Delinquent Daughters (1944)

Lack of good storyline.

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Good concept, poorly executed.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

The film is more than Delinquent Daughters, there are also Delinquent Sons. They could have called it Delinquent Youth/Teens. The one main delinquent daughter is Sally Higgins. Sally is the one that really loves the bad life (crime, stealing, guns, the mob). The other kids started going down the wrong path but they are fairly easy to correct... but Sally is still mad that her parents wouldn't let her see her boyfriend and the boyfriend ended up leaving town. Sally's father also hits her, leaving marks and constantly pushing Sally away from her family. - Sally is still sore about it all.The suicide at the beginning of the film is what kicked off the police officer and reporter getting involved in the teens. The parents of the teens aren't good (example hitting the kids which pushes the kids away even more instead of drawing them in closer).It's not a great film - but it's better than the rating suggests it is.4/10

There only seems to be one delinquent daughter, Sally, and she is a toughie!! When the police visit the high school to investigate a girl's suicide, she struts into the Principal's office like she was born to the streets and proceeds to smart mouth the policeman who is there to ask questions. And no wonder she thinks she is so smart - the policeman is sooo dumb!! There is almost a fight when she thinks good girl June (June Carlson) is about to give her away but he still doesn't twig that there is maybe something fishy going on!! June is one of the "delinquent daughters" as well but she definitely isn't. She is trying to cope with a father who wants to beat goodness into her at every opportunity. There is also Betty played by Marie Bovard, who didn't have a big career due to her very annoyingly screechy voice - she is played too dumb to be a bad girl. They all hang out at the "Merry Go Round" which is like a road house for the younger set. It is run by Mimi (Fifi D'Orsay, who had a brief moment in the limelight in the early 30s, Bing Crosby sang "Temptation" to her) and Nick, who is a real crook and is also enticing a few of the wayward kids (Jimmy and Sally) to commit robberies.I do agree the film quality leaves a lot to be desired - at one point there was a vertical white line through the print and then the film went completely dark!! I know it is PRC but surely they weren't too poor for lights!!! At the 50 minute mark June and Rocky decide to elope but are stopped by police and then all the wayward kids and their parents (except Sally) are given a stern lecture by the JP and usually this is were this type of movie ends but not for Sally!! She is now Nick's new girl and after a cat fight with Mimi - she and Nick are now on their way to - Nowhere!!!Teala Loring, as Sally, really lets her hair down - she was obviously at her best playing bad girls. Her career didn't amount to much, the highlight would have been playing opposite Kay Francis (albeit at the very end of her career) in a couple of Monogram cheapies - "Allotment Wives" and "Wife Wanted". June Carlson had "grown up" in the ghastly Jones family series and when it came to an end she tried to find other roles, the result being things like "Delinquent Daughters" - she retired within a few years.

So I'm watching the flick, and I start thinking to myself - Good grief, did people actually pay good money to watch stuff like this back in the Forties? Yeah, I know, admission was probably only about a quarter at best, but still, you could have had a couple sodas at the malt shop. Straight out of the exploitation/educational film camp, "Delinquent Daughters" attempts to instruct and admonish parents for the 'Alarming Increase of Juvenile Delinquency' as touted in a newspaper headline quote from J. Edgar Hoover. I have a pretty good idea that none of the genre's films had much impact regarding their intended mission, other than the covert one of titillation and cheap thrills.As far as this one goes, it's pretty uneven in both the acting and production values. The print I viewed from the Mill Creek Entertainment set of 'Cult Classics' was of questionable quality; it was easy to pick out the night time scenes because they all looked like they were filmed completely in the dark. The story follows the off screen set up of a high school girl suicide, and goes on to explore the antics of various teenagers, none of whom seem to feel any remorse for the dead teen, who one describes as 'a nice girl but no angel'. It would have seemed more appropriate if the picture explored the angst these high schoolers felt over the death of a friend, but it seems she didn't have one.Hey, how about that Jerry (Jimmy Zahner), all worked up over the gun point robbery he pulled at the grocery store. He got away with $2.80!!! Who wrote this? And you can't beat old Rocky's (Johnny Duncan) logic in trying to convince June (June Carlson) to marry him - Martha Washington was only sixteen when she got married, and she wound up with a president! I guess the highlight, as a number of other reviewers have pointed out, was old Judge Craig's (Frank McGlynn) speech to gathered teens and parents alike noting that the proper attention and discipline might have prevented all the bad things from happening in their kids' lives. More simplistic than compelling, one comes away with a feeling of 'Yeah, right', just as the scene dissolves into a decade early preview of American Bandstand to provide a happy ending. Not one of the better flicks in the 'Cult Classics' collection, you might want to check out one of their drug, sex or alcohol treatments instead.

This is a bad movie that purports to be an educational film designed to warn America about the menace of teenagers running amok thanks to uninvolved parents. However, like almost all the so-called "educational" films of the 30s and 40s, it was really a shabby little film designed to be snuck past the censors of the Hays Office. In 1934, the major studios all agreed to abide by the dictates of a stronger Production Code--eliminating sex, nudity, cursing and "inappropriate" plots in films (these had actually been relatively common in films in the early 30s). However, in an effort to sneak in smut, small studios created films to shock adults when they learn about terrible social ills, though they were REALLY intended to titillate and slip adult themes past the censors! Such films as MARIJUANA, MAD YOUTH, REEFER MADNESS and SEX MADNESS were all schlocky trash that skirted past the boards because they were supposedly educational. Even though they were laughably bad, they also made money due to low production costs and because they often offered nudity, violence and sordid story lines--all in the name of education! Unlike many of these films, DELINQUENT DAUGHTERS didn't have nudity, but it sure had lots of sleazy story elements that were sure to titillate. In this film, teens drank, used drugs, committed pointless robberies and assaults and drove like maniacs--all apparently the result of poor parental guidance. And as a result, kids died in this movie--and in the most spectacular ways! The acting and writing were almost universally bad, though the sequence where the judge tells off the parents of these punks actually was amazingly good--too bad everything else was pretty lousy. In fact, one character was so bad, so annoying and so gosh-darn awful, I nominate the ditsy blonde as the most annoying character of the 1940s--she was THAT bad!! Her voice was more grating than Olive Oyl's and she was practically sub-human in her stupidity!