Girls in the Night (USA, 1953) 83 min B&W DIR: Jack Arnold. PROD: Albert J. Cohen. SCR: Ray Buffum. MUSIC: Henry Mancini, Herman Stein. DOP: Carl Guthrie. CAST: Harvey Lembeck, Joyce Holden, Glenda Farrell, Glen Roberts, Patricia Hardy, Jaclynne Greene, Don Gordon, Emile Meyer. (Universal-International)
Director Jack Arnold will always be known for his string of 1950s science-fiction films at Universal, but had worked in many genres. His first commercial feature is this dated, obscure but interesting melodrama with young adults eager to break out of the East Side ghetto- by any means. In a rare dramatic (and lead) role, Harvey Lembeck (best remembered to modern audiences as the bumbling bike gang leader Eric Von Zipper in the Beach Party movies) is the aimless Chuck Haynes, who lives with his parents and two siblings in a cramped East Side tenement. All of the central characters aspire to a better life: especially the father figure (presently disabled from an accident) who wants to put a down payment on a house (only three blocks away!) to get his family out of the ghetto. Chuck’s girlfriend Georgia (Joyce Holden) scrapes up some loose change by shaking her booty at a beatnik party; his sister Hannah (Patricia Hardy) wins a beauty contest, but won’t get anywhere with her dopey boyfriend Joe (Glen Roberts).
One night this young quartet robs some loot stashed in an old miser’s house, but unbeknownst to them the man is dead in the other room, as cheap hood Irv (Don Gordon) and his accomplice Vera had just made a botched robbery attempt before their arrival. Chuck is accused of murder, and his friends conspire to unmask the true culprit. Hannah, previously avoiding the lecherous affections of Irv, decides to turn up the affection towards him in order for him to spill the beans.
The film already has novelty value because of its director, the atypical dramatic lead, and for featuring the first significant role for ubiquitous character actor Don Gordon (seen in countless 70s movies and TV series). It is also unique in that a woman is the central villain of this youth picture, and for that matter, the tomboyish Vera is its most complex figure: calculating, full of sexual longing, clamouring for attention. She is attracted to Irv, and at first is subservient to his every whim. After the murder however, he is wrapped around her little finger, and must cater to her demands, lest she implicate him with the crime. Throughout most of the picture, Vera is commonly referred to in the second person as “Ugly”. (Try getting that one out of the gate today.) But fret not, viewers, for in the end credits when the voice of Universal contract player Jeff Chandler (!) introduces the young newcomers, it is revealed that actress Jaclynne Greene is anything but.
Girls in the Night is an interesting historical footnote, as it was made before The Blackboard Jungle ushered in the cycle of “troubled teen” flicks later in the decade, and as such, borrows from an earlier tradition. This space-age chronicle of misspent youth harkens back to conventions of 1940s Bowery Boys urban melodramas. Almost everyone, cops and teens alike, talks in patter like “Ah shaddap!” and “Look here, see?” (I kept waiting for Leo Gorcey to show up.)