Bluebeard (1944)

Bluebeard is a 1944 PRC release directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and starring John Carradine. It combines melodrama and horror in a characteristically Ulmer way and it’s also interesting as being a serial killer movie which was fairly rare at the time.

Ulmer wrote the original story. It is of course inspired partly by the fairy tale but also by a real-life serial killer who was executed in France in 1922.

The movie clearly takes place in the 19th century and during the Third Republic so it has to be the late 19th century.

Gaston Morel (John Carradine) is a talented painter who has given up painting to concentrate on his marionette theatre. We know right from the start that Morel is a killer (in fact he’s the notorious murderer who has been dubbed Bluebeard). He has killed more than once.

We later find out that his killings are connected with his paintings and that he wants to stop painting so that he can stop killing.

He meets a pretty young seamstress named Lucille (Jean Parker). There’s an immediate attraction between the two of them. Morel is anxious to avoid painting her because he has no desire to kill her. She is not like those other women. She is a woman worth loving.

Inspector Jacques Lefevre (Nils Asther) is investigating the murders. Assisting him is Francine (Teala Loring) who just happens to be Lucille’s sister. Francine works for the Sûreté. She’s a kind of undercover cop. Neither sister is aware that they are both going to be involved in very different ways with the Bluebeard killer.

He is tempted to paint one of the sisters. He knows it’s a bad idea but he needs money and he’s been offered a very generous fee by art dealer Jean Lamarte (Ludwig Stössel). Lamarte is a less than ethical art dealer and he knows Morel’s secret.

The inspector and Francine have a plan to trap Bluebeard but it’s a very risky plan and Morel is a smart guy, and very cautious.

Gaston Morel is a tortured soul. He is driven to kill against his will. It’s a kind of madness that comes over him. It has to do with a woman in his past, and a painting. Morel is perhaps over-sensitive with an artistic but unstable personality. John Carradine gives his career-best performance and imbues Morel with a strange tragic dignity. Morel is doomed but although in his rational phases he tries to escape that doom he cannot escape his periodic bouts of madness. Carradine had been Shakespearian actor and he plays Morel as a Shakespearian tragic hero. It’s also notable that at no point in this film does Carradine overact. It’s a superbly controlled performance.

Jean Parker is very good. In fact the whole cast is good, and the performances are better than you might expect in a movie made by PRC, usually considered to be the cheapest and shoddiest of the Poverty Row studios.

It’s common to assume that all PRC productions were made on ludicrously low budgets. This has been considerably exaggerated and Bluebeard was not the ultra-cheap production it’s often assumed to have been. It cost $167,000 and the shoot took 19 days.

There’s some fine very moody cinematography courtesy of Eugen Schüfftan (who was the cinematographer but had to remain uncredited due to problems with the union). There are some definite hints of German Expressionism in the flashback sequences. There’s one particularly fine shot with shadows and puppets.

The script ran into some problems with the Production Code Authority. Joe Breen wanted some changes made. Ulmer agreed but when he shot the movie he largely ignored Breen’s objections and most of the material he had agreed to remove is still there in the final film.

Despite his rocky career path Ulmer managed to make some very fine movies and Bluebeard is one of his best. And there’s Carradine’s magnificent performance. Highly recommended.

Kino Lorber have released this movie on Blu-Ray and it certainly looks better than it has ever looked before. It is now possible to appreciate to the full the fine cinematography and art direction. We can now see that this was really quite a classy production.

I’ve reviewed lots of Ulmer’s movies including Ruthless (1948), the very underrated The Strange Woman (1946) and his most acclaimed movie, Detour (1945).

There have of course been quite a few movies inspired by the Bluebeard fairy tale, one of my favourites being Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door… (1948).

The Flaming Teenage (1956)

The Flaming Teenage is a 1956 American moral panic movie. This time the moral panic is about teenagers and alcohol. All it takes is one drink to set a good well-behaved young man on the downhill slide into the nightmare world of depravity and crime.

In fact this movie is more of a moral lesson about what to expect from the exploitation movie business, as we will soon see.

It starts, like so many similar films, with a guy in a suit sitting behind a desk informing the audience of the horrors they’re about to see and warning that this could happen to your son.

Then we see a teenager staggering down a road dead drunk picked up by the cops. The next day the kid’s dad decides to teach him a lesson - he takes on a tour of the city’s bars and night-clubs. Once Junior witnesses the degeneracy to which alcohol inevitably leads he’ll be too scared ever to touch a drink again.

Then we get the narrator back again to inform us that now we’re going to see the real-life story of Fred Garland, another chilling illustration of the perils of the demon drink.

Fred Garland is a very young man who has his own business - a small-town candy store. Fred has a nice girlfriend named Mary. But he isn’t happy. He hates small-town life. He dreams of making it big in the big city.

One night at a party someone slips something into his drink - alcohol! Fred and Mary only drink soda pop and fruit juice. That one taste of booze will destroy Fred’s life!

Fred sells the candy store and moves to New York. He becomes a theatrical producer and then a booking agent but by now he’s hooked on the booze. He stumbles from disaster to disaster and like everyone who makes the mistake of taking one drink he ends up as a dope dealer and a drug addict and winds up behind bars.

He doesn’t just wreck his own life - he breaks Mary’s heart and he breaks his parents’ hearts.

I believe this movie was originally shot in 1945 (under the title Twice Convicted) but unreleased at the time and then released in 1956 with additional footage to make it look like a new movie. This was not an uncommon practice in the classic exploitation movie days. In this case the formula was to take a very dull 1940s moral scare exploitation movie and add some contemporary footage with teenagers and crazy rock’n’roll music to convince audiences foolish enough to part with their money that they were going to see an exciting contemporary story of thrill-seeking teenagers.

