GIRLS TOWN 1959

 “There’s no such thing as a bad girl.” – Mother Veronica, head nun and CEO of Girls Town

Well, happily for me and producers of low-budget “girls reform school” exploitation flicks, the above is not altogether true. 

When I was growing up, late-night and weekend afternoon TV overflowed with 1950s juvenile delinquency movies (“black-&-white-shoe pictures” as they were known in our house, in reference to the two-tone saddle oxfords favored by bobbysoxers of the time). With their jazz/bop musical scores, sound-alike titles, and interchangeable casts of superannuated teenagers; these films were near-identical in their faux, anti-social emphasis—faux because no matter how extreme the civic insubordination, by fade-out you could be sure yet another blow had been struck for conformity and middle-class conservativism—and preoccupation with drag racing, leather jackets, tight sweaters, rock & roll, switchblade skirmishes, and beat generation slang.

Mainstream movies only occasionally touched on the phenomenon of 1950s youth culture. It was a time when population (the sheer number of teenagers), rock & roll music (anarchy with a beat), autonomy (car culture), and economic independence (postwar prosperity), all converged into a marketable and exploitable social force that Hollywood couldn't ignore.

In those rare instances when mainstream films paid attention to teen culture at all (1956s The Girl Can’t Help It, for example), young people and their distractions were either satirized or held in derision. Most films about teenagers were made with the adult gaze in mind. Only the Drive-In market (independent B-movies and exploitation films) made movies specifically FOR the teenage market that were intended to actually celebrate the teenage revolution. 

Ain't No Party Like A Girls Town Party

But even these films made middle-of-the-road concessions to propriety. Almost as a public service, these films took it upon themselves to prove that the national surge in juvenile delinquency was merely due to a few bad apples, and that outside of the need to occasionally blow off a little steam (growing up in the shadow of the Bomb and the Cold War was stressful, man), American teenagers were basically good, decent kids who wanted the same things their parent's wanted out of life.

The success of Marlon Brando’s The Wild One (1953) and Blackboard Jungle (1955) launched a spate of male-centric juvenile delinquent knockoffs, but movies about gangs of lawless teenage boys have been around since at least 1938 -- the year Spencer Tracy sought to prove to Mickey Rooney “There’s no such thing as a bad boy” in Boys Town. Far more interesting were those movies about girl gangs and female reprobates. A teen knockoff of the '40s Women's Prison picture, these films were not only a lot more fun, but given the narrow image of womanhood promoted in movies at the time (girlfriends, mothers, housewives, or objectified objects of the male gaze), the emergence of the tough-talking, no-nonsense gangster girl: choosing to live life on their own terms—flouting both authority and social mores—looked to me to be the only social archetype to genuinely embody the characteristics of the true rebel.
As I was raised in a household with one television set and four sisters, all of whom reveled in the feminist subtext of these low-rent opuses, I saw a great many women in prison/reform school girl flicks growing up. One of my enduring favorites is Girls Town.

Mamie Van Doren as Silver Morgan

Paul Anka as Jimmy Parlow

Margaret Hayes as Mother Veronica

Gigi Perreau as Serafina Garcia

Mel Torme as Fred Alger

Elinor Donahue as Mary Lee Morgan

After being falsely accused of the accidental death of a former boyfriend (a blink-and-you’ll-miss-him appearance by Harold Lloyd Jr.), overdeveloped and underachieving high school senior Silver Morgan (the name a gender-switch tip of the hat to Mickey Rooney’s Whitey March), a peroxide punkette with attitude to spare, is sent to Girls Town, a youth correctional facility run by stern but tender-hearted nuns.

Silver, precariously balancing a mountain of platinum hair and prodigious curves on a pair of high-heeled, open-toed mules, is a gum-popping, slang-spewing hellcat who doesn’t take well to authority figures or being told what to do. Although she resists rehabilitation at every turn and frequently butts heads with the nuns and several of the other, surprisingly compliant, Girls Town detainees; we all know that, at heart,  Silver is more a hard-luck case and victim of circumstance than a genuinely "bad" girl. 

Hulking, Big Ethel-ish Peggy Moffitt and B-movie queen Gloria Talbott play Flo and Vida,
the inseparable pair who maintain Girls Town order

Personally, I’d have been perfectly content were the film to consist solely of scenes devoted to Silver cooling her well-shaped heels at Girls Town, mouthing off to any and all, showering suggestively, getting into cat-fights, and instigating confrontations with the nuns (a la Hayley Mills in The Trouble With Angels). But the makers of Girls Town all-too-frequently shift the spotlight from Mamie van Doren (never a good idea) to follow through on a couple of subplots. 

