We begin in media criminal mischief as two young women stealthily move through the British palatial estate they just broke into. Now, the mastermind behind this two person operation is Lucy Owens (Britton), who used to work at this house as a maid. Thus, she not only knows where the wall safe is hidden, and what valuables are secreted within, but her constant snooping allowed her to secure the combination as well. And while her agitated accomplice, Claire (Swanson), thinks they should just forget the whole thing and get out before they’re caught, Lucy assures the owners are gone on vacation as she pops open the safe and removes all the valuable jewelry.
Alas, Lucy forgot to take into account the other hired help as the family butler stumbles upon the crime scene still in progress, who sees Lucy but not Claire, who in turn manages to sneak up from behind and conk him over the head without ever being seen, rendering him unconscious. The girls then flee the premises with the loot.
Realizing full well the butler saw and recognized her, Lucy knows she’s in trouble and will most likely spend more time in the juvenile reformatory when she is inevitably caught. For this was not her first criminal rodeo. But, ever the conniver, she decides to salvage this caper as best she can by giving all the jewelry to the unidentifiable Claire -- save for one piece, a diamond bracelet, who is then instructed to hide the rest of the stash until Lucy serves out her sentence. By then, things should’ve cooled off enough and they can divvy it up, cash in, and finally enjoy the spoils of their endeavor.
From there, the girls split up and we follow Lucy as she makes her way to a local social club, where her kinda-sorta boyfriend, Tommy Harris (Charlesworth), is playing in the band, entertaining a gathered mass of teens. Well, at least Lucy wishes Tommy was her boyfriend. Here, Sam (Warren), the club’s owner, who is well aware of her feelings, rather gleefully points out to Lucy that Tommy appears to only have eyes for another girl, Anne Turner (Ireland), who also just arrived.
And while Lucy tries to play this all off
as nothing, saying she never cared about Tommy anyway, it’s obvious this
development has the girl seething with a jealous anger -- and all of it
directed at Anne, even though she claims they’re friends. In fact, says
the ever-scheming Lucy, they were just out together.
Meanwhile, after his set ends, Tommy joins Anne at her table and they share a kiss. Worried that she wasn’t going to show up at all, Tommy gets an apology for her tardiness. Seems Anne went on another one of her long solitary walks and lost track of time. But, as these two start to make up for that lost time, Lucy clandestinely moves to the coat check room, where she slips that stolen bracelet into Anne’s coat pocket.
Thus, the following morning, Anne and her widower father (Longdon) are a little surprised when the police show up at their front door. Seems the butler identified Lucy as expected, but then Lucy in turn falsely identified Anne as not only her accomplice but the ringleader of the break-in.
Lucy also claimed Anne is currently in possession of all the stolen loot. Anne, of course, denies this. Unfortunately for her, the inspector has a search warrant, which turns up that missing bracelet. And with that damning piece of evidence, I’m guessing Anne Turner is really regretting that long, solitary, alibi-less walk she took the night before right about now...
After World War II ended, where brother Harry Lee served with distinction as a tank commander in the North Africa and Italian campaigns, earning a Medal of Valor, and brother Edward J. served as a prosecuting attorney for the U.S. Army at the Nuremberg war crime trials, the Danzinger brothers opened a sound studio in their native New York City, which specialized in dubbing over foreign film imports. Soon expanding their operations into film production, their inaugural feature was Jigsaw (1949), where crusading reporter Franchot Tone tries to prove an immigrant shopkeeper’s suicide was actually a murder committed by a secret sect of Neo-Nazis.
Now, the Danzinger’s follow up feature, the ‘slightly’ exploitative So Young, So Bad (1950), was a balls-out screed on the horrors hidden behind the walls of a girl’s reformatory school. Walls psychiatrist Paul Henreid and nurse Catherine McLeod want to tear down to expose the abuses committed by the sadistic headmistress played by Grace Coppin. Walls that also contained a young Anne Francis and Rita Moreno, who both get their jail-bait on and cat-fighting claws out something fierce before getting blasted by a fire-hose when the inevitable riot breaks out.
And after producing two more features -- Edward G. Ulmer’s St. Benny the Dip (1951) and Babes in Baghdad (1952), the Danzingers pulled up stakes and moved to England, where they continued to make low-budget features, utilizing a lot of black-listed American expatriates, and hoped to break into television, starting with the series, Calling Scotland Yard. At the time, screenwriter Brian Clemens, who would go on to create the seminal British TV series, The Avengers, started working for the Danzingers, who later recalled he was often charged with writing screenplays to match still standing sets from someone else’s production to help save costs.
