Runaway Daughters (1956) User Reviews

Good girls gone bad

[BandSAboutMovies · 4/10 · 2 April 2021]

American-International Pictures ran this on a double bill with Shake, Rattle and Rock, supposedly basing the story on something that happened to writer Lou Rusoff when he worked as a social worker.

Audrey Barton (Marla English, Flesh and the Spur) has rich parents who are wilder than she is, hooking up with neighbors when she's trying to come home from a date with Tommy (Frank Gorshin as a high school student!). Everyone in her life is wild. Her friend Mary (Mary Ellen Kay, Voodoo Woman) is dating a twenty-year-old. Angie's (Gloria Castillo, Reform School Girl) mom is on her third husband. And the kids in school are taunting her over all of it.

I mean, if I were Audrey, I'd flip out too. The parents spike the punch at her party with gin. The parents!

Director Edward L. Cahn put out some crazy stuff in the 50's. There's this movie, sure, but also Creature with the Atom Brain, Zombies of Mora Tau, Drag Strip Girl, The Terror from Beyond Space, The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake and more.

Joe Dante remade this in 1994 as part of Showtime's Rebel Highway series, reuniting most of the cast of The Howling - Christopher Stone, Dee Wallace, Robert Picardo, Dick Miller and Belinda Balaski - and starring Julie Bowen, Paul Rudd and Jenny Lewis.

Too much character development destroys the camp stew.

[mark.waltz · 5/10 · 25 July 2022]

Probably one of the more ambitious teen angst dramas of the 50's, this has far too many supporting characters surrounding the group of young women (no, girls, yet still far from ladies) whose issues with family causes them to drop out of high school and head to California to try to make it on their own.

Marla English, Mary Ellen Kay and Gloria Castillo have plenty of teen angst to go around, with Kay dealing with possessive father Jay Adler, English with irresponsible parents Anna Sten and John Litel, and Castillo basically motherless, left in the care of no good older brother Lance Fuller who is never home.

This takes a while to get off the ground, highlighted early on by the arrival of Fuller's party girl plaything, Adele Jergens, exploding like a bomb as she takes on the teenaged she-devil with lines like, "Do you gargle with acid?" It's Fuller and Jergens that the three girls head to California to flop with, stealing a car on the way, and getting work in the dance hall Jergens works with. The imperious looking Anne O'Neal, as an uppity school administrator, does get two very campy scenes, verbally assailed in both with Margaret Dumont like offence, and physically knocked down in the second.

Entertaining but probably about 15 minutes too long as part of a double bill, this has a lot of extraneous scenes that could have been cut out although the party sequence with Sten and Litel making drunken fools out of themselves is memorable because of all the plot developments that come out of it. The twist concerning the one real bad girl leads to a predictable conclusion after a high speed chase in the Hollywood hills.

The mixture of veterans with young non-actors who never made it up far enough to ever be has-beens makes it clear who the pro's were. Jergens, having had enough of playing tough talking dames for two decades when she was quite the opposite, chose this to be her last film. She's the best part of this movie, although Adler does add some dimension as the tough father who doesn't want his daughter to turn out like her mother.

Don't waste your time

[BrentCarleton · 3/10 · 29 June 2007]

AIP were capable, (when they wished to be) of investing this kind of pulpy hokum with enough technical and pacing panache to keep their drive-in audiences involved.

Unfortunately, they didn't bother here.

Thus, unlike "High School Hellcats" and more especially "I Was a Teenage Werewolf," both of which benefited enormously from shadowy, film noir lighting schemes, and (fairly) well dressed settings, "Runaway Daughters" looks all of $2.98 cents.

This can be OK when the lackluster visuals are counterbalanced by an arresting storyline. But alas, the story here is little more than a synopsis of something probably rejected by the "Police Gazette".

Here goes: three teenage girls from different socio-economic circumstances link up to run away from home, in this case to LA, where they quickly become "dime a dance girls" (under the tutelage of Minksy voiced Adele Jergens--"on a good night you might clear $12.00" and "watch out for cockroaches").

Apart from the fact that taxi dancers were already way out by the late 50's, the script is handicapped by more serious problems, chiefly the fact that the girls don't run away until 2/3 of the way into the picture. Thus, we sit through multiple scenes of them sulking and arguing with their respective families.

These altercations include one in which one of our anti-heroines decks a 70 year old schoolmarm onto the lawn! Stereotypically, adults are all misguided at best in this, and of course, the blame for the youngsters delinquency is laid fully at their doorstep.

And what parents!--(if you have been pining away to see 30's film stalwarts, Anna Sten and John Litel, perform a drunken Charleston, then this is your film).

As previously mentioned, production values are lamentably skimpy. For example, the fabulously wealthy Marla English character lives in what appears to be a typical 50's subdivision tract house, with cut rate Danish modern furniture, and nary a hint of a servant.

For Frank Gorshen and AIP completists only

Another film in the long tradition of youth gone wild pictures....

