Teenage Devil Dolls / One Way Ticket To Hell (1956)

‘The junkies call them Goofballs and Cassandra was about as goofed up on Seconal as the physical limitations of the human body can stand.’

A frustrated and misunderstood teenage girl joins a motorcycle gang and begins smoking reefers. Marriage to a nice young boy doesn’t work out and she becomes addicted to sleeping pills. Then her life really starts spiralling out of control…

Dreary, no budget exploitation brought to us by ’Voiceover Man’ (played by Kurt Martell in this instance) whose oh-so serious proclamations warn us of the risks of the deadly weed and the inevitability of apprehension by the forces of law and order. In fact his stern, unforgiving commentary replaces such usual filmmaking conventions as synchronised sound and actual dialogue.

The story follows a path only too familiar to anyone who has seen one of Dwain Esper’s ‘roadshow’ pictures from a couple of decades earlier. We start with the innocent, but fatally bored, Cassandra (Barbara Marks) falling into bad company and trying soft drugs due to peer pressure. Of course, this leads to dealing and hanging out with heroin addict Elaine Lindenbaum. Before too long, she’s known to the local police and ends up with a serious habit herself.

An unkind commentator might be tempted to draw comparisons between director Bamlet Lawrence Price Jr and Ed Wood, given the shoddy production values, poor camera work and terrible performances, but wait! Things are not quite what they seem. This film was not a feature release at all. In reality, it’s the Master’s thesis of a graduating UCLA film student and was filmed for the princely sum of $14,000. A lot of the cast were friends and family and, unsurprisingly, have no other acting credits. The complete lack of synchronised sound was probably down to an absence of resources rather than someone losing the voice track as apparently occurred with notorious carpet-monster trainwreck ‘The Creeping Terror’ (1964).

Giving the director the benefit of the doubt, he may have even intended the film as a kind of throwback to Esper’s kind of cinema, although there’s no evidence of anything but serious intentions. There’s even the sort of ‘warning’ caption at the end that Esper used frequently in his features.

What a trip, daddio!

Few of the cast members had a subsequent film career but Marks did, only it wasn’t in front of the camera. She worked briefly in the 1970s in a production and editorial capacity for Francis Ford Coppola on ‘The Godfather’ (1972) and ‘Apocalypse Now’ (1979). Voiceover Man Martell appeared, appropriately enough, on 4 episodes of Jack Webb’s po-faced hit TV show ‘Dragnet’ and had a couple of other minor credits as well.

What’s more interesting is that at the time of production, director Price Jr was married to MGM contract actress Anne Francis. She’d already racked up a featured supporting role in ‘The Lion Is In The Streets’ (1953) opposite James Cagney, appeared with Spencer Tracy in ‘Bad Day At Black Rock’ (1955) and played the female lead in smash hit ‘Blackboard Jungle’ (1955), which introduced the world to Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock.’ In the very year that ‘Teenage Devil Dolls’ (1956) was made, she achieved cinema immortality opposite Robby the Robot in timeless science fiction milestone ‘Forbidden Planet’ (1956).

Perhaps it was her success that soured the couple’s Hollywood dream but, by the end of the decade, they were divorced. Francis never quite achieved the stardom that must have seemed a real possibility, but she did appear as ‘Honey West’ on the hit network TV show in the 1960s and continued working regularly until the end of the century. Price Jr on the other hand has no other film credits after this. Not a single one.

Given the circumstances of the production, it seems unfair to judge this effort too harshly. Indeed the later scenes of Marks and her pusher boyfriend fleeing through the desert as the police close in actually has a decent, documentary-type feel and some of the shot composition is fairly good.

And it is a very cool title…

 

Sex Madness (1938)

‘Down through the ages has rushed a menace more dangerous than the worst criminal. Syphilis. Let us seize this monster and stamp out forever its horrible influence. Syphilis must no longer play its deadly part in our lives preventing marriages … breaking up families …’

Dwain Esper Vs. The Evils of Burlesque.

Dwain Esper was the great granddaddy of exploitation cinema, an ex-carny and alleged confidence trickster, who ended up with a small movie studio after coming out on the right end of one of his ‘business deals.’ Rather brilliantly, he came up with a sure-fire way to financial success; make no- budget films on daring and salacious subjects that Hollywood wouldn’t touch with a barge pole.