Now, while the majority of their theatrical output at this time was nothing more than combined and re-edited episodes of Calling Scotland Yard and The Vise, the Danzingers did manage a few original features like the cheap but effective Devil Girl from Mars (1954) and Satellite in the Sky (1956). And with the profits generated by these five to ten day wonders, the brothers bought a decommissioned airplane manufacturing plant in Hertfordshire, converted the hangars into sound stages, and rechristened it New Elstree Studios in 1956, where they really started cranking stuff out -- though still on the cheap. Or as actor Christoper Lee put it in a later interview, “If a [Danzinger] picture went on for more than three days, the film would be well in excess of its budget!”
Regardless of these limited funds, between 1956 and 1963, Danzinger Productions Ltd. would produce over 140 bottom bills and six TV-series. And one of those features, of course, was So Evil, So Young (1961), which, obviously, was a not-so-stealth remake of So Young, So Bad. Directed by Godfrey Grayson -- Dr. Morelle: The Case of the Missing Heiress (1949), The Spider's Web (1960), and written by the Danzingers' stock screenwriter, Mark Grantham, who tried to muddy the waters a bit by incorporating elements from a couple of his earlier screenplays for Man Accused (1959), where a man, wrongly convicted of murder, breaks out of prison to find the real killers, and Sentenced for Life (1960), where a son works to exonerate his imprisoned father over false espionage charges.
In So Evil, So Young, Lucy Owens’ vindictive plan to frame Anne Turner is two-fold: first, by implicating Anne, Claire will stay in the clear and the loot they stole will still be waiting for her once she’s served her time; and secondly, this will torpedo Anne’s relationship with Tommy and show that bloody interloper what happens when she dares to try and steal her man away.
A harsh lesson, indeed, as with the assault on the butler on top of the theft charges, with no alibi to speak of, Anne is sentenced to three years at the Wilsham Reformatory School for Girls. And from there, despite the tweaking, the plot really doesn’t stray a whole lot from your standard good girl gone bad / women in prison formula -- only this one kinda comes off a little too wholesome, given that title and the surrounding circumstances. Sort of. (More on this in a sec.)
Still, in short order, Anne has a bullseye painted on her back by the head matron, Miss Smith (Pollock), a vile combination of Evelyn Harper and Nurse Ratchet -- which will make a lot more sense if you’ve seen Caged (1950) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), characters portrayed beautifully by Hope Emerson and Louise Fletcher, respectively. And while the disciplinarian Smith prefers the stick over the carrot when dealing with her charges, the headmistress (Haythorne) is a reformer, explaining why there are no bars anywhere in the building or walls surrounding it. And while she does take a liking to Anne, who serves as her secretary since the girl had been one before winding up in here, she doesn’t believe her protests of innocence or how she was framed by Lucy, a familiar face at Wilsham.
Thus, stuck between Smith and Lucy, who has plenty of friends on the inside to back her up, life at Wilsham is pure hell for poor Anne, who always gets caught finishing the fights her adversary started, landing her more often than not in what passes for solitary confinement in this institution. Luckily, Anne finds a friend and ally in an older inmate named Marie (Whittingham), who is up for parole soon. And with her help, the wronged girl soon learns the rules -- the most important being to never snitch on a fellow inmate, because snitches get stitches.
Alas, to celebrate Marie’s impending parole, which at long last came through, the inmates of her dormitory decide to hold a clandestine going away party for her, which included stealing some sweets from the commissary. But they are caught in the act by Smith, who takes a perverse pleasure in telling Marie this violation will most likely negate her release and add another year to her sentence. And the already unstable Marie is so distraught over this development, she commits suicide by hanging herself.
This would prove the last straw for several inmates, including Lucy, who leads the charge to beat the hell out of Smith, whom the girls blame for Marie’s death. Only Anne abstains from joining in on the resulting riot, even going so far as to free another matron, trussed up and taken hostage during the chaos that is eventually curbed.
But once order is restored, Anne refuses to name the ringleaders of the riot and demands to be punished just like everyone else, earning the respect of several others, including one particular inmate who has proof that Lucy framed her for that robbery: the name of her real accomplice, Claire, and the name of the pawnbroker where Lucy will most likely hoc the jewelry.
Armed with this information, Anne engineers a jailbreak to get that crucial piece of evidence to her father and Tommy, who were already hot on Claire's trail due to the obscene amount of money she'd been throwing around town lately. But will Anne succeed? Or will the battered but ever watchful Smith catch her in the act? Or, most likely of all, will Lucy once more screw Anne over and rat her out?
