Teenage Doll (USA, 1957) 71 min B&W DIR-PROD: Roger Corman. SCR: Charles B. Griffith. EXEC-PROD: Bernard Woolner. ASSOC-PROD: Lawrence Woolner. MUSIC: Walter Greene. DOP: Floyd Crosby. CAST: June Kenney, Fay Spain, John Brinkley, Colette Jackson, Barbara Wilson, Ziva Rodan, Sandy Smith, Barboura Morris, Richard Devon, Jay Sayer, Richard Cutting, Dorothy Neumann, Ed Nelson, Bruno VeSota, Abby Dalton. (Woolner Brothers – Allied Artists)
Teenage Doll is one of director Roger Corman and screenwriter Charles Griffith’s greatest collaborations: a pitch-black impressionistic study of misspent youth, which may or may not be played for laughs. Like many of those great exploitation pictures released by Allied Artists around the same time (The Cyclops; Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman), it opens with this hilarious crawl attempting to justify how educational this movie is about the teenage gang epidemic. And then they let us have it, as a janitor throws some water from a bucket out in the alley, splashing onto a dead girl, Nan, a member of the all-girl Black Widows street gang.
Once the other chain-smoking gals show up, the leader Helen (or, Hel… ooh, symbolism) reasons that she was pushed from a flight of stairs by some “square broad” named Barbara (June Kenney). Barbara is friendly with Eddie Rand of The Vandals gang, so The Black Widows decide to scratch up some cash, in a half-baked scheme to bribe The Vandals away from helping Barbara.
This scheme however gives us the chance to look inside the domestic lives of the girls, as they all go home to rustle up some money. Lorrie (Sandy Smith) picks up some money sent by her father (on the lam), and then throws her undernourished little sister some crackers to eat off the floor… in the dark! Eva (Ziva Rodan) steals money from her parents’ cash register while they are fighting in their restaurant. May (Colette Jackson) gets some loot from her older sister Janet (the lovely Barboura Morris) who is going on a date with her boss. (Only Griffith could write a line like this… “For once in my life I want to eat caviar instead of meatloaf, and let someone else pick up the tab.”) Hel (Fay Spain) blackmails her philandering father, who is having some hanky-panky while Mom is at work. Betty (Barbara Wilson) sneaks in and steals some money, and a pistol from her father, who (ah-ha!) gets a call minutes later to investigate a girl’s body in an alley.
Most bizarre of all, Barbara goes home to her parents- the father is an anal-retentive blowhard (“It is 10:38, young lady”) and the mother (Dorothy Neumann) is some Margaret Hamilton lookalike with a weird ribbon in her hair. We learn that Mom once had something going with a bootlegger until dad straightened her out!
This movie lets no one off the hook: even the comparatively “normal” family households are seen as dysfunctional and oppressive, as if to say, “You think they’re screwed up? Take a look at yourself!” So much screen time is spent with these glimpses at the girls’ home environments; the emphasis is more on the crazy, depressing world they (we?) all live in. The ingredients of a “JD picture” seem throwaway by comparison.
After Barbara is chased away from home by The Black Widows, she hops in a cab to go to the Vandals’ hideout (another great Chuck Griffith line when the cab driver utters: “Are you sure this is where you want to go? You were better off back there with those Amazons!”). There she meets her so-called boyfriend Eddie (John Brinkley), some snot-nosed ducktailed punk who has seen way too many Dwayne Hickman movies, spurns her love and bawls her out for leading the rival gangs to his pad.
The Black Widows hang out with a boy gang called The Tarantulas, who mope around behind them (naturally the girls are much tougher), and the Vandals use this whole episode as an excuse to beat the tar out of The Tarantulas. Then the cops show, and Eddie utters his one profound line to Barbara: “Unlike me, you’ve still got a choice”. Then Barbara walks towards the cops at the end, her fate (and everyone else’s) a big question mark.
This movie is so surreal, that it “might be” some kind of joke. The streets are all brightly lit, the sets are larger than life: the movie looks like some other world, however representative of our own. This mosaic is basically plotless, and full of weird characters (like the blind guy Barbara that runs into, and of course there’s Bruno VeSota as a drunk who will tell the cops the whole story of the girl in the alley… for a price). It is one of the most pessimistic movies Roger Corman ever made, as there are no easy solutions, no quick resolutions, and every single character (except maybe the detective played by Richard Devon) is pathetic. Teenage Doll is a jaw-dropping masterpiece.
Originally published in The Roger Corman Scrapbook, 2006.