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Untamed Youth
Untamed Youth
	Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Howard W. Koch
Written by	John C. Higgins; Stephen Longstreet;
Produced by	Aubrey Schenck
Starring	Mamie Van Doren; Lori Nelson;
Cinematography	Carl E. Guthrie
Edited by	John F. Schreyer
Music by	Les Baxter
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release date	March 10, 1957;
Running time	80 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English

Untamed Youth is a 1957 American teen film directed by Howard W. Koch, written by John C. Higgins and Stephen Longstreet, and starring Mamie Van Doren and Lori Nelson as two starstruck sisters who are sentenced to farm labor.

Plot

Sisters Penny and Jane Lowe are arrested for hitchhiking and skinny-dipping and are sentenced to work on a rural Texas farm for a corrupt agricultural magnate named Russ Tropp. The judge, who sentenced the sisters to the farm, is secretly married to Tropp. Unaware she is being used for her position, she is likewise unaware of the mistreatment of the prisoners. When her son is hired to work at the farm, he uncovers that a scam had been going on. Through dating the judge, Tropp ensures that all delinquents and rule breakers are ordered to work off their sentence at his farm, therefore giving him a stable amount of cheap labor and allowing him to undercut all competition he faces. The judge's son falls in love with Jane, while Penny, who performs four songs in the film, dreams of making it big in show business. One of the girls, named Baby, at one point falls ill, leaving the judge's son to hijack one of Tropp's cars to rush her to a hospital for treatment. Baby dies from internal hemorrhaging caused by a miscarriage.

Cast

Mamie Van Doren as Penny Lowe
Lori Nelson as Jane Lowe
John Russell as Russ Tropp
Don Burnett as Bob Steele
Glenn Dixon as Jack Landis
Lurene Tuttle as Judge Cecilia Steele Tropp
Eddie Cochran as Bong
Yvonne Fedderson as Baby
Jeanne Carmen as Lillibet
Robert Foulk as Sheriff Mitch Bowers
Wayne Taylor as Duke
Jered Barclay as Ralph
Valerie Reynolds as Arkie
Lucita as Margaritia
Matt Malinowski as Hair

Critical reception

According to a contemporary review for The New York Times, the film was "a mélange of mediocre melodrama" that sought to "portray sisters who run afoul of the law and are sent to a prison farm populated almost entirely by rock 'n' roll addicts...Call it a fate almost worse than death," and noted that "the amazingly endowed Miss Van Doren [...] renders a variety of torrid gyrations that are guaranteed to keep any red-blooded American boy awake. Nothing else in this picture can make that claim.^[1] Film critic Glenn Erickson wrote on DVD Talk that the film was "prime camp Juvenile Delinquency material -- with musical numbers! -- that veers between laughable dramatics and pure 50s exploitation," that the characters "both male and female alike are stereotyped," that Van Doren "is unconvincing in almost every scene," "bounces merrily whenever she walks" and that her dancing is "straight from the burlesque stage," and noted the "stultifying finale."^[2] A review of the film by critic Hal Erickson on AllMovie described it as "a camp classic, so stupefyingly awful that it's actually festive," and noted that "to repeat examples of the film's howlingly bad dialogue would be to rob the viewer of the perverse pleasure of experiencing Untamed Youth in all its trashy glory."^[3]

Legacy

The film was featured on an early episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000, and an updated livestream version in 2021 during Joel Hodgson's Make More MST3K campaign on Kickstarter.^[4]