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The "page from the Book of Life" is made flesh, the camera tilts down from the treatise on the headboard (Child Marriage is a Crime) to the slumbering nymphet (Shirley Mills). Underage matrimony among Ozarkians is the alarming matter, barely pubescent girls wed into arduous labor and premature feebleness, the reformist schoolmarm (Diana Durrell) rallies around the mountain: "You can't jump from childhood to womanhood by saying 'I do!'" (A hayseed shrugs: "We're short of women...") The local miscreant (Warner Richmond) responds to her protests with torches and tar cauldrons; foiled, he turns his rotten gaze to "the prettiest young 'un in the community." A crossroads of stilted message and unadorned prurience, Harry Revier's infamous hicksploitation classic is a lingering magnificat of female distress that mingles shabby sets with a fierce sense of the elemental (mud, downpours and howling wind are virtual characters). Nothing beats Richmond courting his bride with a raggedy doll for sheer repulsion, unless it's the ludicrousness and horror of the wedding ceremony, framed like a scabrous parody of a matrimonial portrait: Plainclothes priest going through the motions, helpless mother avoiding her daughter's distressed eyes, erect groom waiting for a kiss. Erskine Caldwell on Poverty Row, Shirley Temple Amid the Wolves. A goldmine for the Buñuel of Los Olvidados (wandering mug at the window), Nazarin (a dwarf moonshiner answers the heroine's prayers), and above all The Young One, practically a remake. With Bob Bollinger, George Humphreys, Dorothy Carrol, Frank Martin, and Angelo Rossitto. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |