610-The Violent Years

Film Year:  1956

Genre:  Drama, Crime

Director:  William Morgan

Starring:  Jean Moorhead, Barbara Weeks, Arthur Millan, Theresa Hancock, Glenn Corbett, Joanne Cangi, Gloria Farr, Lee Constant

MST Season:  6

Featured Short:  "Young Man's Fancy"

The Short

This short tells the story of young boy-crazy Judy who is dreading the return of her pesky brother Bob from college and his sure to be nerdy friend Alex.  Little does she know that Alex is a total hunk!  Susan does her best to doll herself up and get Alex interested in her womanly ways.  In other words, she wants some of that!

This short kind of drones on without an actual point to these sitcom shenanigans until the finale, in which Judy feigns damsel in distress in the kitchen, forcing Alex to come to her rescue and explain how a kitchen works and the wonders of her electronic devices.  At long last, a short that relates the importance of Mansplaining.

To say Young Man's Fancy is odd is an understatement.  It's meant to relate the miracles electric tools can be for cooking, but its story is almost entirely unrelated and it stops in its tracks so Alex can give a monologue about it.  And the underlining sexual undertones of the entire story gets one thinking that the only electronic device Judy really needs is a vibrator.  But who can blame her for trying to jump Alex?  He's a dreamboat!  And the way he explains things I already know!  I'm squishy just thinking about it!

The Movie

Oh joy of joys!  An Ed Wood movie!  Well, technically not a true auteur Edward D. Wood Jr. masterpiece but rather a script he wrote and handed off to another director.  One does wonder what levels of craft The Violent Years would have achieved under Wood's deft guidance, but we'll have to settle for merely good instead of outstanding.

The Violent Years is a story of youth gone wrong, as the spoiled and bored rich girl Sheila decides to throw excitement into her life by organizing a small gang of lady criminals.  They do the works:  rob gas stations, rape men, and even through a scandalous slumber party or two.  But all good things and bad girls must come to an end, as the fuzz eventually catch up to them and the molls pay the price.

The Violent Years features that lovably clumsy Ed Wood dialogue we all love though the production is better than normal.  That doesn't mean the movie is any less exploitive and sleazy as it sounds, far from it, it just has a semblance of a budget.  But it still a one-dimensional film about ladies who do bad things because they feel like it until consequences come a-knockin'.

The primary takeaway I get from this movie is that the structure is pretty odd.  The first half is all "action," so to speak.  Our leading ladies get into trouble, one incident after another, and they just keep at it.  The second half is all "talk."  The ladies get caught, some of them killed in action, while our head girl Sheila is given a lot of stern talking-tos, mostly by a judge who delivers nothing but rehearsed monologues about the bad things she's done and why she has to pay for them.  Ed Wood wants to dig into the psychology of people who do bad things, but he doesn't have any real insight other than "bad things are bad."  It's silly, and no matter what dramatic beats he tries to hit, they fail.

But this is also a film that has people getting shot, clutching their chest, and feinting, without so much as a wound, so it's pretty funny no matter how you look at it.  Even if Ed Wood isn't the man in the director's chair, he's the director in spirit.  And that's good enough for me.

The Episode

Boy, the writers of this show sure were frisky when they wrote this one!  Everything about this episode is making them hot and steamy, and it's hard to blame them.  The short is a peculiar appetizer that is about a girl on her way to be as man-hungry as a woman ever got, and Mike and the Bots do latch onto its strange sexuality overcoming its message.  Probably the best description of it is a line Mike comes up with toward the end when he just blurts out "Judy:  Beyond ThunderSquishy."  That just says spades, right there.  They couple it with the short's obvious misogamy to bring the tone of the piece to "Judy gets turned on by men talking down to her," and it really works because there is a truth to that present in the short.  Young Man's Fancy is wildly funny, and a great way to start the episode.  The gang even adds a sexual relationship between Alex and Bob, because why not?  The rest of the short is subtly about sex anyway, so no room for platonic friendship.  Besides, as protective as Bob is at keeping Alex away from his thirsty sister, maybe a relationship is supposed to be implied anyway.

Moving onto the feature, the fact that the movie stars four promiscuous ladies who do dirty things keeps the innuendo flowing.  Probably the most prominent portion of this is the rape scene, which sounds offensive when I spell it out though I think it's a scene that works.  While rape shouldn't be funny, the way it's presented in the film is almost of a softcore group sex fetish fantasy.  The victim doesn't really resist (which could just be wooden acting) and just goes along with whatever the girls have him do.  It feels to me like the writers really picked up on how non-seriously the film was taking the crime it was depicting and laid it out there that the guy who is being assaulted by these women is just into it.

But probably the big hurdle about this movie is how it shifts gears for its third act and goes full melodrama.  The absurd bad girl element is deflated and now its a lot slower paced and a lot of dialogue.  While the riffing isn't exactly weaker, the final theater segment isn't as much fun as what came before it.  It leaves the episode on a bit of a lower note than I would hope, but it's a funny episode nonetheless.

Like a lot of host segments in season six, the segments presented here are more hit-and-run gags than anything fully formed.  The few larger segments do stand out though.  Everyone coming up with their own theme song is a catchy way to open the episode, at least.  Turn Your Crank To Frank is one of those gags every MSTie knows by heart and loves, especially for Frank's enthusiasm for having a radio station named after him.  Less impressive but enjoyable segments include Tom Servo's new head (which looks like a creepy Howdy Doody), Crow and Mike recreating the gas station holdup from the movie, and Crow trying to get Mike to play Keanu Reeves in a biopic (mind you, this was pre-Matrix and John Wick Keanu Reeves).  If nothing else, "This is my own private Idaho!  POTATO!" is a line that tickles me.  Tom Servo playing Barbara Streisand in A Star is Born is a bit of a stinker though.

The Violent Years has a great short and swell riffing momentum throughout most of the movie.  The fact that it slows down in the final act and that there is a problematic sequence that, despite my opinion of it being pretty funny, might make it hard to recommend in case one objects to its mockery.  This has aspects of being one of the show's finest, but it falls just a slight bit short.

Good

The DVD

This episode was released on Shout Factory's Volume XXII set, with good audio but occasionally flickering video.  The bonus features show off interviews with the two loves of Ed Wood's life, Deloris Fuller and Kathy Wood.  These interviews look to have been conducted around the time of Tim Burton's Ed Wood biopic in 1994, where they were played by Sarah Jessica Parker and Patricia Arquette, respectively.  It's an interesting inclusion on this disc and I'm happy to have them.