Claudelle Inglish

Warner Bros had a brigade of young contact stars and in fact their is a pic of J L Warner with most of them: Connie Stevens, Dorothy Provine, Van Williams,, Clint Walker , Natalie Wood, Edd Byrnes, Peter Brown, Ty Hardin among the many.

Diane McBain was a beautiful young actress with a penchant of getting in the gossip columns. Diane beat out a truly fine actress Shirley Knight - another WB star!-for the lead role in this film shot in black and white. WB stars Chad Everett, Robert Logan, and Robert Colbert were also in the cast. Diane plays it well as a Southern girl out to put the make on men.

Diane McBain made a few more movies such as Troy Donahue's Parrish which has Diane's opening scene sensational as the rolls out of a car and those magnetic eyes of Diane's mesmerizing! , and Raoul Walsh's A Distant Trumpet with Troy Donahue and Suzy Pleshette, with Debbie Reynolds in Mary, Mary, but left the studio rather than play a small part in WB''s big budget Sex And The Single Girl with Tony Curtis, Natalie Wood, Henry Fonda, Lauren Bacall and Mel Ferrer directed by Richard Quine. Richard Quine fell in love with Kim Novak and his films with Kim such as Bell Book And Candle, Strangers When We Meet, Notorious Landlady reveal l Kim at her most lush beauty. Diane should have done Sex And The Sungle Girl with Quine; He may have made her a great star as he did Kim.

I remember this film from the very early '60s. In those years we saw a lot of movies at the so-called "grind houses" on West 42nd Street (on both sides of Times Square); the deal, for us, was terrific: a double feature for "never more than 99 cents!" The first film to break that price barrier was Mercouri's NEVER ON Sunday. After her amazing bitchiness in A SUMMER PLACE, Constance Ford was again remarkable in this motion picture. I feel that this film, like too many others, is nearly forgotten today. But, when graduates, with a B.F.A. in Film, Theatre and Television, can look you in the eye and confess that they've "never heard of Marlene Dietrich", what can one expect?! Another one, a 2004 NYU grad, had never heard of THE GLASS MENAGERIE. Perhaps it's not the students but the schools that are failing!

Potboiler from Erskine Caldwell's novel about a Southern sharecropper's daughter, broken-hearted after being rejected by her soldier-fiancé, turning from timid girl to tramp in order to even the score. Producer-screenwriter Leonard Freeman is rather timid himself within this potentially sweaty and sinful scenario; we're never sure just how far our heroine is going sexually with the drooling males in town--or if she's just a tease (had the film been made only a few years later, it might've been a more salacious melodrama). Diane McBain is well-cast as Claudelle Inglish, and she gives a good performance, but restrictions of the era prevent her and director Gordon Douglas from exploring the character with any depth. As a result, the finale doesn't provide the emotional punch Freeman or Douglas probably hoped for. Instead of being a classic tragic figure, Claudelle merely seems guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. **1/2 from ****

"Claudelle Inglish" is a well made movie but it's also rather dark and depressing. This isn't so much a complaint--I'm just trying to let you know in case you are thinking about watching it.

Diane McBain stars as the title character, an innocent and nice young lady. However, she quickly transforms from this to a 'bad girl' in her small home town after she is jilted by her jerk of a fiancé. Now she uses men and cares little about them--in her odd attempt to punish men in general for her stupid fiancé. Since the film was made in the early 60s, it's really unclear whether Claudelle is sleeping around or if she's just a tease--but it is clear that she uses men to get what she wants. How will this ultimately lead to disaster? See the film.

The acting is very good here--particularly by Arthur Kennedy who plays Claudelle's father. Well worth seeing and very unique...but also a tad unpleasant.

This movie starts out appearing to be the usual b-movie shlock morality tale - and that beginning is where any similarity ends. Claudelle Inglish winds up having a place right beside movies like Showgirls and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, just for sheer shock value.

The basic premise is familiar enough, sweet young thing is seduced and then jilted. However, nobody knows that, since her beau is not a total creep; her shameful secret is still safe from the townspeople who would label her a whore - so here's where the fun starts, since our heroine, literally overnight, decides to transform herself into the town tramp anyway. Why? Uhhh, why not?

Of course it would have made perfect sense for Claudelle to just go ahead and marry the older, unappealing rich man who all but drools on her, but that would be too easy, and it won't happen here. In fact nothing here plays out the way you would expect it to, and that is the brilliance of this film and why it is something you have to see to believe.

This is trash at its very finest, and to tell anything more about what happens after Claudelle creates her own hell would spoil everything.