Born Reckless (1958)

Born Reckless is an unassuming little 1958 rodeo musical melodrama B-picture that turns out to be thoroughly enjoyable mostly due to its star, the wonderful Mamie van Doren.

Kelly Cobb (Jeff Richards) is a rodeo star whose career can’t last much longer because his body just can’t take the punishment any more. At the moment he’s flat broke, which is usual. Even when things go well they go badly. He wins a hefty slice of prize money at a rodeo but a crooked promoter runs off with the money and Kelly is still flat broke. He travels around the country with his sidekick Cool Man (Arthur Hunnicutt), an older and even more broken down ex-rodeo star who acts as a father figure to Kelly. Kelly hopes for one big win so he can buy a little ranch, but that one big win seems more elusive by the day.

Then cute cowgirl singer and trick rider Jackie Adams (Mamie van Doren) starts tagging along with Kelly and Cool Man. She has obviously decided that Kelly is her kind of man. Jackie isn’t stupid. Kelly is a pretty nice guy and a girl could do a whole lot worse. And a man could do a whole lot worse than Jackie.

Jackie’s a nice girl but when you have a body like hers you don’t have to go looking for trouble. Trouble will find you. And trouble always means a man. Kelly doesn’t see himself as the knight in shining armour type but he’s an old-fashioned guy. If a woman is attracting unwanted attention from some sleazebag then he’s not the sort of man who’s going to stand by and let that happen. A fight invariably follows and Jackie spends much of her time patching up Kelly’s wounds. Kelly always wins his fights, but he doesn’t escape without an assortment of cuts and bruises.

It seems like love is destined to blossom but there’s a problem for Jackie. She has a rival. Liz is rich, scheming, unscrupulous and she collects men the way other women collect shoes. And the unfortunate truth has to be admitted that Kelly does like chasing the ladies. Liz is a formidable rival, but Jackie is a fighter.

It's amusing that the brunette is the bad girl and the blonde bombshell is the good girl.  

Jeff Richards wasn’t A-list star material but his performance is pretty decent. It’s a low-key but believable performance.

Mamie van Doren is likeable, lively, sexy, funny, high-spirited and generally adorable. She was never able to make the jump to A-pictures but when she landed a good role she could turn in a very effective performance. And she sparkles here. She gets to sing quite a few songs. The songs aren’t bad and if a song was even half-decent van Doren could sell it. She also looks terrific dressed as a cowgirl.

Howard W. Koch was a competent B-movie director and he demonstrates a surprisingly sure touch in this movie.

It might seem presumptuous to compare this movie with Sam Peckinpah’s superb Junior Bonner but as a low-budget attempt to explore similar themes it works a whole lot better than you’d expect. The characters in Born Reckless are a bit more than stereotypes. There’s a touch of subtlety to the characterisations that you really don’t expect in a B-movie, and there’s a nice atmosphere of creeping defeat and melancholy. Kelly knows he’s probably not destined to be one of life’s winners but all he knows how to do is be a rodeo cowboy and he can’t see any really promising way forward.

The Warner Archive release is barebones but the anamorphic transfer is generally very good.

Born Reckless is a pleasant surprise. It’s a much better movie than it has any right to be. Along with Guns, Girls and Gangsters (1959) and Untamed Youth (1957) it’s one of van Doren’s best pictures. It offers her a role with enough substance to allow her to demonstrate why she was such a B-movie icon, and why she still has a loyal following.

Born Reckless is highly recommended.

Untamed Youth (1957)

Untamed Youth is a juvenile delinquent rock’n’roll musical melodrama starring Mamie van Doren.

Penny Lowe (van Doren) and her sister Jane (Lori Nelson) are aspiring singer/dancers on their way to LA when they get busted by a small-town sheriff for skinny-dipping and hitch-hiking. Judge Cecilia Steele (Lurene Tuttle) gives them the choice of thirty days in the county lock-up or thirty days as agricultural workers. Naturally they chose the agricultural worker option.

What they don’t know is that they’ve been caught up in a racket run by the judge, the sheriff and crooked cotton farmer Russ Tropp (John Russell). Young people get arrested by the sheriff on bogus or ridiculously trivial charges and end up picking cotton for Tropp for 75 cents a day. There’s a shortage of cotton pickers so this is a huge advantage for Tropp - the other cotton farmers in the country can’t get labourers while he’s getting virtual slave labour for peanuts. The other farmers will eventually have to sell out to him and he’ll end up filthy rich. The sheriff gets paid off and the middle-aged judge thinks she’ll end up marrying the young handsome Tropp.