[planktonrules · 3/10 · 21 February 2017]

In the 1930s, 40s, 50s and beyond, crappy little film studios churned out a continuous supply of so-called 'Youth Gone Wild' pictures. These movies announce that they are intended to warn parents and society of the hazards of terrible parenting. Inevitably, either because of extreme neglect and indifference or because of abuse and over- control, the teens* in the movies end up either getting killed, going to prison or committing hellishly brutal murders and robberies. And, in many of the films, there is a judge or cop who asks the audience what could have been done to prevent all this. These movies are almost always highly moralistic AND lurid at the same time. This is because although they claim to be doing a public service, they actually often just want to titillate and get around censorship laws!

As far as these sorts of films go, "Runaway Daughters" is pretty typical...though not as lurid as some of the films. One parent overly controls his daughter and acts as if fun and boyfriends are evil, one set of parents simply are never home and another set of parents are so busy partying and carousing themselves that they couldn't care less about their daughter's behaviors. As for the boys, many as simply perverts who are out for one thing and one thing only (and it's NOT a soda down at the malt shop). A few (the highly indulgent and indifferent mom) are horrible actors and all the stories come off as incredibly simplistic. Deep is not a word I'd use to describe this movie!

So is it worth seeing? Well, not if you want to see a good movie...it stinks. However, I happen to be a person who loves exploitation and youth gone wild movies....and for folks like me, this one is quite enjoyable...though not even close to being as entertaining or titillating as my two favorites, "Reefer Madness" and "Sex Madness", both by the same crappy filmmakers. In fact, for the genre this one has reasonably good production values...which isn't saying much. Some other similar bad movies you might want to seek out include: "Delinquent Daughters", "Where Are Your Children?", "Enlighten Thy Daughter", "Youth Run Wild" as well as "The Terrible Truth"....among others.

*In almost all these films, the 'youth' appear to be in their 20s or 30s! This one features actors that appear close to being teens but clearly many of them are NOT youth nor have been for quite some time! At 20, 22 and 26, the ffemale leads are not exactly youthful.

Teen Trouble, Times Three

[Laughing_Gravy · 7/10 · 8 December 2004]

In the summer of 1956, American-International Pictures (AIP) had scored big with a double feature of GIRLS IN PRISON and HOT ROD GIRL, and followed it up before Thanksgiving with a couple of similar titles, RUNAWAY DAUGHTERS and SHAKE RATTLE AND ROCK. DAUGHTERS shares director Edward L. Cahn, writer Lou Rusoff and two actors, Adele Jergens and Lance Fuller, with PRISON. It also contains the same sneering attitude, to the third power.

RUNAWAY DAUGHTERS tells the story of three teenage girls with bad home situations; Audrey (Marla English) has parents who throw money instead of love at her; Dixie (Mary Ellen Kaye) was abandoned by her mother, and her father keeps her on a short leash to prevent her from becoming a tramp; and Angela (Gloria Castillo) has been abandoned by her parents and decides that life is only worth living if you're drunk and cheap. Angela's role model, unfortunately, is a brother who's a one-bit heel (he's not even good enough to be two-bit), Lance Fuller, who spends half his time planning heists with his cheesy companion, the delightful Adele Jergens (in her last screen role), and the other half getting his greasy fingerprints all over good-girl Audrey. After problems with parents, brouhahas with boys, tempests with teachers, and clashes with cops, our three vivacious vixens steal a car and head south to L.A., city of hopes, dreams, and ten-cents-a-dance sleaze joints. One unwanted pregnancy, one near rape, and one fatal auto accident later, our trio of troubled teens head for home, sadder but wiser. Well, one of 'em does, anyway.

DAUGHTERS has the usual AIP formula: angst-filled kids, condescending adults, and a mixture of young faces (besides those listed above, you'll find familiar AIP stars Frank Gorshin and Steve Terrell) and old veterans (Anna Sten, John Litel, and in cameos Kermit Maynard, Snub Pollard, and Edmund Cobb; in fact, according to Sam Arkoff, Cahn fought to have Miss Sten, a studio joke back in Sam Goldwyn's heyday, given top billing). At a running time of approximately 94 minutes, however, it's much more leisurely paced than most AIP fare of the time, which is not a bad thing. I found myself even more involved in the girls' story than I had been when watching, oh, DRAGSTRIP GIRL or BLOOD OF Dracula, two other kooky she-teen movies from AIP. Recommended.

Wittier and snappier than most kids!!

[dean-mcinerney · 7/10 · 25 April 2012]

I was amazed at how droll, urbane, and witty the kids were presented as being, It made me realize that these films really aimed to speak to the teenagers and articulate their frustrations. I much prefer this film to other AIP fare which lacks character development. Fairly ordinary cinema style. Its a time capsule film that explores the burgeoning permissiveness of the late 1950's.

The parents of one girl are verging on being bourgeois-bohemian, having parties and drinking booze all the time. Another girl has a bitter hyper-conservative catholic single dad whose domination of her is almost a bit creepy in an incestuous way. Whilst the angry uber-sarcastic and highly enjoyable girl (definately too sophisticated to be realistic) is simply left to fend for herself by some terrible mother who has gone abroad.

Other great characters such as the con-man brother, the streetwise grifter, and maternal and tough private dancer... The film seemed to be struggling with the fine art of pleasing the teen and parent viewer alike, which makes it a curio... so much so that the typical moralising end seemed beleaguered