The contrast between the new footage (with 1950s fashions and music) and the old footage (with fashions and music from more than a decade earlier) is quite jarring. There’s no logical connection whatsoever between the new footage and the old. The new footage is quite amusing with its ridiculously over-earnest tone. The old footage is just stodgy and melodramatic (but not melodramatic in a good way).

The acting, in both the new and old footage, is astonishingly amateurish.

Irvin S. Yeaworth Jr. (best known for directing The Blob) and Charles Edwards are the credited directors but I have no idea which of them directed which bits of this composite movie but I believe that Yeaworth probably only directed the Fred Garland footage. Yeaworth spent the latter part of his career making religious films which won’t surprise you after seeing The Flaming Teenage.

Alpha Video have released this movie paired this with another “these crazy teenagers today” moral scare movie, The Prime Time. The transfer is fullframe (which is quite correct) and it’s fairly typical of what you expect from Alpha Video - it’s dark and murky and image quality is a bit on the fuzzy side. But it’s watchable. Sound quality is OK.

The Flaming Teenage has a few (a very few) amusing moments but mostly it’s about as exciting as reading temperance tracts. If you’re expecting a fun juvenile delinquent flick you’re in for a disappointment. It doesn’t even have camp value. Not recommended but if you buy the disc to get The Prime Time and you’re incredibly bored and you can’t find anything else to watch then I guess you could risk it. Just make sure you have a generous supply of alcohol on hand.

Pin-Down Girl (1951)

Pin-Down Girl (AKA Racket Girls) is very low-budget (and I mean very very low-budget) 1951 American exploitation movie about lady wrestlers. There’s a flimsy plot about racketeering and lots of footage of women wrestling. The tag-line is The Strange Love-Life of a Wrestling Gal. That was enough to hook me.

Timothy Farrell (a character factor who was especially good at playing sleazebags) plays Umberto Scalli, a mobster who runs a variety of rackets. He uses women’s wrestling as a front for his operations. Farrell played the same character in the very entertaining Dance Hall Racket a couple of years later.

Scalli has been skimming off a lot of money from the rackets and now he’s in big trouble with the local Mr Big of organised crime, known as Mr Big. Mr Big wants Scalli to repay $35,000 pronto but Scalli doesn’t have the money and that could be real bad for his health if he can’t come up with a solution.

He tries various schemes to fix horse races and wrestling bouts but he discovers that lady wrestlers are proud women and they’re incorruptible.

Scalli has other problems. While he’s been cheating Mr Big his own employees have been  cheating him. And his book-keeper is informing on him to Mr Big. So the last thing he needs at this point in time is to be dragged before a Senate committee but that’s the next misfortune that befalls him.

Scalli has just bought the contract of a buxom lady wrestler named Peaches Page (played by Peaches Page). Although the other girls try to warn Peaches she falls for Scalli anyway. She’s a nice girl but maybe a bit naïve. Scalli’s approach with women is painfully obvious but I guess that a lot of the girls who come into contact with him want to believe his lies.

A criticism often made of this movie is that there’s too much footage of women’s wrestling, or women practising their wrestling in the gym. What on earth is wrong with some people? The whole point of watching a movie like this is to see lady wrestlers wrestling. You just can’t please some people.

The acting is terrible of course (this was a true exploitation movie and thus even further down the food chain than Poverty Row B-pictures) but it’s the right kind of terrible acting for this sort of movie. It works for me. And Timothy Farrell is awesomely slimy. Peaches Page can’t really act but she has a certain presence, and she has the kind of body that men went nuts for in the 50s. The cast includes actual champion women wrestlers (or so we’re told and they certainly seem to know their stuff).

There are only about three sets and they’re basic to say the least. This is another odd criticism levied at this movie. These exploitation movies were made for next to nothing, certainly far less than even the cheapest Poverty Row B-movies, and on absurdly tight shooting schedules. Of course they look ultra-cheap. If you enjoy the exploitation movies of the 30s to the 50s then you’ll find that the cheapness is part of their charm. It makes them more fun.

This is the kind of movie that relies on promising subject matter that is more lurid and more sensational than the movie can actually deliver but that’s what exploitation films were all about. There’s zero nudity. There is however an atmosphere of hard-boiled sleaze which is rather appealing.

Writer-director Robert C. Dertano also helmed the absolutely fantastic 1954 juvenile delinquent flick Girl Gang (which is an absolute must-see and also features Timothy Farrell) so this is a guy with a definite knack for exploitation sleaze. That’s my kind of guy.

Alpha Video’s DVD release offers a very basic VHS-quality transfer and the sound is kinda scratchy at times. Given that it’s not very likely this movie is ever going to get a Special Edition Blu-Ray release and it’s not likely to ever get any restoration at all then if you want to see it the Alpha Video DVD is your only option. And it’s not like you’re missing out on appreciating any visual brilliance or any stunning cinematography.

Pin-Down Girl combines gangsters and lady wrestlers. Serious, what’s not to love about that? OK, as wrestling women movies go maybe it doesn’t have the inspired craziness of Mexican masterpieces like Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Mummy but it’s still a great deal of disreputable fun. I recommend it.

Midnight Frolics (1949)

Midnight Frolics, made around 1949, is a burlesque movie. The burlesque movie is one of those odd and now incredibly obscure exploitation genres. It enjoyed a vogue in the 40s and 50s and then vanished without trace when other exploitation genres emerged that could show a great deal more skin.

Of course burlesque itself is an art form that is also long gone, somewhat ironically swept away by the sexual revolution. Everyone has heard of burlesque and most people they have at least a vague idea that it was synonymous with strip-tease. In fact strip-tease was merely one element of the classic burlesque show. A show would also feature singers, fully clothed musical routines and comics. It was kind of like vaudeville but with semi-naked ladies.

