Delinquent Daughters
Delinquent Daughters
NR | 15 July 1944 (USA)
Delinquent Daughters Trailers

A town is shocked when a high school girl commits suicide. A reporter and a cop team up to investigate and find out exactly what is going on among the youth of the town.

Reviews
kidboots

There only seems to be one delinquent daughter, Sally, and she is a toughie!! When the police visit the high school to investigate a girl's suicide, she struts into the Principal's office like she was born to the streets and proceeds to smart mouth the policeman who is there to ask questions. And no wonder she thinks she is so smart - the policeman is sooo dumb!! There is almost a fight when she thinks good girl June (June Carlson) is about to give her away but he still doesn't twig that there is maybe something fishy going on!! June is one of the "delinquent daughters" as well but she definitely isn't. She is trying to cope with a father who wants to beat goodness into her at every opportunity. There is also Betty played by Marie Bovard, who didn't have a big career due to her very annoyingly screechy voice - she is played too dumb to be a bad girl. They all hang out at the "Merry Go Round" which is like a road house for the younger set. It is run by Mimi (Fifi D'Orsay, who had a brief moment in the limelight in the early 30s, Bing Crosby sang "Temptation" to her) and Nick, who is a real crook and is also enticing a few of the wayward kids (Jimmy and Sally) to commit robberies.I do agree the film quality leaves a lot to be desired - at one point there was a vertical white line through the print and then the film went completely dark!! I know it is PRC but surely they weren't too poor for lights!!! At the 50 minute mark June and Rocky decide to elope but are stopped by police and then all the wayward kids and their parents (except Sally) are given a stern lecture by the JP and usually this is were this type of movie ends but not for Sally!! She is now Nick's new girl and after a cat fight with Mimi - she and Nick are now on their way to - Nowhere!!!Teala Loring, as Sally, really lets her hair down - she was obviously at her best playing bad girls. Her career didn't amount to much, the highlight would have been playing opposite Kay Francis (albeit at the very end of her career) in a couple of Monogram cheapies - "Allotment Wives" and "Wife Wanted". June Carlson had "grown up" in the ghastly Jones family series and when it came to an end she tried to find other roles, the result being things like "Delinquent Daughters" - she retired within a few years.

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dougdoepke

PRC was just about the last studio on poverty row. Expectations for one of its productions were about rock bottom, and for the most part this exploitation quickie lives down to that well-earned reputation. The sets are cheap and few, the script darn near incoherent, the lighting and camera work fit for a bat's cave, and the acting wildly variable. Actually, some of the performances are pretty good-- Dawson and Loring are believable toughies, while Carlson and her swain come across as genuinely nice kids. However, D'Orsay's French accent is about as good as mine, at the same time Bovard's silliness is enough to make you reach for a stick. One reason to check out a dead-ender like this is for its glimpse of teenagers past, that is, of how Hollywood framed teens during the stressed-out war year of 1944. Note how much of wanton teen behavior is blamed on the parents. Much of that behavior is obviously hyped for exploitation purposes (the gun battle, the stick-up), but the question of responsibility remains valid. What surprises me is that there is no mention of the war that was still raging in 1944. Youth Runs Wild, a more serious RKO teen film from that same year, shed a lot of light on how gas rationing and 24-hour factory shifts, for example, affected young people's behavior. None of that here. These youths and their parents appear to exist in an historical vacuum, and I'm not sure why. Maybe the producers thought war concerns would complicate the titillating plot. Whatever the reason, the only value to scoping out this ultra-cheapie is curiosity for curiosity's sake.

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sol

(Some Spoilers) Straight out of todays-Summer of 1944-newspaper headlines the film "Delinquent Daughters" focus on the epidemic of juvenile crime that's was sweeping the country during the war years in the early and mid 1940's.We have this local hood and his moll Nick Gordon & Mimi, Jon Dawson & Fifi D'Orsay, running this teenage watering hole, supposedly serving soda pop and milkshakes to its under aged customers, the Merry-Go-Round Cafe. The Merry-Go-Round is instead getting the teenagers both juiced up, on hard liqueur, and doing Nick's and Mimi's dirty work. It's when local high school girl Lucille Dillerton is found drowned and boozed up after she jumped off a pier that the police headed by J.Edger Hoover look-alike Det. Hanahan, Joe Devlin, start to put the screws on Nick & Mimi's joint.With Nick just too slick to get caught with the goods on him all Det. Hanahan could do is wait for him to make a mistake. That's exactly what happens when Nick starts to make eyes on pretty and well stacked high school girl Sally Higgins, Teala Loring. It's Sally's boyfriend Jerry Syker, Jimmy Zahner,who's been knocking off bars gas stations and groceries for Nick who split the take, 90% for Nick and 10% for Jimmy, with him. Jimmy got the sh*t end of the stick, in the money he robbed, even though he was the one who put his a** on the line doing the robberies and at the same taking an eager, looking for both action and excitement, Sally along with him on his crime spree.It's when Mimi is brought into police headquarters for questioning that Let. Hanahan drops a bombshell about her cheating boyfriend Nick Gordon planning to drop her for the much younger and sexier Sally Higgins. Sally's boyfriend Jerry had earlier participated in a payroll robbery with Nick where he and a security guard were shot and killed. Now seeing that there's a future, in crime, for her with Nick Sally willingly replaced Mimi as Nick's new squeeze. Mad as hell Mimi not only implicates Nick in the string of robberies including a number of murders, one of a cop, in and around town but confronts her ex-lover Nick and her replacement, Sally, at the Merry-Go-Round-Cafe.After getting into a vicious eye scratching and hair pulling cat fight with Sally Mimi ends up getting belted by Nick who then together with Sally take off in his car away from the perusing, and now on to Nick & Sally, police headed by Let. Hanahan. The movie ends with teenagers June Tompson and her boyfriend and soon to be husband Rocky Webster, June Carlson & Johnny Duncan, forcing Nick off the road. Nick and his new love Sally end up at the bottom of a cliff crushed and burned to a crisp.Unlike Jerry and Sally June and Rocky didn't fall for Nick's boastful promises of making them rich and famous, or better yet infamous. The two youngsters not only stayed away from Nick's criminal activities but did what they could to both prevent and put an end to them.Besides the hooky dialog and bad acting the movie had some of the worst lighting you'll ever see, or not see, in a motion picture! Even in an extremely low budgeted turkey like "Delinquent Daughters". There were a number of scenes in the movie that looked like they were filmed in the bottom of a two mile mine shaft with the miners helmet-lights batteries having gone dead!

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dwpollar

1st watched 1/22/2007 - 3 out of 10(Dir-Albert Herman): Mediocre, at best, juvenile teenager drama which starts at the onset of a high school girl killing herself with the authorities trying to find out why. Of course, the kids remaining aren't much help as they were all out partying together the night before and don't want their parents to find out. None of the kids show much sympathy, which appears to be the point of the movie -- if you're a bad girl and party you lose all your sensitivity. Although later in the movie, the tables turn and the parents are shown to blame -- which was a nice turn(with a good scene with the judge helping the parents understand where they were going wrong), but it comes too late in the movie(about ¾ of the way thru). For the most part the acting is pretty bad and the lighting on some scenes is so horrible that you can barely tell what's going on(this may have just been the age of the movie, though). Besides this, the movie tries hard from a story perspective, but turns out to be pretty much a snoozer that you're just waiting on to end.

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