In light of all of the excitement in this thread now about the upcoming
Mamie Van Doren Film Noir Collection, I'll take the opportunity to share my recommendations for three noir-stained Olive Films titles that feature the actress...
When a new kid, played by Russ Tamblyn (
West Side Story), arrives at a high school, he quickly immerses himself into the wild crowd and tracks down the best supply sources for drugs, quickly earning the ire of teachers and authority figures. Will his preoccupation with criminal element of the town's teenage population get the best of him?
Jack Arnold's 1958 exploitation film,
High School Confidential, is hilarious, rambunctious, and overwrought in a way that leads me to believe that it was never really intended to be taken seriously, despite some notably altruistic plot turns late in the story. I can imagine that enforcers of the Hays Code must have had a field day with this movie, where the presence of Jerry Lee Lewis himself during the opening and closing sequences implies that everyone is in on the joke. While watching these scenes earlier today, I was reminded of a bizarre 1970 meeting between Elvis Presley and President Richard Nixon. Thanks to a team of accomplished actors and filmmakers, though,
High School Confidential remains solidly engaging even if one chooses to take it at face value as a crime drama about the perils of drug use in high schools.
If you're looking for eye candy, then there's plenty of that to enjoy in this film. The iconic sex symbol, Mamie Van Doren, commands attention every time she's on the screen as the “aunt” of the lead character. Film
noir knockout Jan Sterling (
Union Station,
Appointment with Danger,
Mystery Street,
Ace in the Hole) is surprisingly straight-laced, but nonetheless alluring as a teacher who shows real concern for Tamblyn's Tony Baker while brushing off his advances with style. Diane Jergens drives one of the most prominent, and one of the most eye-rolling, subplots as a schoolgirl in the clutches of addiction to gateway drugs. Most of all, though, I was particularly smitten with Phillipa Fallon, who appears in a brief, but unforgettable sequence as a beatnik chick who chants a nihilistic poem in a coffee house.
Russ Tamblyn, John Drew Barrymore, and the other male leads all talk as though they just graduated from the Robert Mitchum
Out of the Past School of One-Liners, and the result gave me a few belly laughs as I watched the film. The initial dialogue sequence involving a parking dispute is particularly golden.
Mickey Rooney did not always star in comedies. In the 1959 crime drama,
The Big Operator, he plays a racketeering union boss whose tough talk is backed by deadly connections. The end result is an intense movie, even by today's standards, that must have been quite controversial for its time. One union worker in the film is dumped out of a car, doused in gasoline, and set on fire, while another union worker is tortured by Rooney's henchmen in an effort to prevent his testifying before a government committee. This movie was released during the thick of the Senate hearings where Robert F. Kennedy squared off against Jimmy Hoffa, and that sense of urgency resonates throughout the story.
The unbelievably sexy Mamie Van Doren, who, along with Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, stopped a lot of traffic back in the day, is somehow convincing as a normal housewife in this movie, although she probably got quite a few pulses racing when it was released.
The 1959 Charles F. Haas movie,
The Beat Generation, has been described as one of the last films
noir of the classic era, but it strays from that genre by wearing borderline-exploitation tendencies on its sleeve. I was not alive during the late 1950s, but, while watching this movie, I got the impression that releasing a police thriller revolving around the beatnik community in 1959 would have been somewhat akin to releasing a Bee Gees disco film in 1983, and that the beatnik vernacular and the over-the-top vibe were probably outdated by at least a couple of years even while it was being produced.
On its own terms, though, this is a pretty solid crime drama that veers into
noir territory at times with dark explorations of misogyny, as its cynical male detective hero, played by Steve Cochran, chases down a serial rapist, played by Ray Danton, who has assaulted his wife. Controversial subjects for the time, namely rape and abortion, come into play during some serious scenes, and the storyline is engaging even when the beatnik interactions during the final moments push it close to the edge of parody. The sexy Mamie Van Doren plays a bored wife who becomes drawn into the fold when she is sought out by both the rapist and the police. Fay Spain earns high marks during the more somber turns in the film with her role as the victimized wife of the detective. The amazing Louis Armstrong has some screen time as a musician on the scene, and the iconic actress/television host, Vampira, has an amusing brief role as a beat poet.
As one of the characters might say, there's some cool cats in this flick, Daddy-O!
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