Esper bypassed the usual distribution channels (and decency laws) by touring his films around the country himself. He would hire a hall/tent/burlesque house in a small town and simply take money on the door, aided by his wife, an ex-snake dancer who usually wrote the films. There were brushes with the law, of course, but Esper was a clever man; his films might show hardcore drug use, bare breasted women, murder and mayhem, but it was all for educational purposes, as proved by the inclusion of helpful captions. Also the protagonists always came to a bad end, driving home the supposed ‘moral lesson.’

Here, we follow two stories; reformer’s son Pat Lawrence who attends a burlesque house (the fool!) and small town beauty queen Vivian McGill, who sacrifices her virtue for the promise of a break in the movie business. Lawrence goes to a party where unmarrieds periodically disappear upstairs to check out the guest bedroom. Both hero and heroine contract an STD, and find themselves at the mercy of quack doctors offering expensive, miracle cures.

Unfortunately, there’s a bit of a problem with all of this from an entertainment perspective. Esper might have been prepared to show people injecting drugs: ‘Narcotic’ (1933), women fighting with loaded syringes: Maniac (1934), and fornication (pretty much all of his films) but actual sex? That was a line even he wasn’t going to cross. So, instead of the near-the-knuckle titillation that an audience might have reasonably expected, instead they got lots of sober men in grey suits sitting in offices discussing syphilis. It’s not exactly a thrill a minute.

Naughty, naughty!

The filmmaking technique is very basic, but it’s devoid of the rough edges that made his earlier films, like ‘Maniac’ (1934), such a delirious and hysterical ride. Sure, there’s one scene where an open window falls shut and causes one of the performers to flub her line, but it’s the only real sign of the Esper of old. The rest of the proceedings are obviously cheap, but flat and desperately lifeless.

Whether the film was not such a success as Esper’s earlier works is obviously unrecorded, but it did turn out to be his last. But that was probably because Esper saw a better, and more profitable, future for himself in the business. Why bother actually making the films when you could just distribute other people’s work? He secured the right to midnight movie staple ‘Reefer Madness’ (1938) and made a mint.

Esper was only a barely competent filmmaker, but he was truly a cinema visionary.

Marihuana (1936)

‘I’m the doll who should be sporting the rocks.’

A well-to-do society girl resents her family’s concentration on the fortunes of her older sister and starts running around with a fast crowd. At a weekend house party, she is introduced to the ‘Weed of Evil’ and her life disintegrates into habitual hard drug use and the world of organised crime.

Ex-carny and shady businessman Dwain Esper was arguably history’s first exploitation filmmaker. Typically, his films focused on drug use, prostitution and other social ills, often depicting these vices in an almost documentary fashion. Bypassing the usual outlets, Esper took his cheap and cheerful pictures on the road himself, exhibiting in halls and burlesque clubs and taking money on the door. He sidestepped problems with obscenity laws by arguing that the films were educational. To prove his point, they often included cautionary captions and the protagonists always came to a bad end.

This film was pretty much a re-run of the earlier ‘Narcotic’ (1933), also written by Esper’s wife, a former snake dancer. This time around, instead of a promising young doctor getting hooked, it’s high spirited teenager, Burma, who starts looking for kicks in all the wrong places. As we join the action, she’s dancing the night away in a disreputable juke joint downtown. We know it’s disreputable because people are drinking and some of them look rather intoxicated. There are some slurred words and laughing and snogging. Someone even falls over. This is bad. Burma and her friends get targeted by two older guys, who are wearing their hats indoors, a sure sign of the criminal type. They invite Burma and her naïve companions to a house party the following week. On the way home that night, Burma’s boyfriend gets a bit frisky in the car! The cad!

Taking drugs make all your clothes fall off…

Next weekend, the house party gets out of hand with all sorts of hi-jinks. There’s snogging, rolling around on the floor, more snogging and a fight with soda siphons!  Our dodgy hosts get out the ‘special cigarettes’ and, before you know it, all the girls have stripped off and gone skinny-dipping in the sea. We see actual breasts (disgraceful!) and one of them quite rightly pays the price for such brazen behaviour when she drowns (the wages of sin, eh?)

Later on, we find out that the frisky boyfriend has got Burma in the family way. Apparently, it happened at the house party (I must have blinked and missed that part) and he has to get a job with the drug pushers so he can pay the bills and marry her. But things go wrong and it’s all downhill from there for our feisty (and rather dim) heroine.