For those who wonder what an actual burlesque show was like there is no need to wonder. Quite a few burlesque shows were filmed and quite a few of these burlesque movies survive. Some can be found online or on public domain DVD releases but the quality is often dire. Fortunately Something Weird Video offered something much better - a two-disc set including six complete feature-length burlesque movies of the late 40s and early 50s, with very acceptable transfers.

Midnight Frolics is the first movie on disc one and it’s the only one I’ve watched so far.

Of course there is no plot at all. It’s just a filmed stage show (filmed at the Belasco Theater in Los Angeles). There are lots of strip-tease artistes but there’s also plenty of the other characteristic burlesque acts.

The comedy routines are excruciatingly bad. I wasn’t surprised that there were plenty of dirty jokes but I was surprised that most of the jokes aren’t sexual jokes but rather crude toilet humour. Of the four or five comic turns there is one that has some amusing moments and it’s the clean parts of the routine that provide the only laughs.

There’s a girl singer who’s OK. There are several all-singing all-dancing big production numbers that involve absolutely no nudity or even any suggestion of such a thing. They’re just the kinds of production numbers you’d expect to see in an average B-movie musical of that era. They’re actually not too bad. And there’s a girl acrobat.

Of course what attracted customers to burlesque shows and burlesque movie was the prospect of seeing attractive ladies taking their clothes off. And this movie features lots of strippers. In the heyday of burlesque the girls usually did not strip naked (although I believe that when they played cities that were known for their relaxed approach to such matters they did on occasion strip fully naked). In this movie they don’t even go close to nakedness. Relatively substantial G-strings and bras is as far as they go. The secret to the success of the strip-tease artiste was her ability to make the audience think she was being much naughtier than she actually was. So if you think you’re going to see naked female flesh you’re going to be disappointed. This is stuff that would be considered only just raunchy enough to get a PG rating today!

It is interesting to see how the classical strip-tease act actually worked. Each girl’s routine is broken into three distinct segments. First she does a fully-clothed dance that is breathtakingly respectable. Mind you, in those days the strippers actually did know how to dance. She then leaves the stage and immediately returns and does her strip-tease. She then leaves the stage again and again immediately returns, this time to do another dance. This third stage is in all cases by far the most raunchy part of the act. They’re now scantily clad and they’re getting into bump and grind territory. These young ladies know how to shake those parts of the female anatomy that look good when they’re shaking. While it would still seem very tame compared to what strippers were getting up to a few decades later they do achieve a degree or eroticism that would have been fairly exciting at the time and actually seems quite attractive today for its ability to be sexually suggestive without being crude.

The star performer of this show is a young lady named Sunny Knight. She also incidentally is the one who ends up most scantily clad. I rather suspect that being allowed to reveal a lot more flesh may have been one of the privileges of stardom.

This is one of the six burlesque movies in Something Weird's Strip Strip Hooray two-disc set.

Midnight Frolics has a lot of historical cultural interest. It’s an intriguing glimpse of an extinct art form and it’s a reminder of an era when the emphasis was on sexiness rather than sex. Whether you’ll enjoy the movie depends entirely on how interested you are in burlesque.

The Man They Could Not Hang (1939)

The Man They Could Not Hang is a 1939 Columbia horror flick starring Boris Karloff as a mad scientist.

Dr Henryk Savaard (Karloff) is a brilliant scientist who has come up with an amazing breakthrough that will revolutionise surgery. He has invented a mechanical artificial heart which allows him to kill a patient and then bring him back to life. As he explains, you can’t repair an engine while the engine is running. You switch off the engine, do the repairs, and then restart the engine. It’s the same with the human body - if you can bring it to a complete standstill the surgeon has enough time to do the necessary repair work while the patient is technically dead, after which the patient can be revived.

He naturally needs to put his theories into practice, and a young medical student volunteers to be the first human subject (Dr Savaard has already tested his theories successfully on animals). Unfortunately the medical student’s girlfriend panics and calls the police. Dr Savaard pleads with them to give him time to revive the young man but the police surgeon decides that Dr Savard’s theories are dangerous nonsense and refuses. As a result the young man dies and Dr Savaard is charged with murder.

Dr Savaard stands trial and is condemned to death. He is naturally very embittered about his experience and vows to take his revenge on the fools who have condemned him - the jury, the judge and the police surgeon. Of course he won’t be able to carry out his plan of revenge if he is put to death. Or will he? Putting a man to death who knows the secret of life and death is not an easy matter.

This is a classic mad scientist film. The mad scientist starts out as an idealistic and humane man who only wants to benefit the human race, but misunderstood and condemned he is transformed into a homicidal madman.

This is the sort of role Karloff always played so well. It gives him the opportunity to be both a crazed monster and a gentle sensitive man. Karloff plays both sides of Dr Savaard’s personality to perfection. The supporting actors are all quite adequate but Karloff dominates the movie completely.

Director Nick Grinde spent his entire career making B-movies and he does a competent if not unspectacular job, and he doesn’t commit the cardinal sin of low-budget film-making - he doesn’t allow the pace to flag. He keeps things moving, and with a reasonably good story and a fine actor like Karloff that’s enough.

The settings for both the mad scientist laboratory and the revenge scenes look reasonably impressive. The visuals are nothing spectacular but they’re effective enough.

The movie raises the usual questions that mad scientist movies raise. How far should science go? Are there territories that should be off-limits to science? Should scientists be free to pursue their researches no matter where those researches take them? The movie doesn’t really draw any profound conclusions about these matters, other than suggesting that the dangers of science going too far are real, especially the dangers to the scientist himself.