Tropp is involved in all manner of crooked business dealings and the prisoners at the farm are mercilessly exploited. Tropp also sexually exploits the female prisoners (adding another exploitation movie angle) and he tries it on with Penny. When Penny rebuffs him he sets his dogs on her.

Tropp has made one miscalculation. He’s employed Judge Steele’s son Bob at the ranch. Bob is a straight arrow and he falls for Jane Lowe, and he starts digging around looking for evidence of Tropp’s shady dealings.

So that’s the melodrama angle. There’s also the exploitation angle (juvenile delinquents, Mamie van Doren in tight dresses). And within the first few minutes we get a cat-fight when Jane Lowe gets into a dispute with one of the other girls at the farm.

All of this would have made for an OK B-movie but Untamed Youth has rock’n’roll as well. The kids amuse themselves after a hard day’s cotton-picking dancing to rock’n’roll and from time to time they spontaneously burst into song in the cotton fields.

The big surprise, and it’s a very pleasant one, is that the songs are great. It helps that one of the young cotton-pickers is played by Eddie Cochran, about a year before he became a major rock’n’roll idol. Eddie Cochran gets one very good song but Mamie van Doren gets four songs and she’s terrific. Oo-Ba-La Baby (co-written by Eddie Cochran) is a show-stopper.

Perhaps Mamie van Doren isn’t the world’s greatest actress but she has presence and charisma and this rôle is well within her acting range and she acquits herself well. She’s smokin’ hot, she has the right moves when she dances and her songs are good. This was one of her favourite rôles and it’s easy to see why.

Lori Nelson is very good although she’s overshadowed by Mamie van Doren. But everyone in this movie is overshadowed by Mamie van Doren. Lurene Tuttle is reasonably good. John Russell as Tropp is memorably slimy. The other cast members are quite adequate. It’s not as if any of the characters are complex or well-developed. They’re not meant to be. This is a lightweight B-movie.

Untamed Youth has been released on DVD is the Warner Archive series, with a good anamorphic transfer and no extras.

Untamed Youth is not a movie to be taken at all seriously. It’s not a good movie in a conventional sense but it is a very good cult movie. It has juvenile delinquents, rock’n’roll and Mamie van Doren. And it’s fun. That’s enough to keep me happy. Highly recommended.

I’ve reviewed several other Mamie van Doren movies in the past year or so - The Girl in Black Stockings, Vice Raid and the wonderful Guns, Girls and Gangsters.

Vice Raid (1959)

Vice Raid is a 1959 low-budget crime pot-boiler included in Kino Lorber’s three-movie set featuring legendary blonde bombshell Mamie van Doren. The title promises plenty of lurid thrills. We’ll see whether it delivers the goods.

Tough but honest cop Sergeant “Whitey” Brandon (Richard Coogan) has been trying to break up a vice racket run by mobster Vince Malone (Brad Dexter). The reason he’s been having so much trouble (as the audience finds out right at the beginning) is that Malone has so many crooked cops on his payroll.

Malone is getting tired of the pressure from Brandon and he cooks up a plan to deal with the problem.

For the plan to work Malone needs a girl with looks and brains and the Syndicate has just the right girl - Carol Hudson (Mamie van Doren). This is a rôle that gives Miss van Doren a chance to strut her bad girl stuff. Carol is one dangerous broad. She has the body of a goddess and the morals of an alley cat.

Carol’s job is to set Brandon up so he looks like a corrupt cop. The plan succeeds and Brandon is out of a job. But Brandon is not a guy who gives up. Now he’s on a one-man crusade against the vice racket and everyone associated with it, including corrupt cops. He just needs to find a weakness in Malone’s setup. He has one big advantage - this is a personal vendetta and he’s happy to risk his own skin if it’s necessary.