By 1936, Esper had made a few films so he’d learnt some of the rudiments of the process. This is actually a great pity as it was the rough edges and technical incompetence that made such efforts as the delirious ‘Maniac’ (1934) so incredibly entertaining. The only signs of such failings here are the obviously tiny budget and some of the supporting cast, who are very stilted. The story is obvious and predictable but does serve to highlight some of the interesting social attitudes of the time. Burma rebels because her mother spends all her time concentrating on getting an older sister ‘safely married’ (her words). Obviously, this is because women can’t be trusted on their own without a man.

Amazingly for a Dwain Esper project, the finished film does have one notable strength and it comes in the lead performance of Harley Wood. Yes, her early scenes of intoxication are pretty laughable, but, once past that, she charts Burma’s transformation from teenage tearaway to hardened criminal with a level of skill that belongs in a far better arena than this. In real life, she was actually a professional songwriter and her acting career never came to more than bits in a few low budget westerns and crime pictures. The most famous film she graced was Oscar winning ‘My Man Godfrey’ (1936) with William Powell and Carole Lombard. She played ‘Socialite.’

Esper gave up making films about drugs after this one. He switched to the evils of sex instead!

Narcotic (1933)

‘You can take it out of the body but you can’t take it out of the mind.’

A promising young physician develops an opium habit and his life spirals ever downward over the following years to its inevitable sordid and tragic conclusion as he becomes hopelessly addicted to hard drugs.

Dwain Esper made exploitation movies before the term even existed. To avoid trouble with the censors, he did not exhibit them through the usual channels but took them out on the road himself, setting up in halls, revival tents, carnivals and burlesque houses – anywhere he could sit on the door and collect admissions. Esper was a former carny himself and his partner in crime was his wife and ex-snake dancer Hildesgard Stadie. She wrote the films and he directed.

‘Narcotic’ (1933) was their 2nd effort, debut ‘The Seventh Commandment’ (1932) is seemingly lost. Stadie’s screenplay was supposedly based on the life of an uncle, a quack who hocked patent ‘medicines’ around the carnival circuit. We join Dr William G Davies (Harry Cording) at the start of his pharmaceutical journey, a respectable man with a glittering career in front of him. Cording is surprisingly naturalistic in these scenes, although Joan Dix playing his wife is very stilted. Hooked on opium by a stereotypical Chinaman, Cording’s behaviour becomes increasingly fractured, although his performance remains mostly restrained. He ends up swindling suckers in a tacky sideshow, a life with which Esper and Stadie were probably only too familiar!

Although the film is dull and very cheaply made, there are several talking points. First and most obvious is the presentation of hard core drug use. At a ‘drug party’, we see cocaine, heroin, weed and other substances laid out like in a tapas bar, with swells in evening clothes snorting, smoking and actually injecting.

Yes, this woman went on to win an Emmy…

Esper wouldn’t have been able to get away with this daring and titilating content, even outside of the usual studio system, but his movies were social documentaries and educational (well, supposedly!) and this one opens with no less than 4 captions, detailing the scourge of drugs and the authenticity of the scenes depicted. By showing us the degradations of addiction, Esper is obviously rallying us all to a social cause, not just making a quick buck.

Another item of interest is the unusual structure of the narrative. Scene follows scene with no clue as to how much time has passed between, sometimes it seems to be a day, sometimes months or even years. It would be easy to just put this down to incompetence of course (the shadow of the boom mike should have got an acting credit) but was it actually an attempt to show the increasing deterioration of an addict’s mind? One of the characters even tells Cording in the final scenes that his perception of time and reality are now completely screwed. The feel of it certainly foreshadows the glorious delirium of Esper’s demented follow up ‘Maniac’ (1934) and begs the question of what he might have been trying to achieve with that movie. Was he actually shooting for something on an artistic level? Is it really as wonderfully clueless and idiotic as it seems?

Actress Jean Levy, later Jeanne Grey, who appeared here in the ‘drug party’ scene (‘You can shoot me if I don’t…with a needle!’) actually went on to win an Emmy believe it or not. Not for acting mind, she became a pioneer in the role of women on radio and TV, presenting her own network magazine show for women in the 1950s (introduced by a young Johnny Carson!) She also won many awards for her civic works and philanthropy. All a long way from the somewhat shabby world of Dwain Esper…

Buy ‘Narcotic’ here and you get ‘Maniac’ too! Can you resist?