“Hoodlum girls on the loose … and no man can stop them!” Released 65 years ago (5 October 1959) today: Girls Town (1959), the acme of fifties drive-in juvenile delinquent b-movies. With many of these flicks, the actual movie can’t hope to live up to the lurid posters and tantalizing taglines. Girls Town genuinely delivers on the thrills. It boasts adolescent thugs running amok! Teen tramps! Hot rods and drag races! Girl-on-girl catfights! Frantic rock’n’roll music! The threat of sex trafficking in Tijuana! And nuns! Vocal group The Platters coo ethereal doo-wop in a nightclub sequence. And everyone speaks in ultra-camp hepcat beatnik lingo like “No dice!” “You dig me?” “It’s real gone, ma!” “Not wonderful – crazy! Cool! Fantabulous!” “I’m blasting out of here!” and “You’re in Queersville, man! You’ve flipped!” (Where is this “Queersville” and how do I get there?). In her definitive role, wanton platinum blonde leading lady Mamie Van Doren stars as 16-year-old hellcat Silver Morgan. (Even with her perky ponytail and tight Capri pants, 28-year-old Van Doren is perhaps the most overripe, fleshy and mature adolescent in cinematic history). Girls Town is precisely the kind of film that John Waters parodies in his 1990 rockabilly musical Cry-Baby (and the Traci Lords character is directly modeled on Van Doren). Best dialogue: when non-Catholic Silver inquires “what’s holy water?” and one of her fellow Girls Town inmates snaps, “It’s water with the hell boiled out of it!” Watch it here.
