Untamed Youth is a 1957 American teen film directed by Howard W. Koch, written by John C. Higgins and Stephen Longstreet and starring Mamie Van Doren and Lori Nelson as starstruck sisters who are sentenced to farm labor.
Eddie Cochran acts in the film and sings the song "Cotton Picker". The music was composed by Les Baxter.
Plot
Sisters Penny and Jane Lowe, on their way to Los Angeles, are arrested for hitchhiking and skinny-dipping and are sentenced to work on a rural Texas farm for corrupt agricultural magnate Russ Tropp. Cecilia Steele, the female judge who sentenced the sisters, is secretly married to Tropp. When Tropp's son Bob is hired to work at the farm, he uncovers that his father has used his relationship with Cecilia to ensure that all convicts serve their sentence at his farm, therefore affording him a stable amount of cheap labor and allowing him to undercut his competition. Bob falls in love with Jane, while Penny dreams of showbiz stardom. Bob rushes another girl, Baby, to the hospital, where she dies from internal hemorrhaging caused by a miscarriage.
Bob confronts his mother, who reveals that she married Tropp and is unaware of the abuses on the farm. She takes Jane along to investigate further while Bob and Penny, with the help of Spanish-speaking worker Margarita, learn that Tropp is looking to hire illegal migrant workers for the ranch. Margarita and Bob are spotted and chased by Tropp's guard dogs before being captured. Tropp orders them to be sent across the border with the smugglers to keep them from informing federal authorities. Penny rallies the farm workers to confront Tropp before they can leave. After someone throws an object at the sheriff, a riot is averted as Jane and Cecilia return. The sheriff's deputy attempts to drive away, but Bob, despite being under arrest, causes the car to crash into a pole. Bob captures the coyote with whom Tropp spoke and informs the crowd about the smuggling plan. After Tropp is searched and phony work permits are found on him, Cecilia orders both men into custody. She tells the crowd that she will seek to commute their sentences before retiring.
Some time later, Jane, Bob and Cecilia watch Penny performing a calypso number on television.
Music from the film performed by Mamie Van Doren was released as an extended play record on the Prep label. Eddie Cochran and Jerry Capehart cowrote one of the film's songs, "Oo Ba La Baby". The three other songs on the record are "Salamander", "Rollin' Stone" and "Go, Go, Calypso!" Les Baxter wrote the film's score.[citation needed]
In a contemporary review for The New York Times, critic A. H. Weiler called Untamed Youth "a mélange of mediocre melodrama" and wrote: "Call it a fate almost worse than death—for one viewer, at least. ... Miss Van Doren renders such exotic numbers as 'Oobala Baby,' 'Salamander' and 'Cotton Picker' to a variety of torrid gyrations that are guaranteed to keep any red-blooded American boy awake. Nothing else in this picture can make that claim."[2]
Legacy
The film was featured in an early episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and in an updated livestream version in 2021 during Joel Hodgson's Make More MST3K campaign on Kickstarter.[3]
The film has acquired a cult following. It has been described as "a camp classic, so stupefyingly awful that it's actually festive" by critic Hal Erickson of AllMovie, who also noted that "to repeat examples of the film's howlingly bad dialogue would be to rob the viewer of the perverse pleasure of experiencing Untamed Youth in all its trashy glory."[4]
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