Accent on Crime (1944) Online

This is a bad movie that purports to be an educational film designed to warn America about the menace of teenagers running amok thanks to uninvolved parents. However, like almost all the so-called "educational" films of the 30s and 40s, it was really a shabby little film designed to be snuck past the censors of the Hays Office. In 1934, the major studios all agreed to abide by the dictates of a stronger Production Code--eliminating sex, nudity, cursing and "inappropriate" plots in films (these had actually been relatively common in films in the early 30s). However, in an effort to sneak in smut, small studios created films to shock adults when they learn about terrible social ills, though they were REALLY intended to titillate and slip adult themes past the censors! Such films as MARIJUANA, MAD YOUTH, REEFER MADNESS and SEX MADNESS were all schlocky trash that skirted past the boards because they were supposedly educational. Even though they were laughably bad, they also made money due to low production costs and because they often offered nudity, violence and sordid story lines--all in the name of education!

Unlike many of these films, DELINQUENT DAUGHTERS didn't have nudity, but it sure had lots of sleazy story elements that were sure to titillate. In this film, teens drank, used drugs, committed pointless robberies and assaults and drove like maniacs--all apparently the result of poor parental guidance. And as a result, kids died in this movie--and in the most spectacular ways! The acting and writing were almost universally bad, though the sequence where the judge tells off the parents of these punks actually was amazingly good--too bad everything else was pretty lousy. In fact, one character was so bad, so annoying and so gosh-darn awful, I nominate the ditsy blonde as the most annoying character of the 1940s--she was THAT bad!! Her voice was more grating than Olive Oyl's and she was practically sub-human in her stupidity!

The newspaper-ads promotional material for this film featured a series of Coming Soon theatre script-written teaser-ads comprised of daily entries in "The Diary of a Delinquent Daughter." June writes:

Wednesday: "Had my first drink of whiskey today. Tastes awful...but what a wallop! Guess I passed out. If Dad knew what I was doing I'd get trounced! Gosh...wonder if he really cares what happens to me?"

Thursday: "Nick wants me to run away with him. Says I'm old enough to know my own mind. I'm sixteen, but I look older when I use makeup...Wish I could confide in Mom or Dad!"

Friday: "Can you keep a secret, diary? I'm going to slip away tonight. Dad will probably be tight as usual and Mom out painting the town (also as usual.) So it shouldn't be too difficult. I'm scared a little bit but I just can't stand things here!"

Saturday: "I'm on my way to the big city with Nick. That's the fellow I met at the dance. I'm in love with him, I guess, but he makes me awfully jealous. Always making passes at some other girl when I'm around. But anything is better than what I left behind."

Sunday: "What a big baby I am...I've been crying. I'm not homesick, just a little bit scared. Nick accused me of flirting and hit me. Just found out he's broke. We've got to get some money some way, and fast!"

The only reason to see the movie after that series of ads ran was to find out if Nick had figured out by Monday a swell way June could make them some money...from real-friendly strangers...fast.

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.

This was on the compilation DVD, Cult Classics. The transfered print was awful. There was a big scratch running through print for about fifteen minutes. About fifteen minutes of the night material was so dark that you might as well be listening to the radio.

What can be seen is quite poorly written. We are talking Ed Wood bad here. A woman pulls a gun on a man. The man says, "What have you got there." She answers, "Something that goes boom, boom, boom!"

Teara Loring is interesting as a real sociopath. She really enjoys lying and stealing. Mary Boward gives a cute performance as a blond airhead, more blond and more airhead than anything in movies until Marilyn Monroe's comic performances.

Fifi D'Orsay is funny as a French woman.

Other than a few interesting performances, the bad dialogue and inane plot make the film difficult to take seriously. It is only redeemable for a few camp moments.

After high schooler Lucille commits suicide, the police arrive on campus and start grilling the squeaky clean teens to find out the whys and wherefores. Good girl June (June Carlson from the long forgotten Fox series of Jones' family comedies) is more than happy to answer their questions, airhead Betty (Mary Bovard) would cooperate if only she could successfully string together more than two or three words to create a coherent sentence, and bad girl Sally (Teala Loring, sister of Debra Paget) won't give them the time of day. Detective Hanahan (Joe Devlin) has the right idea, though, and suspects that local hood Nick Gordon (Jon Dawson) and his moll Mimi (Fifi D'Orsay) are implicated in some way in the girl's death. This low, low budget PRC production is thoroughly predictable in both the story and production departments, with most of the film shot against very poorly lit cardboard interiors. Sinister Cinema's print is in splicy but watchable condition.