Well, to answer, despite the seedy subject matter, the overall tenor of that cumulative stiff-lipped English temperament we've encountered thus far is a pretty big clue as to how So Evil, So Young was destined to end. Yup, there are no fire-hoses employed here, but when you chuck in that bold and brassy British Technicolor, which really snaps and pops, along with that absolutely bug-nuts xylophone-heavy spaz-jazz score, which really pops and snaps, it gives this film such a prim ‘n’ proper weirdness that kinda glosses over the absence of the usual exploitative sleaze you’d expect to see in a girl’s reform school vehicle like this one. So much so, one can’t help but giggle at all the bitch-slapping cat-fights and boggle at one of the most pleasant prison riots you will ever encounter on film.
Thus, it should come as a surprise to no one when Anne manages to get the name of the pawnbroker to Tommy, whom they refer to as Dear Old Moran (Diamont). She then turns herself in. And while her sentence is extended over her escape, Tommy is able to connect Claire to Moran and several pieces of the missing jewelry, who then turns this all over to the police. And when they bring Claire in for questioning, she’s surprised to see Lucy there, too, who was also brought in for more questioning. Here, Lucy still insists Anne was her partner -- until the inspector reveals Claire had already pawned-off all the jewelry to the unwitting Moran and burned through most of the cash. And with no honor among thieves, we are entreated to one last cat-fight as Lucy and Claire go at it like a couple of hellcats. And with that, Anne is exonerated and leaves the reformatory behind, pardon in hand, and rushes into the waiting arms of her father and Tommy.
These days, Jill Ireland is mostly known for being Mrs. Charles Bronson, who co-starred in numerous films together -- The Mechanic (1972), Hard Times (1975), and From Noon Till Three (1976) among others, but she already had a steady acting career, and another husband, long before those two first met. Ireland's showbiz vocation actually began in 1955 as a dancer in Michael Powell’s Oh, Rosalinda! (1955), and then her big break came two years later when she landed a role in Hell Divers (1957) opposite Stanley Baker, Herbert Lom, and Sean Connery. Here, she also met and fell in love with another co-star, David McCallum.
McCallum and Ireland would marry soon after, and then the couple moved to the United States around 1964 so McCallum could star as Ilya Kuryakin opposite Robert Vaughn’s Napoleon Solo on The Man from U.N.C.L.E. TV-series. Ireland would also appear on several episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and landed a recurring role as Marian Starett on the short-lived series, Shane, which was loosely based on the movie starring Alan Ladd. More TV work followed, including guest-starring stints on Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, My Favorite Martian, and most notably for her solo shot on Star Trek, where she played Leila Kalomi, the one and only woman Mr. Spock ever loved, in This Side of Paradise.
It was while on location with her husband for The Great Escape (1963) when Ireland first met Bronson, who was one of McCallum’s many co-stars in that mega-blockbuster. The couple would divorce in 1967, and Ireland and Bronson would marry less than one year later; so, I think we can extrapolate from there on what happened in the interim. Anyhoo, after a couple of brief scenes together in Villa Rides (1968) and London Affair (1970), which made Bronson a huge star in Europe, the two would finally officially co-star together in the French film, Rider on the Rain (1970). And over the next 17-years, the couple would star in 13 films together; the last being Assassination (1987). Ireland would pass away three years later in 1990 after a long fight with cancer.
So Evil, So Young was a rare top-bill for Ireland. And while she's fine, the rest of the cast is a bit of a wash with two notable exceptions: Ellen Pollock, whose limp, cane, streaked hair, and taciturn speech brings to mind a German gulag commandant. Of course, before the film wraps, she is shown the door. Defiant to the end, Miss Smith quits instead of accepting a suspension over her unbecoming conduct that resulted in Marie’s suicide. The other is Jocelyn Britton, who positively excels as the conniving Lucy Owens. This would be her only feature; and aside from a brief run on the William Hartnell era of Doctor Who, Britton’s acting career never seemed to spark, which is too bad because, if I'm being honest, she kinda acts circles around her headlining co-star here.
Again, So Evil, So Young will hold no real surprises for those familiar with this subgenre of cheap exploitation pictures. And those that aren’t, well, it’s still pretty weak sauce. However, you can’t underestimate the impact of that hard candy coating slathered all over this colorful nonsense. As a B-picture, it barely breaks an hour and, hell, there are a lot worse things you could do for an hour and 17 minutes, right?
Originally posted on January 16, 2012, at Micro-Brewed Reviews.
So Evil, So Young (1961) Danziger Productions Ltd. :: United Artists / P: Edward J. Danziger, Harry Lee Danziger / AP: Brian Taylor / D: Godfrey Grayson / W: Mark Grantham / C: James Wilson / E: Desmond Saunders / M: Tony Crombie, Bill LeSage / S: Jill Ireland, Jocelyn Britton, John Charlesworth, Ellen Pollock, Joan Haythorne, Sheila Whittingham, Bernice Swanson, John Longden, Otto Diamant, C. Denier Warren
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