Carol’s problem is her kid sister Louise (played by the delectable Carol Nugent), fresh off the bus from Iowa. Louise is physically all grown up but she’s as naïve as they come. The only thing Carol cares about, apart from money, is little sister. The smart thing would be to put Louise straight back on that bus to Iowa, but persuading Louise to go proves to be a challenge. Louise can’t believe how much money her big sister makes as a model. She naturally doesn’t know that Carol is no model. This is Louise’s first glimpse of the glamour of the big bad city and she likes what she sees.

Brandon starts to make his moves in a dangerous game of bluff with Malone. Malone is a tough customer, tally untroubled by moral scruples. He does have a weakness however. He understands the rackets but he doesn’t understand women.

The plot is fairly routine. You can predict most of what’s going to happen. Which doesn’t really matter. It’s executed with plenty of energy and a fair amount of sleaze (a lot of sleaze by 1959 standards) although the sleaze is mostly implied. This is pretty close to being an out-and-out exploitation movie. Since it was released by United Artists it’s perhaps not a true exploitation movie, but it has some of that grungy feel to it. This is a very cheap movie with just a limited number of very basic sets but it was photographed by Stanley Cortez so it manages to look better than it has any right to look.

Mamie van Doren is in fine form. She’s hardbitten and sexy but as she often did van Doren manages to make her character believable. She wasn’t a great actress but she gives it her all and she dominates the movie.

The anamorphic transfer is excellent. This movie is in black-and-white and it’s the sort of movie that really needs to be in black-and-white in order to capture just the right blend of sleaze and seedy glamour.

Vice Raid belongs to an era in which movies like this tried desperately hard to be salacious but they had to pull their punches. They can’t actually tell us that Malone’s model agencies are fronts for prostitution (or that Carol is a prostitute) but they can make sure we figure it out. And perhaps surprisingly they do tell us outright when one of the female characters is raped (and while we only see the lead-up to the rape the woman’s obvious terror is quite harrowing).

Vice Raid is a routine B-movie potboiler but it has Mamie van Doren and she’s reason enough to see it. Recommended.

The Girl in Black Stockings (1957)

The Girl in Black Stockings, released in 1957, is part of Kino Lorber’s three-movie set of steamy crime potboilers featuring the legendary blonde bombshell Mamie van Doren although she actually plays only a supporting rôle in this particular movie.

A women’s body is found in the bushes at a resort hotel in Utah. The young woman apparently had a less than respectable reputation. The body is found by lawyer Dave Hewson (Lex Barker) and Beth Dixon (Anne Bancroft). The obvious suspect would be Edmund Parry (Ron Randell), the owner of the hotel and a man who thoroughly hated the dead girl (in fact he doesn’t seem overly fond of women in general). Parry is looked after by his devoted sister Julia (Marie Windsor). But Parry is completely paralysed so that pretty much eliminates him as a suspect. Fortunately (or from the sheriff’s point of view unfortunately) there are plenty of other suspects.

Pretty soon the bodies start to pile up. The sheriff knows he’s dealing with a psycho but there seem to be plenty of potential psychos among the suspects.

Apart from those mentioned above there’s a faded movie star, his blonde good time gal girlfriend Harriet (van Doren) and a local Lothario. I was pretty certain I knew what the solution was going to turn out to be but I admit I was totally wrong.

This was 1957 so while there are plenty of brutal murders the violence occurs off screen. The sexual content is obviously entirely implied as well but Mamie van Doren still manages to heat things up in her inimitable style.

For a cheapie B-budget this film boasts a pretty strong cast. Anne Bancroft and Lex Barker are the headliners but of course there’s Mamie van Doren and Marie Windsor, both B-move favourites. And in one of his most substantial rôles, as the local sheriff, there’s John Dehner and he’s one of my favourite American character actors. Ron Randell doesn’t let the fact that the character he’s playing is paralysed stop him from chewing the scenery.

All the performances are very good. The players are giving it everything they’ve got and there really aren’t any weak links among the cast. Ron Randell is the standout - he really is scary and creepy.

This is very much a B-picture but it has absolutely everything you could wish for in a B-picture. There’s some reasonably lurid subject matter, there’s glamour and there’s a well-constructed script by Richard H. Landau with some good red herrings and an effective shock ending. Director Howard W. Koch does a fine job. Given the low budget he can’t do anything too fancy but he gives us some nicely atmospheric moments and there’s certainly no reason to complain about the pacing. It’s a well-crafted little movie.