The biggest strength of this movie is Karloff’s subtle performance as a man who tries to be a benefactor of mankind only to find himself labelled as a madman and a murderer. Karloff pretty much carries the movie single handed and he’s more than equal to the task. This is an entertaining movie even if it reaches no great heights and it can certainly be recommended to fans of 1930s horror and to Karloff fans.

This movie is released on DVD as part of Columbia’s Icons of Horror: Boris Karloff collection. There’s a lack of extras but it’s a nice clean print.

Dance Hall Racket (1953)

I adore the classical era of American exploitation movies, from the 1930s to the 50s. None of the these movies could possibly be considered a good movie by any conventional standard of film criticism, but it’s their very flaws that make them fun.

The stilted dialogue, the wooden acting, the contrived (and very thin) plots and the crude sets - all combined with sex, sin and sleaze (or at least the promise of sex, sin and sleaze). It’s a recipe for campy movie fun.

Dance Hall Racket was made in 1953 but has the feel of exploitation movies of the 40s. It’s greatest claim to fame is probably that the screenplay was written by Lenny Bruce, stand-up comedy legend, counter-culture hero and all-round loser. And he not only wrote the film, he plays one of the leading roles. His stripper wife Honey and his mother also appear in this film.

Like most exploitation movies it has a little plot that even with a running time of less than an hour it still feels padded out. Umberto Scalli (Timothy Farrell), a character who appeared in several earlier exploitation films, runs a dance hall. It’s one of those dance halls where the customers buy a ticket that entitles them to dance with one of the hostesses. It’s not quite a clip joint but it’s close. It also serves as a front for Scalli’s smuggling operations and assorted criminal activities.

The authorities are aware of Scalli’s activities and they’ve got an undercover agent planted in the club. Scalli’s chief henchman is the sociopathic Vinnie (Lenny Bruce). Vinnie is a little heavy-handed and when ordered to rough someone up he more often than not kills them. There’s a kind of romantic triangle involving Scalli, Vinnie and one of Scalli’s dance hall girls.

I don’t want to give the impression there’s a coherent plot happening here. There isn’t. Even by exploitation movie standards the acting is jaw-droppingly awful. And if you were wondering why Lenny Bruce didn’t go on to have a glittering career as a screenwriter you need only watch this movie. Phil Tucker’s direction is basic at best.

The sleaze is mostly implied although there is some blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nudity and there are countless scenes of the dance hall girls getting dressed and undressed. Again it’s pretty standard for exploitation movies of this era.

In fact it’s a staggeringly bad movie.

Its one big asset is Timothy Farrell. He’s one of the legends of exploitation film-making and can always be relied upon to deliver an outrageously entertaining performance. Acting was a sideline for Farrell who worked for the LA Sheriff’s Department, eventually becoming County Marshall before being fired in 1975.

Dance Hall Racket is included as an extra on the Alpha Video DVD release of Sin You Sinners (a reasonably entertaining early sexploitation feature). It’s a fairly atrocious print but it’s hardly likely this movie is ever going to be released as part of the Criterion Collection so this is probably the best version we’re ever likely to see. And it’s good value double-movie set.

Despite its faults, or more probably because of them, Dance Hall Racket is great fun. If you’re a fan of exploitation movies you’ll certainly want to see this one.

Confessions of a Vice Baron (1943)

Confessions of a Vice Baron is a great example of the recycling abilities of the exploitation movie makes of the 30s and 40s. Can you shoot just a few minutes of new footage, using a single actor and a single set, and still come up with a feature film? Of course you can! Willis Kent Productions can show you how.

The method used was quite ingenious. Willy Castello had made numerous movies for Willis Kent Productions over the preceding decade or so, always playing a sleazy bad guy of some description. So a framing story was devised - gangster Lucky Lombardo is about to go to the electric chair and decides to tell his story as a warning to others that there’s no such thing as easy money, that vice will always be punished. His criminal career is then recounted in a series of flashbacks, the flashbacks being made up entirely from footage from previous Willis Kent films.

The fact that Willy Castello played different characters in all these movies is no problem - he simply tells us he used a wide variety of aliases. And whatever type of bad guy he played in the earlier movies, whether he was a white slaver, a gigolo, an abortionist or whatever, is equally simply explained as another phase in his varied career.

It’s a shameless ploy to produce a movie for almost no outlay whatsoever but it works surprisingly well. All the movies Willy Castello made were of a similar type - outrageous exploitation shockers. So stringing bits and pieces of them together makes perfect sense.

And the advantage of this technique is that you get every imaginable exploitation element combined in one movie! There’s some fairly lurid content here. Plenty of shots of young ladies in sexy 1940s underwear - these were practically compulsory in exploitation movies. But there’s actual nudity as well. Not a while lot of violence but violence wasn’t the main attraction in exploitation movies, even those concerned with organised crime.

Willy Castello was always an entertaining villain. Not a great actor by any means but perfect for these types of movies.

Naturally this movie has the other qualities that aficionados of the classical exploitation movie enjoy - the acting by the supporting players is delightfully bad, the sets are incredibly cheap, and everything looks the way you’d expect in movies made on minuscule budgets. There’s a certain film noirish ambience as well, but with sexual content that you won’t find in actual film noir. Being made entirely outside the Hollywood studio system and not being subject to the Production Code exploitation producers was certainly an advantage. There were still limits, mainly imposed by the various state censorship boards but they could still get away with a lot more than any of the established studios could.

The framing story here provides the perfect “square-up” - the moralising message that Crime Does Not Pay which then justifies all the wickedness presented by the movie. The square-up just makes these movies that much more fun.

Confessions of a Vice Baron is included in the fabulous Girls Gone Bad - the Delinquent Dames Collection DVD boxed set. They’re all public domain titles and the quality is variable but the picture quality is at least watchable on all of them and it’s a terrific selection of exploitation movie naughtiness.