Subplot #1 has Silver’s restless 15-year-old sister Mary Lee (Father Knows Best’s Elinor Donahue, decked out in a blond wig, tight sweater, and behaving in a very un-“Princess”-like fashion) blackmailed and potentially shipped off to Tijuana for her part in and knowledge of the real circumstances surrounding the death of Silver’s ex. Preposterously, these threats come from “The Velvet Fog” himself, diminutive, elder hot rod gang member Mel Tormé (whose character, despite looking well into his 30s, lives in fear of his father taking his car away).

Carrying on in the Family Tradition (click on photo to enlarge)
Although difficult to make out, that's Harold Lloyd Jr on the left clinging to a mountain cliffside in a pose recalling the iconic skyscraper sequence from his father's 1923 silent film Safety Last!

The other subplot—superfluous, but by far the most campily entertaining of the two— features another crooner, Paul Anka, as pop star Jimmy Parlow, upon whom Serafina, a lonely Girls Town orphan, is delusionally fixated. Teen sensation Paul Anka makes his film debut in Girls Town, singing almost as many songs as Olivia Newton-John did during the finale of Xanadu, and serving in practically the same magical capacity in this film’s plot. Indeed, Anka’s character swoops in to save the day so often, one wonders where he finds time to cut one of his many, sound-alike, loneliness-themed records.

Popular singing group The Platters make an appearance in a sequence set in a smart supper club (to which Silver wears the most laughably inappropriate outfit imaginable). The Platters was my father's favorite singing group so I practically grew up on their smooth sound. The group was known for its frequent changes of personnel, so perhaps that's why the face of the lead singer (the disembodied hand to the right)  is never shown

Meanwhile, as Silver manages to sneak in a date with a 36-year-old delivery boy (bandleader Ray Anthony, Van Doren’s husband at the time), Girls Town shoehorns nepotistic “guest star” appearances by: Harold Lloyd Jr, Charlie Chaplin Jr, Jim Mitchum (eldest son of Robert), Cathy Crosby (Bing’s niece), and pseudo-star cameos by the likes of Dick “Daddy-O” Contino, Hollywood gossip columnist Sheilah Graham, and martial arts pioneer, Bruce Tegner.

In addition to all this, time is set aside for sexual assault, a potential suicide, human trafficking, social commentary, and the standard juvenile delinquent movie staples consisting of:

Make-Out Sessions

Cat Fights

Drag Races

Remarkably, all of these labyrinthine plot entanglements wind up being neatly resolved and expeditiously dispensed with by fade-out. Silver, while still maintaining her ostentatiously lewd clothing sense, learns respect for authority and finds religious redemption (of sorts) after Jimmy subjects her to a grueling rendition of “Ave Maria.” Mary Lee is saved from an involuntary run for the border, and lonely Serafina gives up stalking Canadian pop singers with hero complexes and becomes a Fangirl for Jesus. By all appearances, Girls Town ends with the scourge of teenage delinquency well and soundly vanquished.

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

When I was a kid, afterschool TV consisted of reruns of programs like The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet, Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, and Leave it to Beaver. Although I enjoyed them all, each suffered from what felt like an unrelenting, almost propagandistic endorsement of a kind of bland suburban conformity so artificial it seemed beamed in from another planet. The one welcome deviation from this plastic norm was Leave it to Beaver’s Eddie Haskell, a refreshingly candid, wise-guy anarchist whose appearance on the show was practically subversive in its ability to make the program's promoted standards of middle-class “good citizenship” look absurd. 

All Revved Up
Fred corrals Mary Lee into taking part in a drag race. Jim Mitchum stands looking into the camera center frame in the dark clothing and glasses, Charles Chaplin Jr stands with his arms folded, and that's accordion maestro Dick Contino dressed like Tom Slick. 

It's that quality of defiance of the norm that I most love in ‘50s juvenile delinquency movies, and Girls Town is one of the most enjoyable of the lot. Lighter in approach than the social commentary JD movies like The Cool and the Crazy or High School Hellcats, Girls Town’s inconsequentiality (it exists primarily to showcase Van Doren’s assets and Anka’s music) makes it easy to be enjoyed purely as a camp timepiece.

I have no idea what teenagers thought of the film at the time, but it’s a laugh-riot from start to finish now. Even without the uproarious running commentary provided by the Mystery Science Theater 3000 team in the edited, most readily-available version of the film.

