The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

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.

Delinquent Daughters (1944) ** (out of 4) PRC cheapie has a cafe owner turning a bunch of local kids into juvenile delinquents. Thankfully there's a caring judge and a loving cop to try and teach the kids to be good and drink soda instead of whiskey. Seeing that this quickie is from PRC should tell you not too take it too seriously. The film, like so many others of its day, is incredibly poorly made, features bad acting and an even worse script but all of this adds to its charm and if you enjoy movies that are so bad they're laughable then this is a film for me. There are countless stupid scenes with all the typical preaching moments where the judge pleads for peace while the teenagers talk about their bad home lives. The highlight of the film is when one of the cops takes two of the bad kids to see the judge in the middle of the morning and we get a ten minute scene with the judge preaching to everyone in the room. An even dumber scene is when one of the girls comes home late and her freak father slaps her and then tries to go after her with a cane. It's silly moments like this that keeps the film moving throughout its 71-minute running time. If you're looking for art then go watch a Bergman film but if you want silly trash then this film delivers.

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!

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.