Delinquent Daughters (1944)

Too much of everything

Such a frustrating disappointment

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

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.

(Some Spoilers) Straight out of todays-Summer of 1944-newspaper headlines the film "Delinquent Daughters" focus on the epidemic of juvenile crime that's was sweeping the country during the war years in the early and mid 1940's.We have this local hood and his moll Nick Gordon & Mimi, Jon Dawson & Fifi D'Orsay, running this teenage watering hole, supposedly serving soda pop and milkshakes to its under aged customers, the Merry-Go-Round Cafe. The Merry-Go-Round is instead getting the teenagers both juiced up, on hard liqueur, and doing Nick's and Mimi's dirty work. It's when local high school girl Lucille Dillerton is found drowned and boozed up after she jumped off a pier that the police headed by J.Edger Hoover look-alike Det. Hanahan, Joe Devlin, start to put the screws on Nick & Mimi's joint.With Nick just too slick to get caught with the goods on him all Det. Hanahan could do is wait for him to make a mistake. That's exactly what happens when Nick starts to make eyes on pretty and well stacked high school girl Sally Higgins, Teala Loring. It's Sally's boyfriend Jerry Syker, Jimmy Zahner,who's been knocking off bars gas stations and groceries for Nick who split the take, 90% for Nick and 10% for Jimmy, with him. Jimmy got the sh*t end of the stick, in the money he robbed, even though he was the one who put his a** on the line doing the robberies and at the same taking an eager, looking for both action and excitement, Sally along with him on his crime spree.It's when Mimi is brought into police headquarters for questioning that Let. Hanahan drops a bombshell about her cheating boyfriend Nick Gordon planning to drop her for the much younger and sexier Sally Higgins. Sally's boyfriend Jerry had earlier participated in a payroll robbery with Nick where he and a security guard were shot and killed. Now seeing that there's a future, in crime, for her with Nick Sally willingly replaced Mimi as Nick's new squeeze. Mad as hell Mimi not only implicates Nick in the string of robberies including a number of murders, one of a cop, in and around town but confronts her ex-lover Nick and her replacement, Sally, at the Merry-Go-Round-Cafe.After getting into a vicious eye scratching and hair pulling cat fight with Sally Mimi ends up getting belted by Nick who then together with Sally take off in his car away from the perusing, and now on to Nick & Sally, police headed by Let. Hanahan. The movie ends with teenagers June Tompson and her boyfriend and soon to be husband Rocky Webster, June Carlson & Johnny Duncan, forcing Nick off the road. Nick and his new love Sally end up at the bottom of a cliff crushed and burned to a crisp.Unlike Jerry and Sally June and Rocky didn't fall for Nick's boastful promises of making them rich and famous, or better yet infamous. The two youngsters not only stayed away from Nick's criminal activities but did what they could to both prevent and put an end to them.Besides the hooky dialog and bad acting the movie had some of the worst lighting you'll ever see, or not see, in a motion picture! Even in an extremely low budgeted turkey like "Delinquent Daughters". There were a number of scenes in the movie that looked like they were filmed in the bottom of a two mile mine shaft with the miners helmet-lights batteries having gone dead!

After high schooler Lucille commits suicide, the police arrive on campus and start grilling the squeaky clean teens to find out the whys and wherefores. Good girl June (June Carlson from the long forgotten Fox series of Jones' family comedies) is more than happy to answer their questions, airhead Betty (Mary Bovard) would cooperate if only she could successfully string together more than two or three words to create a coherent sentence, and bad girl Sally (Teala Loring, sister of Debra Paget) won't give them the time of day. Detective Hanahan (Joe Devlin) has the right idea, though, and suspects that local hood Nick Gordon (Jon Dawson) and his moll Mimi (Fifi D'Orsay) are implicated in some way in the girl's death. This low, low budget PRC production is thoroughly predictable in both the story and production departments, with most of the film shot against very poorly lit cardboard interiors. Sinister Cinema's print is in splicy but watchable condition.