Sucker Money (1933)

Willis Kent Productions was one of those movie production companies that was even further down the food chain than the Poverty Row studios. They were involved in some Poverty Row productions but mostly they catered to the exploitation market, making sensationalistic potboilers such as Sucker Money.

Although it came out in 1933 I’m not sure that it actually qualifies as a pre-code movie. Willis Kent movies were the types of movies, in common with other exploitation movies of the period from the 30s to the 50s, that were generally distributed outside the established distribution networks dominated by the major studios. Even when the Production Code came in these tiny companies weren’t bound by its rules anyway.

Although Sucker Money was apparently filmed in the studios of Republic Pictures the studio doesn’t appear to have had any actual involvement. Presumably they just rented out studio space.

The plot is as sensationalistic as you could hope for. A newspaperman goes undercover to blow the lid off the operations of a phony psychic. This counterfeit spiritualist claims to be able to contact the spirits of the dead, for a price of course. He has quite an elaborate setup with a team of actors and various technical aids including a movie projector that appears to show his clients scenes of their dead relatives. The dearly departed offer helpful advice, but the advice is usually along the lines of recommending the purchase of shares in speculative mining companies that the phony psychic just happens to own.

The fake psychic’s current target is a wealthy but naïve businessman from a small town in the Midwest. The businessman has an attractive daughter and she provides the love interest for the crusading reporter. The scam starts to go wrong, but the reporter’s cover is also blown and he finds himself held captive while the scammers plan to kidnap the businessman’s daughter.

This is very low-budget film-making indeed, and to describe the plot as creaky would be an act of generosity. The acting is mostly dire, with a particularly wooden hero. The special effects are crude but considering it’s a zero-budget film they’re serviceable enough.

Surprisingly, for an exploitation film, there isn’t much in the way of sex and sin. In fact there isn’t any sex and sin at all, which leads me to believe the movie may have been intended as a very cheap B-feature for theatrical release rather than an exploitation film as such.

It’s a public domain movie and my copy is from Mill Creek’s Dark Crimes boxed set. It’s an awful DVD transfer but it’s the sort of movie that probably only exists in very battered theatrical prints. It’s also a film that’s not likely to be getting a fancy restoration job done on it any time soon.

With all its faults the inherent interest of the subject matter makes it at least moderately entertaining. Especially if love movies about fake spiritualists and con artists with a suggestion of the fascinating and seedy-glamorous worlds of travelling carnivals and sideshows.

Director Dorothy Davenport had been married to silents star Wallace Reid. After he died as a result of drug addiction she directed a number of exploitation movies which she used as a vehicle to warn the public against the evils of moral decay. The movies she directed including the highly entertaining 1934 The Road to Ruin, a delightful mix of sleaze, sin, nudity and moralising.

At just under an hour Sucker Money is a harmless enough time-killer, and it’s an amusing curiosity.

Delinquent Daughters (1944)

Delinquent Daughters is a bit of an oddity. Released in 1944, it looks and sounds like a typical 1930s/1940s exploitation movie but it isn’t really.

True exploitation movies were made by tiny independent production companies that were not members of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America or MPPDA (the ancestor of the MPAA) and were therefore not bound by the Hollywood Production Code. But Delinquent Daughters was a studio release. It was made by the cheapest of all the Poverty Row studios, PRC, but even the Poverty Row studios were members of the MPPDA.

The classic exploitation movie if this period always included a square-up - either an introductory message or a speech by one of the characters justifying the movie’s treatment of controversial subject matter by presenting it as a kind of public service, a timely warning of a dire social evil. But being a studio release Delinquent Daughters features an incredibly lengthy and moralistic square-up to justify its treatment of a grave threat to the moral fibre of the nation, juvenile delinquency.

In fact it tries so hard to be moral that it ends up being less fun than the average exploitation film.

The plot centres around a night-spot called the Merry-Go-Round. This club is aimed at teenagers, but exploits a loop-hole in the law by providing “chaperones” so that teenagers can legally go there. The club is run by Nick Gordon, and he’s the villain of the piece. He tempts teenagers into lives of crime, encouraging them to commit robberies on his behalf.

This den of iniquity has already been responsible for driving one teenager to suicide, but the kids from the local high school just can’t stay away. Even good girls like June Thompson hang out there. And bad girls like Sally Higgins encourage good kids into all sorts of wickedness. Basically decent kids like Rocky end up carrying guns and becoming involved in armed robberies. And nice girls like June stay out all night, even on school nights.

The most interesting thing bout such movies is that they reveal that paranoia about juvenile delinquency was not purely a phenomenon of the 1950s. This movie as made in 1944 and the hysteria is already in full bloom. Crazy jazz rhythms are already leading American youth astray.

This movie is the quintessential example of the “blame the parents” style of juvenile delinquent movie. The heroes are a crusading journalist and a hardbitten but idealistic cop (in fact he’s a classic gruff cop with a heart of gold) and they have no doubt that the parents are responsible. And the parents really are presented in an incredibly unsympathetic light. It’s made plain that June’s father is a firm believer and enthusiastic practitioner of corporal punishment and that the constant beatings have led June to hang around with bad girls like Sally. And Rocky’s father fails to show his son any affection, apparently an even worse crime.

The acting is mostly horrifically bad, although Teala Loring is quite good as Sally, a hardened bad girl and aspiring femme fatale.

The script contains far too many pompous speeches and is excessively contrived even by the standards of this type of movie.

This movie is included in the Delinquent Dames: Girls Gone Bad DVD boxed set. They’re all public domain movies but mostly the picture quality is at least passable and the selection of movies offered is superb. And it’s absurdly cheap and extremely good value and I highly recommend it.

