UNTAMED YOUTH (1957)

Near a small town in Texas, young sisters Penny (Mamie Van Doren) and Jane (Lori Nelson), who are hitchhiking their way to Los Angeles with dreams of becoming famous singers, are caught skinny-dipping in a river by Sheriff Mitch and arrested, for that and for being vagrants. Cecilia, the local judge, offers them and other juvenile offenders the opportunity to pick cotton for a month at a local farm run by Russ Tropp. They’re paid for their work and they get to rock and roll in the evening in their barracks, with songs provided by Penny and by a guitarist named Bong (the rock singer Eddie Cochran). We soon discover that the judge is secretly married to Tropp, hence this arrangement, and during a labor shortage, he gets away with having cheap juvenile workers (cheaper even than migrants), making the kids work hours in the hot sun, giving them shabby living conditions, and not conducting required medical checks. We also see that Tropp has a live-in mistress, Lilibet, but when she displeases him, he boots her out to pick cotton. When the judge’s son Bob arrives home from his Army service, Tropp gives him a job, and soon Bob is flirting with Jane and, at the instigation of Penny and Lilibet, digging into Tropp's dastardly ways. Bob discovers that Tropp has been feeding the kids dog food on occasion, and one day, a sickly girl named Baby faints in the sun. Bob, ignoring Tropp's orders, takes her to the hospital where she dies and it's discovered that she was five months pregnant. Tropp offers to get Penny an audition at a local TV station, but he wants sexual favors in return which Penny won't deliver. Eventually Jane and Bob both tell the judge what's going on. Will she do the right thing and put an end to Tropp's misdeeds or will lust blind her to the situation?

In the realm of sexy teenage melodramas of the 1950s, this is OK. Mamie plays Mamie here and that's not all bad. She's got skimpy clothes, attitude in spades, and her songs are not unpleasant—one has a verse that goes, "You’re as slimy as a salamander." In another, she sings, "I get the jiggles / Everything wiggles!" Lori Nelson, as the more innocent sister, sort of fades into the background but manages to pep up when called upon to in the last third of the film. Eddie Cochran, who had a top 10 hit, "Summertime Blues" (a song most of us know now from the The Who's cover in the 70s), was killed in a car crash in 1960. His one song, "Cottonpicker," is fun, done as a mini-production number out in the fields. The very busy Lurene Tuttle (with almost 200 acting credits on IMDB, including playing the sheriff's wife in Psycho) is adequate as Judge Cecilia, though the way she ignores the goings-on in her courtroom when her son comes bouncing in is very unprofessional (and maybe indicates some mother-son issues?). Though it's hard to take your eyes off of Mamie, I was pleasantly distracted by the two darned good-looking male leads. John Russell (Tropp) has an intense and sexy gaze, making Cecila's interest understandable despite his sleazy behavior. Don Burnett (Bob) is young and handsome and charismatic but didn't have a long career—I know him from DAMON AND PYTHIAS. His character is a little slow on the uptake but is properly heroic in the end. The score by the prolific Les Baxter is appropriately loud and sexy. Jered Barclay is amusing as an aloof beatnik; in one scene, a dancing girl brushes her head against his hand and he's careful to wipe his hand on his shirt afterward. I liked this movie, but I can only recommend it to Mamie fans, or fans of 50s teenage camp, or, ya know, fans of handsome B-movie actors. At top right, Russell and Van Doren; at left, Burnett and Nelson. [YouTube]