Mamie Van Doren

  • High School Confidential! (1958)

    High School Confidential! (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2021) The newly coined concept of the teenager was a deeply scary thing in 1950s America, and Hollywood made bank by reminding audiences of the young menace now living with them. In High School Confidential!, we go deep undercover in a “typical” high school as our protagonist (Russ Tamblyn, unforgettable) deals drugs, talks back to adults and has an interest in recreational sex. Narcotics are quickly designated as the scourge of the nation, and the plot gradually shifts into a crime thriller as it wraps up the narrative. It’s what lies aside of the main story, however, that’s most interesting. Specifically, the screenwriter’s idea of teenage slang and lingo is so dated as to appear parodic to modern audiences. The opening lines are so, so good that you just want to revel in that dialogue for a long time. It calms down shortly afterwards, although there’s an amazing bit of beat poetry later on that almost justifies the film by itself (“Tomorrow is dragsville, cats. Tomorrow is a king-sized drag.”). The other thing worth noting is Mamie van Doren’s performance as a sex-crazed older woman with designs on the protagonist, considerably amping up the film’s exploitation score. It’s all very enjoyable, although on a second degree unattainable to audiences who first saw this in theatres: the moralistic value of the story becomes very, very obvious by the time the film wraps up, and it feels curiously naïve in the way it both exploits teenage rebellion while (professing to) being repulsed by it. I still stand by my assertion that the dialogue is the finest thing about High School Confidential! : some people can dig Shakespearian soliloquies all day long, but give me a load of those hep-cats jazzing and I’ll be a happy square until dawn.

  • Guns Girls and Gangsters (1959)

    Guns Girls and Gangsters (1959)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2020) There is something a bit too easy in the way Guns Girls and Gangsters is put together – too obvious, like its title. Coming at the tail end of the original film noir movement, it’s perhaps a bit too self-aware about the elements it has to include (like, er, Guns, Girls and Gangsters) but not witty or sophisticated enough to be able to make much out of it. The story has to do with a Vegas armed car robbery pulled off by ex-convicts, complicated by a sexy seductress cheating on one of the criminals with another. Produced away from the major studios, the film feels a bit threadbare when it comes to production values – but it did have the good sense of putting its dollars where the stars were: Lee Van Cleef is an excellent choice as a vengeful husband, while Mamie Van Doren dominates the film as a sultry blonde femme fatale. The narration underscores things a bit too much, exemplifying the theme of excessive self-awareness combined with the lack of skill to pull it off. While thoroughly mediocre (easily in the lower-middle-tier of first-generation film noir thrillers), Guns Girls and Gangsters still has enough to entertain, but it’s going to be as a semi-unintentional comedy more than a hardcore noir.