Unfortunately this particular movie suffers from a very poor DVD transfer. The night scenes are so dark that nothing whatsoever can be seen.

It’s difficult to make a juvenile delinquent movie that isn’t campy fun, and Delinquent Daughters is reasonable fun in its own cringe-inducing way. But if you’re going to sample the delights of the classical exploitation movie (and you should) you’re better off seeking out a real example of the genre.

Mad Youth (1940)

The 1940 exploitation shocker Mad Youth (later re-released as Girls of the Underworld) is another delightfully lurid little movie from the wonderful Girls Gone Bad: The Delinquent Dames Collection boxed set.

This one deals with some of the great social evils of the 1940s - male prostitution, white slavery and jitterbugging. Lucy Morgan is a middle-aged woman with a teenaged daughter. After years of being trapped in a loveless marriage Lucy is now divorced and she’s decided she wants to have the things she missed out on. Mostly what she wants is good-looking young men in her bed. She starts hiring male escorts. The latest escort sent out by the agency is the Count DeHoven (of course it goes without saying that he isn’t a real count but that’s all part of the fantasy that the agency sells). He’s happy wining and dining her but he haughtily informs her that if she requires any additional services she’ll have to pay extra.

While Mrs Morgan is out on the town with her gigolo her daughter Marian is indulging an equally pernicious vice - jitterbugging. She invites her friends over and pretty soon jitterbugging leads inevitably to strip poker. But while Marian and her friends are mostly just having innocent fun they will soon pay the price for the shameful neglect displayed by their parents. When Marian’s friend Helen gets into trouble from her grandmother fir sneaking out at night she decides she’s had enough. She’s going to run off and get married. She’s met a man through a matrimonial agency but she has an unpleasant surprise in store for her. He’s actually a while slaver! And when Helen writes to Marian inviting her to come and stay for a few days Mrs Morgan is happy to get her daughter out of the way, since the daughter and the gigolo had been getting way too friendly for her liking. This will give Mrs Morgan the chance to have the Count all to herself. But her selfish lusts will indirectly lead Marian into the clutches of the white slavery ring, and the hapless teenager finds herself imprisoned in a brothel.

At this point the plot takes a slightly unexpected turn as the Count turns out not to be quite the sort of man we’d taken him to be. But will Marian be saved from the white slavers before she suffers a Fate Worse Than Death?

This is a fairly typical example of the classical exploitation movie made, distributed and exhibited outside the boundaries of the Hollywood studio system and the rules of the Hollywood Production Code. In this case it’s from Willis Kent Productions who made some of the better known examples of the genre. They generally promise more lurid delights than they actually deliver. It’s what David Friedman, one of the greats of the exploitation movie business, terms “selling the sizzle rather than the steak.” What makes this one slightly unusual is that you do get some actual steak - the content really is fairly salacious. It’s also a little more polished than is usually the case with these movies.

It has the padding provided by a series of variety acts that was such a common feature of these movies. As soon as the characters walk into a night club you know you’re going to be treated to some fairly bizarre routines. It has the square-up that was one of the essential ingredients of the exploitation film. The square-up was the earnest moral message, usually in the firm of a title card at the beginning of the movie, explaining that what you are about to see may be shocking but the producers are bringing you the movie as a public service to expose a dangerous social evil! This then justifies the film-maker in presenting an hour or so of scandalous titillation and throughly enjoyable sin. In this one the square-up comes in the form of a couple of speeches delivered in a wonderfully pompous manner. It turn out it’s all the fault of the parents!

There’s no actual nudity, but there is the obligatory scene of the girls in the brothel lounging about in sexy lingerie. The print included in this set does seem to be a little short of the stated running time so it may have been cut. Of course the nature of these films meant that often there was no definitive cut - there were different versions for exhibition in states with differing censorship regimes so there may have been a “hot” version that is now lost.

The acting is of the standard you expect in such low-budget features. Willy Castello (who plays the Count) was something of a fixture in Willis Kent exploitation flicks. Mary Ainslee is reasonably good as Marian and Betty Compson is entertainingly lecherous as Mrs Morgan.

Mad Youth is more entertaining than most exploitation movies of its kind. The jitterbugging sequences are rather fun and it’s reasonably fast-paced, and the final shot of the movie gives it an unexpected kick. It goes without saying that movies of this type are going to be viewed mainly for their appeal as camp, and Mad Youth doesn’t disappoint in that area. Along with Dorothy Davenport’s The Road to Ruin it’s a fine introduction to this enjoyably sleazy genre of American film.

The Cocaine Fiends (1935)

The Cocaine Fiends (originally released as The Pace That Kills) was made in 1935 by Willis Kent Productions, one of the main producers of exploitation movies at that period. It’s clearly an attempt to capitalise on the growing drug hysteria in the US at that time.

Jane Bradford is a sweet innocent country girl lured to the big city by a smooth-talking Lothario. He promises to marry her, and he offers her a wonderful cure for her headaches. He has these special headache powders, and after she takes one her headache goes right away - in fact she feels just swell! But of course once a good girl from the country makes the fateful decision to go to the city she’s already taken the first steps on the road to degradation and ruin. Sure enough, once he gets her there he doesn’t marry her. He does keep her supplied with headache powders though.

By the time she realises that his headache cures are actually dope its too late - she’s hooked! And pretty soon he has her working as a prostitute to support her habit. Meanwhile her brother Eddie has gone to the big city as well, to look for his sister. He has a job at a drive-in fast food outlet, and he’s met a real nice girl. Unfortunately it seems that headaches run in the family, but luckily his new friend has these terrific headache powders, and pretty soon he’s feeling just swell again.