Another day, another juvenile delinquency film courtesy of poverty-row American producers. This one concerns a couple of girls who get caught up with some low rent criminal types and end up going on something of a crime spree. It's a little like a low key BONNIE AND CLYDE except made without any discernible scripting, characterisation, or narrative drive.

Indeed, this is poverty-row filmmaking at its nadir, and there's little here to tempt fans of the genre. The dialogue has been written by somebody with a tin ear and the acting is hardly up to scratch. These films always seem to have some boring reporter guy who goes undercover to bring down the criminals at large. But the worst thing about DELINQUENT DAUGHTERS is the quality of the public domain print in circulation; half the scenes have a massive scratch running down the middle of the screen, while the rest are so dark you're staring at a black screen.

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.

So I'm watching the flick, and I start thinking to myself - Good grief, did people actually pay good money to watch stuff like this back in the Forties? Yeah, I know, admission was probably only about a quarter at best, but still, you could have had a couple sodas at the malt shop. Straight out of the exploitation/educational film camp, "Delinquent Daughters" attempts to instruct and admonish parents for the 'Alarming Increase of Juvenile Delinquency' as touted in a newspaper headline quote from J. Edgar Hoover. I have a pretty good idea that none of the genre's films had much impact regarding their intended mission, other than the covert one of titillation and cheap thrills.

As far as this one goes, it's pretty uneven in both the acting and production values. The print I viewed from the Mill Creek Entertainment set of 'Cult Classics' was of questionable quality; it was easy to pick out the night time scenes because they all looked like they were filmed completely in the dark. The story follows the off screen set up of a high school girl suicide, and goes on to explore the antics of various teenagers, none of whom seem to feel any remorse for the dead teen, who one describes as 'a nice girl but no angel'. It would have seemed more appropriate if the picture explored the angst these high schoolers felt over the death of a friend, but it seems she didn't have one.

Hey, how about that Jerry (Jimmy Zahner), all worked up over the gun point robbery he pulled at the grocery store. He got away with $2.80!!! Who wrote this? And you can't beat old Rocky's (Johnny Duncan) logic in trying to convince June (June Carlson) to marry him - Martha Washington was only sixteen when she got married, and she wound up with a president!

I guess the highlight, as a number of other reviewers have pointed out, was old Judge Craig's (Frank McGlynn) speech to gathered teens and parents alike noting that the proper attention and discipline might have prevented all the bad things from happening in their kids' lives. More simplistic than compelling, one comes away with a feeling of 'Yeah, right', just as the scene dissolves into a decade early preview of American Bandstand to provide a happy ending. Not one of the better flicks in the 'Cult Classics' collection, you might want to check out one of their drug, sex or alcohol treatments instead.

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.

(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!

Delinquent Daughters (1944)

** (out of 4)

PRC cheapie has a cafe owner turning a bunch of local kids into juvenile delinquents. Thankfully there's a caring judge and a loving cop to try and teach the kids to be good and drink soda instead of whiskey. Seeing that this quickie is from PRC should tell you not too take it too seriously. The film, like so many others of its day, is incredibly poorly made, features bad acting and an even worse script but all of this adds to its charm and if you enjoy movies that are so bad they're laughable then this is a film for me. There are countless stupid scenes with all the typical preaching moments where the judge pleads for peace while the teenagers talk about their bad home lives. The highlight of the film is when one of the cops takes two of the bad kids to see the judge in the middle of the morning and we get a ten minute scene with the judge preaching to everyone in the room. An even dumber scene is when one of the girls comes home late and her freak father slaps her and then tries to go after her with a cane. It's silly moments like this that keeps the film moving throughout its 71-minute running time. If you're looking for art then go watch a Bergman film but if you want silly trash then this film delivers.

The film is more than Delinquent Daughters, there are also Delinquent Sons. They could have called it Delinquent Youth/Teens. The one main delinquent daughter is Sally Higgins. Sally is the one that really loves the bad life (crime, stealing, guns, the mob). The other kids started going down the wrong path but they are fairly easy to correct... but Sally is still mad that her parents wouldn't let her see her boyfriend and the boyfriend ended up leaving town. Sally's father also hits her, leaving marks and constantly pushing Sally away from her family. - Sally is still sore about it all.

The suicide at the beginning of the film is what kicked off the police officer and reporter getting involved in the teens. The parents of the teens aren't good (example hitting the kids which pushes the kids away even more instead of drawing them in closer).

It's not a great film - but it's better than the rating suggests it is.

4/10