Location shooting was done at the Parry Lodge in Utah. It’s a great location which was used in countless movies and I believe it still exists.

The anamorphic transfer is excellent. The extras include a fascinating interview with Miss van Doren (who is at the time of writing still very much alive). She talks about the three movies included in the set (of which she has fond memories) and about her 1950s career in general.

The Girl in Black Stockings is a solid murder mystery with perhaps some very faint noir tinges. It’s content to be a B-movie, but it’s a good and very entertaining B-movie. Highly recommended even if Mamie van Doren doesn’t get anywhere near enough screen time.

Guns, Girls and Gangsters (1959)

Kino Lorber have released a three-movie set of crime potboilers featuring legendary blonde bombshell Mamie van Doren. So far I’ve only watched Guns, Girls and Gangsters but already I’m a confirmed Mamie van Doren fan.

Chuck Wheeler (Gerald Mohr) has just been released from San Quentin and he has big plans - to rob an armoured car carrying the take from Las Vegas casinos to LA. The haul should be at least two million dollars (an astronomical amount of money in 1959). The only thing is, he needs Joe Darren (Grant Richards) because Darren is the one guy who knows how to launder the money. To get to Darren he intends to use his old cellmate Mike Bennett’s wife Vi Victor (Mamie van Doren). Vi is a canary working at one of Darren’s night clubs and Daren’s been making time with her. As well as the two million Chuck intends to get Vi as well. Considering that her husband Mike (Lee van Cleff) is insanely jealous and psychotically violent and is being released in three months’ crime any man thinking of putting the moves on Vi seriously needs his head examined. But of course the whole point of the movie is that any man who sets eyes on Vi is not exactly going to be thinking sensible thoughts.

Chuck’s plan is a good one but Chuck is thinking more about Vi than anything else. His judgment is not as sound as it might be (I must say I can’t blame him).

The plan might have worked except that Mike has found out that his wife has been sleeping around while he was inside so he busts out and proceeds to create havoc for everybody, leaving an ever-lengthening trail of corpses behind him. Vi makes every man crazy but crazy doesn’t even begin to describe what she does to Mike.

The movie relies a lot on voiceover narration which is usually a bad idea but there’s a lot of plot to be packed into the 70-minute running time so it’s perhaps excusable. And it’s important to get the background to the crime sketched in as quickly as possible so we can get to what’s really important - Mamie van Doren. That’s what the audience for this film wants to see, and there has to be time to let her do a couple of musical numbers so we can see just how sexy she is. And she’s plenty sexy.

Vi is hardboiled and not very moral but she’s also rather sentimental. There’s a sweet kid underneath the bad girl exterior. Life hasn’t offered her much and she’s had to take what she can get, which she’s done without hesitation, but while she’s unscrupulous she’s not in the least evil. Miss van Doren does a pretty reasonable job here. She makes Vi believable and she makes her interesting.

As a singer and dancer she wouldn’t set the world on fire (although she’s OK) if it wasn’t for that body, but she has that body and she’s read the instruction manual that came with it. Her night club performances are what you’d expect in the old Vegas of the late 50s. This was the Vegas of the Rat Pack and the movie captures the atmosphere of money and seedy glamour.

Cult movie fans will naturally be waiting to see Lee van Cleef make his entrance. He doesn’t disappoint. He’s bad and mad and dangerous and he’s totally out of control. He’s a killing machine. Gerald Mohr is pretty good too as Chuck. Chuck is a bit like Vi. His problem is that he’s not quite as bad as he thinks he is.

The heist scenes are done fairly well. This was a pretty low budget film but while it might lack sophistication director Edward L. Cahn keeps things moving along at a cracking pace. It’s also moderately violent by 1959 standards. Of course there’s no gore or anything remotely approaching it but there are a couple of killings that are chilling in their cold-bloodedness. This is a movie that tries to be hardboiled and mostly it succeeds.

The anamorphic transfer is very good. There are no extras. The movie is in black-and-white and looks all the better for it.

This is a B-movie and it makes no apologies for this. It glories in it. It’s a celebration of tackiness and trash culture. It wants to be lurid, and it is.

This would be an entertaining little B-movie even without Mamie van Doren. With her it’s loads of fun. And she sure does fill a dress very nicely.

Guns, Girls and Gangsters is highly recommended.