A teenage girl accidentally murders a member of a girl gang, and tries to escape both the police and the gang.
1957 sure was a good year for whiz-kid auteur Corman. He made FIVE masterpieces of 50’s genre cinema; ATTACK OF THE CRAB MONSTERS, NOT OF THIS EARTH, SORORITY GIRL, THE UNDEAD and this astonishingly fresh and dynamic girl-gang movie.
A knowing and dramatic script by Charles Griffith helps, full of punchy, strong street language and memorable soliloquies. Powerful performances by all enhance the gritty dialog. The film is shot in moody, shadowy b/w by Floyd Crosby, making backstreet LA look almost like 1940’s Sicily. Walter Greene’s haunting, didactic score is as emotional as the rage-fueled generation it both mocks and glorifies.
The efficient plot (members of a girl gang need to raise quick cash in order to catch the girl who murdered one of their own), gives us the opportunity to enter into each of the girl’s home lives, and we see immediately why they’re all screwed-up: the leader lives in utter filth, alone but for a malnourished kid sister who sits in a pile of garbage and eats stale crackers, begging for food; a Spanish girl goes home to a chaotic landscape in a fascinating scene told entirely in Spanish; the heroine of the piece comes from a wacky, almost surreal WASP environment, with a stuffy nerd-dad and a kooky mom; another gang girl catches her bum of a dad making it with a prostitute, and chews him out for screwing around while his wife breaks her back working; finally, another gang member goes back to a nice apartment only to berate her roommate for screwing around with her boss.
Peripheral characters, including cynical drunks, would-be rapists, creepy bums, nasty cops and deranged gang flunkies, are all overdrawn so colorfully they border on the surreal, and are thus indelible, virtually mythic.
No doubt about it, TEENAGE DOLL packs in more squalor and despair and gritty psychodrama than a dozen other 50’s JD flicks. This almost-otherworldly movie moves and talks like something Quentin Tarantino might make today; surely, this lost gem is at least 25 years ahead of its time.
