I'm not the only critic who was put in mind of Ed Wood with this bargain-basement effort about white slavery in what seems to be New Jersey. This is Ed without the defiant ebullience that somehow filtered through to the finished article, and turned his excruciating films into art-house classics. No such legend seems to attach to William (who?) Martin.
The plot starts out fairly well, with a married advertising man dining-out a young, unknown TV-model he has employed, on the assumption that she'll return the favour like a good girl. When she refuses, he reluctantly agrees to drive her home, but in his frustration, he accelerates away at twice the speed limit, only to get pulled in and escorted to the cop-shop. Lacking ready money, he has to find a bank, leaving her with the cops as security. Meanwhile another speeding offender (Wayne) takes pity on the model, and offers to pay the fine himself, so she can get home quicker with him - if she's willing, of course.
Not too believably, she agrees... and the next thing she remembers is waking up in a strange house, where her rescuer makes it clear that she's now a captive member of his 'public relations' group, just having to 'be nice to clients' in exchange for a (handsome) salary. As you may have guessed, drugs come into the picture in a big way.
We can't reveal much more, except to hint that small-town cops and prosecutors are not always immune to pressure from dodgy local business, and that Wayne's timely arrival may not have been the pure accident it looked like. But as usual, everything goes wrong before anything comes right.
I don't know whether the part of the model required a beauty of the first magnitude. Maybe not. Or maybe the budget just didn't stretch to one. Either way, the little-known Jeanne Rainer is only passably good-looking, and sounds particularly silly claiming to be only nineteen. Wayne is played by Ronald Long, an accomplished English actor who looks and sounds like Hitchcock merged with Charles Laughton, talking very 50's (with that mysterious 'n' in front of the 'yes'.) Otherwise the cast is quite forgettable, the elegant Eileen Letchworth making only a faint play at bunny-mother/wicked witch.
In 1959, I was a 12-year-old in a boys' boarding-school, and I think we would have been thoroughly titillated by this adult material, even though most of it was just talk. As for real adults, I cannot begin to imagine them paying good money at the box-office for The Naked Road.