Naturally it isn’t long before Eddie and his friend lose their jobs, because that’s what happens when you’re a coke addict. The plot becomes increasingly tortuous, and there’s a sub-plot involving a nice rich girl who befriends Eddie’s girlfriend. The nice rich girl hangs out at the trendy night spot known as The Dead Rat Cafe (the decor of which features drawings of dead rats all over the walls and is one of the highlights of the film), not knowing that it’s run by Jane’s gangster boyfriend. The nice rich girl is kidnapped by the gangster to be sold into white slavery. She is to be the plaything of the big chief of the drugs and vice racket. The conclusion involves several shocking revelations, as Jane battles to save her brother from the wickedness of his life in the big city. He can be saved, but there’s no hope for her because "girls can't go back.”

The lesson of the movie is not so much about the evil of drugs. It’s more the evils of the city, and of pleasure. Looking for fun and pleasure will inevitably lead to destruction and disgrace, especially if you’re a woman.

Like most of the exploitation movies of that era The Cocaine Fiends sheds interesting light on the anxieties engendered by the modern world. Modern life is seen as threatening and dangerous. And like most such films it faces the fascinating contradiction of condemning the very things on which it relies for its chance of commercial success, which for such movies depended entirely on the thrill of the forbidden and the illicit.

It’s really more of an interesting historical curiosity than anything else, and is only worth watching if you have a real taste for these kinds of movies that operated in the netherworld outside the Hollywood studio system.

Gambling with Souls (1936)

Gambling with Souls (AKA The Vice Racket) is another bizarre 1930s exploitation shocker from the boxed set Girls Gone Bad: The Delinquent Dames Collection.

Mae is a respectable doctor’s wife in a decent clean-living town. She is befriended by an older woman, Molly Murdock, who convinces her that perhaps playing bridge isn’t the ultimate thrill that life has to offer. She lures her to a gambling club. At first Mae has a remarkable streak of luck, and is able to but herself all the luxuries her husband can’t provide. Pretty soon though her luck begins to change, and before she knows it she’s in debt up to her eyeballs. And the owner of the gambling club, Lucky Wilder, turns out not to be such a nice man as she initially thought. Molly then explains to her how she can work off her debt - by entertaining wealthy gentlemen.

The gambling club was just a front for a white slavery racket! The first gentleman she has to entertain seems rather nice though, and it doesn’t take too much encouragement on his part to get her out of her clothes. And at least it’s better than having her husband find out she’s been gambling! This first man actually works for Lucky Wilder - his job is to provide an easy introduction to the world of prostitution for innocent women like Mae. Before long Mae is having to entertain lots of other men, and they’re not so much fun. Mae is so ashamed she leaves her husband, but her husband (a dedicated doctor and a paragon of domestic virtue) and her sister are determined to track her down and restore her to married bliss. Unfortunately the sister also fall into Lucky Wilder’s clutches, and takes the same road to ruin that Mae has already traveled.

This delightfully lurid story is told in flashbacks, as Mae is interrogated by the District Attorney after a raid on the gambling club. During the course of the raid Lucky Wilder’s bullet-riddled body had been discovered by the cops. Mae recounts the whole sad story, punctuated by moralising asides from the DA and by her still-devoted husband.

This movie has everything you expect from a 1936 American exploitation movie - almost non-existent production values, wonderfully hammy acting, plenty of little moral lectures, and lots of shots of young ladies in their underwear. And it has the illicit thrill of moral wickedness - gambling, prostitution, abortion, good girls gone bad, and all without the censorship of the Hollywood Production Code (since the tiny independent production companies that churned out these potboilers weren’t bound by the Code). If you’re a fan of these lurid exposes of shocking immorality lurking behind the respectable facade of American society then you’ll find plenty to enjoy in Gambling with Souls.

Sex Madness (1938)

Sex Madness was one of the movies made by legendary exploitation producer / director / distributor Dwain Esper. The story of the exploitation film-makers and distributors of the 1930s and 1940s is often a lot more interesting than the movies themselves. The introduction of draconian Hollywood self-censorship in the form of the Production Code in the early 30s gave the exploitation mavericks their golden opportunity. So many subjects were now off-limits, but these restrictions didn’t apply to the tiny exploitation producers who were even further down the food chain than the Poverty Row studios. The exploitation producers weren’t members of a later became the MPAA so the Production Code didn’t apply to them.

The exploitation studios focused on any subject matter that was banned by the Production Code. Abortion and prostitution were favourites, but there was an entire genre devoted to venereal diseases. The standard trick was to present these films as educational films performing a important public service, while promoting them as luridly as possible. The actual content was often fairly tame, although in fact most such films existed in multiple versions. Different US states had different censorship laws (until the Supreme Court eventually overthrew the state censorship boards as unconstitutional) and widely differing policies on enforcement. So you’d have a tame version for showing in strict states, a warm version for more lax areas, and a hot version for screening in places where you could get away with it.

The movies were distributed completely outside the established exhibition and distribution system, either on a “states rights” basis where the rights to exhibit in a particular region were sold to an independent distributor, or by roadshowing. Roadshowing, where the movies were literally take in the road and screened in public halls, theatres or even tents, was Dwain Esper’s favoured method. Most of the exploitation distributors had backgrounds in traveling carnivals and sideshows and had an unerring instinct for separating suckers from their money.

Sex Madness is a fairly typical example of the VD genre. The incredibly ramshackle plot follows the fortunes of a rich but naïve young man who is foolish enough to attend a burlesque show, and afterwards goes on to a “house party” where there is plenty of booze and ladies who enjoy showing a fellow a good time. Naturally he contracts a dreaded “social disease.” There’s a parallel story about an innocent country girl who wins a beauty contest and is lured to the big bad city where she soon falls prey to unscrupulous talent agents and loses her virtue and contracts syphilis. She returns home to the country hoping to marry her childhood sweetheart, after spending her money on a quack cure and being assured she is no free of the disease. But of course she isn’t, and tragedy ensues.

