The movie version of Erskine Caldwell's over-heated "tobacco road" potboiler is all about a sharecropper's teenage daughter becoming the town pump after receiving a "Dear John" letter from her drafted beau and it's a mind-boggling trip to bad movie heaven where "love" is literally that other four-letter word. The dead-earnest dialog's a howler: Claudelle (played by pretty 60s starlet Diane McBain) tempts her date (a young and handsome Chad Everett) away from their high school dance and into the woods where she exhorts him to "love me!" but he jilts her later on and she cracks up, screaming at her mother, "But I loved him, mama -and I let him love me!" Looking to get even, she now loves anything in pants, telling one local yokel who sneaks up to her bedroom window looking for a date that he can have one if he promises her something: "Tell me I'm pretty -all over." The one man she won't have, however, is the overbearing oaf (Claude Akins) her bitter, ambitious mama (Constance Ford channelling Kim Stanley) foists on her. He's the richest man in the county and nuts about her but when Claudelle blows him off, her mother dresses up in her daughter's duds and hides in the shadows, going off with the sex-minded simpleton herself. Claudelle's reckless abandon eventually turns the town (consisting of little more than a general store) upside down and it can only end one way...
Arthur Kennedy (as the wayward wench's long-suffering pa) tried to give the trashy tragedy some much needed class but it's a curious dinosaur, a throwback to an earlier time. The sordid subject matter was definitely "for adults only" but it was handled with a "Production Code" sensibility that was more-or-less obsolete after PSYCHO began breaking all kinds of barriers the year before. Warner Brothers' hesitation waltz around the lassie's lurid ways was not unlike the one Paramount was still doing a few years later in A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME and SYLVIA. The last starred Carroll Baker and was yet another unsuccessful "A" attempt to turn its "B-list" leading lady into a sex symbol star. By the end of the 60s, "Baby Doll" Baker found a niche in Eurotrash and Diane McBain went on to make MARYJANE, a marijuana movie starring Fabian Forte. Thank god. As for CLAUDELLE INGLISH, ya gotta "love" her -catch it if you can!
Arthur Kennedy (as the wayward wench's long-suffering pa) tried to give the trashy tragedy some much needed class but it's a curious dinosaur, a throwback to an earlier time. The sordid subject matter was definitely "for adults only" but it was handled with a "Production Code" sensibility that was more-or-less obsolete after PSYCHO began breaking all kinds of barriers the year before. Warner Brothers' hesitation waltz around the lassie's lurid ways was not unlike the one Paramount was still doing a few years later in A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME and SYLVIA. The last starred Carroll Baker and was yet another unsuccessful "A" attempt to turn its "B-list" leading lady into a sex symbol star. By the end of the 60s, "Baby Doll" Baker found a niche in Eurotrash and Diane McBain went on to make MARYJANE, a marijuana movie starring Fabian Forte. Thank god. As for CLAUDELLE INGLISH, ya gotta "love" her -catch it if you can!