostitution slave-girl trade.

The big star is Raymond Burr, who is excellent in his brief appearances, but the main man is a likable Scott Brady, who is an archetypal nice guy American who sees trouble in this foreign land and saves the damsels who would otherwise perish. It's an odd twist that the bad guys in Brazil are actually American, too (Burr), but that's probably good, not to typecast the South Americans as the bad guys.

Director Kurt Neumann is famous for the idiosyncratic and important original version of "The Fly" as well as the notoriously awful "She-Demon." The long list of his films includes a lot of dregs, including a series of half-length movies (called streamliners) that were super low budget fillers. But because of all this work he was an experienced pro by 1954, and adapted to the wide screen exotic scenario here pretty well. The story, however streamlined itself, is a believable and frightening one. If the outcome is too predictable, that's true with half of Hollywood, so just go for the ride.

An American engineer helps a German girl escape the clutches of a white slavery ring in South America.

The movie's a peculiar production. The origin appears West German since the names in the credit crawl are German, while the cast, except for Brady, is also German. I guess the film was released here by Lindsley Parsons' low-budget outfit. All in all, the package seems odd since not many English-language films came from West Germany during this post-war period.

Anyway, the result plays like an exploitation movie with its tawdry subject-matter (notice all the euphemisms used for the taboo word "prostitute"), plus a suggestive title that, as I recall, was heavily promoted at the time. The opening part in the city plays pretty well, but once the action moves inland, the screenplay becomes darn near incoherent with its shifting locales minus connecting segues.

Still, Matz is a spunky little number, reminding me of Debbie Reynolds with an accent, while Brady delivers a surprisingly spirited performance as the white knight. Burr turns up in a sinister role so typical of his pre-Perry Mason period; at the same time, his jumbo tropical suit suggests a younger version of the great Sydney Greenstreet.

The movie has a few good moments and some suspense, but on the whole fails to rise above the level of exotic sleaze.

This is a German film and not any American Hollywood production, and it is not filmed on location in the swamps of Brazil but actually in Hamburg studios, but it is well made and surprisingly convincing for being all artifice. The story is true though, these rackets did go on and probably still go on today, and we shall never know how many girls from how many countries were lost this way. The music is good also and the one enjoyable thing about the movie. Raymond Burr is as impressive as ever as a qualified villain of professional double standards, and Scott Brady is a positive surprise for his honest acting. Johanna Matz like the other girls all young and pretty also make one-sidedly good impressions, especially Johanna Matz for her innocence. The Brazilian insights, especially in the row aboard the river boat in the end, are delightful, and the story makes sense although scary without exaggerations. It is worth watching but no more.

They Were So Young (aka: Violated, aka: Party Girls For Sale) is an exotic and entertaining late film noir (broadly speaking), set in Brazil, produced in Germany, and featuring second-tier American stars Scott Brady and Raymond Burr. Apparently American pictures were so popular abroad in the 1950's, a couple of Hollywood players at the top of the bill, even lesser lights like Brady and Burr) would ensure better box office both over there and over here. In the English-dubbed version it's obvious only the two American actors are actually speaking English, and were no doubt dubbed over in the original German. Not that you ever forget this is a German production! Most of the characters have Portuguese sounding names but look about as Brazilian as sauerkraut. Michael Jary's full-bodied score sounds like Wagner frolicking about South America. But it works for the best, as all the villains except for Burr are played by Germans such as Gert Forbe. And those Teutonic types -- let's face it, they're not good at anything if not good at sinister! A kinky middle-age dame with the mouth-full handle of Gisela Fackeldey plays a menacing madam in charge of the exploited models to which the title refers. If she had still been in the pink in the 1970's, she would have been the perfect cruel women's SS camp commandant in that shabby species of exploitation films.

This movie teaches two basic morals. Numer one, some guys are turned on by getting crowned on the head with a water decanter. You will have to watch the picture to discover how that one works. Number two is stated in the above summary. Watch out for newspaper ads that promise too much! That's how a covey of pretty and shapely young models are lured to Rio De Janeiro, supposedly to model high-class duds, but in reality to become high-class call girls. Nasty things happen to those unfortunate lasses who try to back out. Our heroine, very comely Johanna Matz, is more determined than most. She enlists the aid of good guy Brady, a mining engineer in Rio looking for a good time. Follows an action-filled, suspenseful and atmospheric adventure in jungle roads, rivers, and villas. Particularly atmospheric and exciting are the climactic scenes on board and around a broken-down tub of a river boat, which is actually a sleazy floating bordello.

Too much ink has been vainly spilled over whether this picture, or various others, qualifies as a film noir. A noir picture does not have to have starkly shadowed and obliquely angled cinematography, or a femme fa-tale, or a morally ambiguous protagonist, though all of these elements are frequently seen. A dark, seamy story will do. But then the more discerning cinema critics confess that "noir" is not actually a genre but more of a style or better yet a mood. It springs from the dark, doom-laden, uncertain, bitter-sweet, dream-like -- even nightmarish -- ambiance of the 1940's. In that decade almost every Hollywood picture produced reflects at least a touch of that mood, even the Westerns. It bleeds into the early 1950's, but it was fading by the time of They Were So Young. Though the term "film noir" was hardly even known to movie makers or audiences of the time, who knew these pictures simply a "melodramas" or "thrillers", it may well be that film-makers in Europe at least, such as They Were So Young's producer/director Kurt Neuman were self-consciously attempting to capture the mood.

They Were So Young captures enough of the noir mood and has enough of the traditional noir elements that it can't be said VCI Entertainment misrepresents the case including the picture in its nicely restored "Forgotten Noir Double Feature" DVD. Attractive lead players, stalwart villainy, atmospheric, suspenseful and entertaining. Better than many of the similar Hollywood efforts of the time, I regret to say.

Ninety-percent of this film is a well-made, exciting white slavery melodrama about a German girl lured to Brazil for "modeling" work but trapped in a white slavery racket. She turns to an American engineer working in Rio (Scott Brady) who initially asks for help from a powerful Brazilian industrialist, Jaime Coltos (Raymond Burr), but soon suspects that Coltos is not exactly what he appears to be. That's all developed well and acted convincingly by Burr, Brady, and newcomer Johanna Matz. Then there is a frame story explained in a talky prologue about how Coltos almost led Southern Brazil to secede from the rest of the country and how Coltos, modeling himself after Jefferson Davis and Aaron Burr (!!!) was a brilliant strategist and almost a dictator. And at the end of the film, after the white slavery plot has been resolved and you think the film is over, we go back to the two characters in the frame story--a general and an American reporter--and we learn that Coltos was eventually found guilty of high treason and sentenced to hard labor for life. While Raymond Burr's character may be a crook and control a corrupt machine, there doesn't seem to be anything "political" about his actions in the film. I wonder if the frame story was added after the fact? And I wonder why? In any event, this little-known entry in the Raymond Burr filmography is worth seeking out. Coincidentally, it was one of the last releases of Lippert Pictures, the interesting low-budget company that was a kind of PRC of the late 40s and early 50s. Lippert always padded its release schedule with imported films, including a number of excellent UK and continental crime/mystery films, some featuring American stars, and as the studio wound down to its end, more and more foreign films appeared. My review has been of the US release of this film, entitled THEY WERE SO YOUNG (AND SO IN DANGER). Perhaps someone who has the original German language version could tell us if the frame story exists in the original, or if there were political elements in the main plot that were cut out for the American release.