The Girl in Lovers Lane (1960)

Great Film overall

It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

I have watched this through Mystery Science Theater 3000. This movie starts out with a kid running away from thugs. After he is beaten up he is carried to the nearby train by a hobo by the name of Bix Dugan. Sooner or later they arrive at a small town. Bix then falls in love with a waitress. Then - afraid of him getting too attached to this place he decides to leave. Then he reconsiders, then the girl dies by the jealous-creepy-guy-with-crush-on-her cliché. Bix then gets accused of murdering her. Soon they find out the truth, Bix broods and the person at the beginning phones home and invites Bix for dinner over there.Now, this is worthy of MST3K. The acting is weak at it's very best and the writing is also flat. Although when fair is fair this is extremely easy to make fun of and Joel and the Bots do it well. If you watch it with them it will be a great old laugh for you to have.

There was a time when Jack Elam was actually a pretty good looking young actor, but by the time his late Fifties TV Western days rolled around he had that weird eye sinister look going and it's on display here in all it's glory. Man, what a creepy looking guy! And speaking of Westerns, this might be the only time outside of one where there's a lynch mob going after a suspected murderer. Considering it was set in modern times, I had some trouble reconciling that scene with my own recollection of 1960 and growing up in a small town. I guess it could have happened somewhere, but I don't recall ever hearing of one.Anyway, this story is about as off the beaten path as you'll find considering the understated yet overt subtext between the principals - Britt Halsey as Bix Dugan and Lowell Brown as Danny Winslow. Other reviewers have elaborated on the subject convincingly enough so I won't have to go into detail with my own review. I will say though, it did give me the creeps the very first time Danny put his hand on Bix's shoulder way back on the freight train ride. The other thing that kept me off balance was Bix's unusual resemblance to Michael Landon which I just couldn't get out of my mind while watching.With all that, I'm not sure why this one was called "The Girl in Lovers Lane". Maybe it was for the benefit of the unidentified couple out parking near the lake when they heard Carrie scream. Now there was a real hero, the guy who went to investigate. And Bix never even saw him.

The Girl in Lovers' Lane: 3 out of 10: Homoerotic subtext in the movies is a well known phenomenon. Plenty of dissertations have come out of film schools about the hidden subtexts in such films as Top Gun and Spartacus. The Girl in Lover’s Lane certainly fits the homoerotic trope. In fact, it is so blatant and over the top even MST3K, whom rarely notes such things in their riffing, simply cannot avoid it.The film is about two drifters. One a rich kid (Lowell Brown) running away from home with a hundred dollars and no street smarts, the other is a professional hobo (Brett Halsey). The hobo saves the kid from a gang of thugs and they end up in a small town consisting of a diner, a pool hall and a whorehouse. Our drifter scholar gets a second look from the diner’s waitress (Joyce Meadows as the titular Girl in Lovers Lane) who clearly is past the age of being choosy and whose only other prospect is creepy Jack Elam doing a Steve Buscemi impression.On the surface, this seems like a strange film for the MST3K treatment. While the cast are to old for the characters they are playing, the acting is actually pretty good with both Brett Halsey and Jack Elam giving solid performances. The story is slight, but hardly The Robot vs. Aztec Mummy material and the production values are cheap back lot, but relatively competent.It is the strange Batman and his ward homosexual undercurrents that make this film both awful and hilarious. Halsey’s over the top objections to the kids attempts to get laid in the whorehouse are hilarious, his inability to commit to the waitress (or at the least get past first base) are telling, and the dozens of glances between him and the kid; a hand on shoulder, the sleeping arrangements, blowing off dates with the girl so he and the kid can shave each other. You don’t have to be Freud to figure out this undercurrent.

The Girl in Lovers Lane is one strange little low-budget film. On its surface, the movie tells the story of a tough drifter named Bix (Brett Halsey) who spends his time looking out for a young kid named Danny (Lowell Brown) and the girl, Carrie (Joyce Meadows), that Bix meets who would like to look out for him. Nothing overly interesting happens (Bix goes out with Carrie, Bix gets Danny out of trouble, Carrie's father drinks a lot, etc.) until about 10 minutes to go in the movie when Carrie is murdered. Her father blames Bix, pulls him out of a jail cell, and just about beats him to death. Now their roles are reversed and Danny has to save Bix.Until I read the reviews on IMDb, I thought that maybe it was just me reading more into Bix and Danny's relationship than was really there, but I see now that I'm not alone. It was quite obvious to me early on that Bix and Danny had more of a relationship than you usually see in a movie from 1959. The homosexual nature of their relationship, while never openly expressed, is still quite obvious. Their living and sleeping arrangements, Bix's reaction to finding Danny in bed with a prostitute, Bix's inability to commit to Carrie, and that phone call at the end when Danny tells his parents he's "brining home a friend" are a few examples of moments that lead to the inevitable conclusion that there's more to their relationship than initially meets the eye. I'm sure they exist, but I can't think of any movies I've seen from the 50s that scream homosexual quite as loudly as this one.As for the movie, I don't know any other way to put this – it's boring. As I wrote earlier, nothing much at all happens for 90% of the run time. The characters are dull and the actors aren't good enough to give The Girl in Lovers Lane much of a spark. The lone exception is Jack Elam. His crazy Jesse is the one character interesting enough to be worth watching. Elam had creepy down pat! But I guess the biggest problem I had with the movie was with character motivation and logic. Carrie is killed and Bix is immediately blamed? What about crazy Jesse who has been stalking Carrie for probably her whole life? Anyone think to ask Jesse where he was that night? Her father has seen him bother Carrie at the diner, yet he never considers that the leering Jesse might have something to do with his daughter's death? Not a lot of logic there. And what about Jesse's confession? Danny grabs Jesse by the lapel and this is all it takes to force a confession out of Jesse? Real tough guy, huh? Why would he confess so easily? And after he confesses, no one thinks to grab him? It's awfully nice of Jesse just to stay put and not run off. In any other reality, he would have never spilled his guts and would have run like a rabbit if he had been fingered for the murder. The fact that The Girl in Lovers Lane asks me to accept these ridiculous actions on the part of the characters is something I'm not willing to do. Overall, I'm giving The Girl in Lovers Lane a 4/10.