Vida & Flo share a secret glance (how did this get past the censors?) as Jimmy Parlow 
croons a love song to the wayward girls of Girls Town

William Claxton 1964

In a movie full of actors on the cusp of transition (Paul Anka not long after underwent a nose job, and Mamie Van Doren split from husband Ray Anthony the following year), none is as startling as that of 18-year-old Peggy Moffitt. Cast as Flo, a girl sent to Girls Town because she was so unattractive she stole money to pay for cosmetics and fancy hairdos, Moffitt would go on—as muse and model to futuristic fashion designer Rudi Gernreich—to become one of the most famous and iconic faces of the '60s.

How Do You Solve A Problem Like Silver?
Mother Veronica (Margaret Hayes, the harassed teacher in Blackboard Jungle) and Sister Grace (gossip columnist and F. Scott Fitzgerald mistress Sheilah Graham) discuss the pros and cons of giving Silver Morgan a "poke in the kisser."

PERFORMANCES

As one of the platinum blonde 3-Ms of the ‘50s (Monroe, Mansfield, and Mamie) Mamie Van Doren carved out a niche for herself as the bad girl of B-movies. I haven’t seen enough of her films to access her talent as an actress (she seems a good light comedienne), but I can tell you that in Girls Town she has a vivacity and presence that makes it difficult to watch anyone else when she’s onscreen. The performance Van Doren gives may not be considered "good" by any objective standard, and though neither she nor any of the other major players are believable as teenagers, her prototypically '50s charm and somewhat hard edge makes her ideally suited for the material. Girls Town drops several degrees Fahrenheit whenever the story veers away from her.

Infinitely more convincing as a tough-cookie troublemaker than Ann-Margret was in Kitten With a Whip, Van Doren possesses a tongue-in-cheek sexiness and sass that suggests Mae West more than Monroe. 

Silver (certainly one of the screen's most energetic listeners) steps out with
superannuated delivery boy/Private Investigator Dick Culdane (Ray Anthony)

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
At least half of the Girls Town screenplay is devoted to bop talk and slang. I have no idea if the dialect is authentic or exaggerated, I just know that it makes for a very quotable movie.

All quotes attributable to Silver Morgan:

"You’ve gotta let me out of here! There’s nobody to take care of her but Aunt Scrooge...and she’s cracked!"

"Aw, Don’t flip your wig… I got your signal"

“Big deal. King Groovy comes to Dungeonsville to make with a song for po’ little ol’ us. What do you want me to do, kiss your foot?”

"Hey, who are them apples, the Junior WACs?"

"Go flap your plates!"

“I got tired of you cats with the fast cars and slow heads. You give me a pain in the ears”

“Ok if I use the Alexander Graham?”

"Stop draggin’ your axel!"

"What’s my crime, dad? For not having as much moola as this jerk? Or my old lady wasn’t in the social register?"

“You’re in queersville, man. You’ve flipped.”

"Go bingle your bongle!"

Lovely Cathy Crosby (whose character isn't even given a name) pops up out of nowhere to serenade The Dragons - rival hot rod gang to The Jaguars - at a "crazy weenie roast" with the Paul Anka composition "I Love You" only to disappear, never to be seen again

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

If the male juvenile delinquent movies of the ‘50s owed more than a passing nod to the Warner Bros. gangster films of the ’30s, then the exploitation movie bad girls of the era were simply a gum-popping, teenage iteration of the ‘40s film noir femme fatale. What gives this particular incarnation its ginger and snap is the percussive beat of rock and roll, the restless hum of Youth Culture, and its unexpectedly (and perhaps unintentionally) progressive female lead. Girls Town, free of its half-hearted social commentary, is a great deal of mindless fun. A shining specimen of time capsule camp. Mamie Van Doren rocks!

BONUS MATERIAL 

In a movie whose 90-min. running time is excessively padded out with musical numbers which somehow manage to be both brief and interminable, not affording the well-padded Mamie van Doren a solo feels like a particularly egregious omission. We do get to hear Miss Van Doren sing (in that flat, rocker-chick style later adopted by Debbie Harry of Blondie) a verse of the film's theme song during the opening credits, but as everyone knows, as a vocalist, Van Doren is strictly a visual act.

Apparently '50s censors thought so too, for it seems Anka penned a swingin' rock and roll ditty for Van Doren that was shot and later cut from the film for being too suggestive. Not the lyrics, the setting: Silver Morgan sings the song "Hey Mama" while wriggling around in the shower as she prepares for her date with the 36-year-old delivery boy.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, here's that heretofore unseen Mamie Van Doren number in all its glory. "Hey, Mama" has the same melody as the film's terrific theme song and is as catchy as hell. And as you might expect from Miss Van Doren, her performance of the song is nothing short of crazy, cool, and fantabulous!

Not a success during its initial release, when Girls Town was re-released in 1964, its dated, Drive-In-friendly title was changed to the bland and nondescript The Innocent and the Damned 

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2016