Directed and written by Harry Revier — who also made Lash of the Penitentes and would come back in the 50s and 60s to re-edit movie serial Buck Rodgers into Planet Outlaws and The Lost City into City of Lost Men — this original exploitation movie was the first produced by Kroger Babb, who would go on to make Mom and Dad.
Star Shirley Mills, who was also the youngest daughter in The Grapes of Wrath, is nude in this movie. That’s pretty amazing seeing as how it was made at the time of the Hays Code. It was an educational movie and made outside of Hollywood, but Mills is also 12 years old in this movie. You can imagine how controversial it was.
Miss Carol (Diana Durrell) has come back to the Ozarks to be a teacher and to end child marriage, which is the shame of the movie. Jake Bolby (Warner Richmond) wants to marry Mills’ character and is stopped by the law and then killed by Angelo the dwarf (Angelo Rossitto). Rossitto is in a ton of movies, all the way from the 20s to the 80s. He may be best known as the Master part of Master Blaster in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.
Babb tried submitting this movie for a certificate of approval, only to be told it was “a sexually abhorrent abnormality which violates all moral principles.” He released it anyway and when it played Indianapolis, film critic Anna Horn said that she was horrified that a “cheap, crude, mislabeled morality play would be shown in a major Indiana family theater.” Babb met with Horn and instead of her writing a review, they stayed together for thirty-six years. She would write his next film, Mom and Dad.
You can watch this on YouTube.