I hope I’m not giving the impression that this film has a connected or coherent plot. It jumps all over the place, the editing is jumbled and confused, and the script is excruciating. It also boasts some truly awful acting. Esper may have been a formidable showman, but as a director he was roughly on a par with Ed Wood for technical competence but far less entertaining.

While the clams of such movies to being important educational documents were pure carny hokum, it is worth pointing out that they did at least admit that such things as abortion and venereal diseases existed. So in an age of overwhelming sexual ignorance they may even have served some purpose.

The movie is, fortunately, very short. Like other Esper films it’s fascinating in its true awfulness although it lacks the bizarre touches of Maniac. It’s interesting as a glimpse of a kind of film-making that has now disappeared completely. There are other exploitation movies by other directors dealing with similar “forbidden” subject matter that I would recommend as being a lot more entertaining, such as Party Girl, Slaves in Bondage and Gambling With Souls. But you must see at least one Dwain Esper movie.

She Shoulda Said No (1949)

She Shoulda Said No (AKA Killer Weed) is perhaps best known for the fact that its young female star Lila Leeds had been busted for marijuana possession the year before. Along with a Hollywood actor by the name of Robert Mitchum. They both served time in the county jail. After her release Lila Leeds decided to cash in on her notoriety by making this lurid exploitation pit-boiler about the evils of drugs.

Leeds plays a nice young girl who is working hard to put her incredibly dorky kid brother through college. Things are going swell until she meets an evil dope pusher, who convinces her that she needs to learn to relax, and that just one puff of a reefer can’t possibly hurt her. She soon learns how wrong she was, and he seduces her as well as turning her into a dope fiend. She is sucked into a nightmare world of parties, fun, sex, money, swanky apartments, flash cars and beautiful clothes. Some of these innocent kids get so “turned on” by the drugs that they start laughing and dancing. But luckily the police are doing their job, and they save her from this horror by arresting her and throwing in jail.

The movie then switches to being an equally lurid crime B-movie as the cops hunt down the kingpins behind this hideous plot to introduce America’s teenagers to fun and excitement.

It’s a fairly typical example of the classic American exploitation movie, made outside the studio system and therefore not subject to the restrictions of the Production Code. These movies were the Jerry Springer Show of their day. While putting a moralistic gloss on the depravity (well depravity by the standards of the time) of the subject matter they raked in the dollars with their outrageous sensationalism and aura of wickedness. And with taglines such as the one for this film - How Bad Can a Good Girl Get?

These movies played in small theatres, and were often “roadshowed” - being taken from town to town, sometimes screened in tents, with the exhibitors often possessing several versions of each movie of varying degrees of luridness, with tame versions to show the local authorities to reassure them that these were actually serious educational films and not dirty movies! She Shoulda Said No is lacking in sex, but the wild drug parties would undoubtedly have thrilled audiences at the time.

The exploitation movies were a constant irritant to the nation’s moral watchdogs, and an annoyance to the studio bosses who were outraged that somebody besides them should be making money out of movies. Modern audiences (judging by comments on the IMDb) often make the mistake of thinking that these movies really were intended to be taken seriously as moral warnings, or that they had some kind of official government backing. In fact they were mostly produced by people who’d started out as carnival hucksters and their entire operations were marginally legal at best and they spent a good deal of their time trying to keep one step ahead of local law enforcement agencies. They were true underground movies.

And they’re a good deal of fun.

Slaves in Bondage (1937)

Slaves in Bondage is one of the many ultra-low budget exploitation movies cranked out by independent producers in the US during the 1930s, 40s and 50. Since they were not destined for exhibition in major mainstream movie theatres and were not distributed by the major studios they were able to circumvent the Production Code and deal with otherwise forbidden topics such as prostitution.

This one deals with the dreaded white slave racket - innocent young country girls lured to the wicked big city with promises of jobs as manicurists only to find themselves forced into working at the Berrywood Roadhouse, a notorious (and apparently rather expensive and high-class) brothel. I must say that these poor unfortunates seem to be thoroughly enjoying themselves and don’t seem to be terribly worried about their lost virtue.

An ambitious young reporter (now where would a crime film be without an ambitious young reporter) and his girlfriend find themselves unwittingly caught up in this racket and set out to bring the evil racketeers to justice, with some help from an idealistic crusading newspaper editor. Although the editor does seem to be more interested in this moral crusade as a way of selling newspapers. The reporter’s girlfriend is a real manicurist, working in a beauty salon that serves as a front for the white slave racket.

The subject matter is lurid enough, and while the treatment of the material is actually pretty tame (the most daring scenes feature ladies of easy virtue in their underwear) you have to consider that mainstream Hollywood movies were more or less entirely prevented by the Code from dealing with such topics at all. Audiences in 1937 undoubtedly found this hot stuff. And there are at least hints of genuine kinkiness.

Even at a mere 70 minutes this movie is a tad on the slow side. On the other hand it does have some truly bizarre touches - the two acrobats in the boarding house constantly practising a routine in which they kind of entwine themselves around one another just has to be seen to be believed. I still have no idea if it’s supposed to be vaguely kinky. The fact that it’s totally irrelevant adds to the weirdness factor. The night club acts are a little on the odd side as well.

I can’t honestly say that Slaves in Bondage offers great entertainment, but it’s different and it does have curiosity value (and some campy appeal as well). It’s in the public domain so it can be found on DVD very cheaply, or even legally downloaded. If you can download it or pick it up for a couple of dollars it’s worth a look. This was my first glimpse into the world of the low-budget exploitation flicks of the 30s and 40s, and it was interesting enough to inspire me to try to hunt down more examples of this genre.