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Claudelle Inglish (1961) by Kevin Hennessey Hey kids! Thinking of having pre-marital sex? Think again. That's the message of the 1961 Claudelle Inglish, and though back then no one knew buzz words like "sexual addiction" and "low self-esteem," Erskine Caldwell's cautionary tale offers a timeless lesson for every generation of teenagers. Diane McBain plays Claudelle, the dirt-poor sharecropper's daughter who turns town pump when fiance Chad Everett uses her for sex and then breaks her heart by marrying someone else. Claudelle's surprisingly sanguine Mama observes, "You woulda wasted your life on that no-count, like I wasted mine on your father," and urges her to wed the rich old widower who comes calling with a gift of--no! yes!--red high heels. Wearing only a tight slip, Claudelle models them as the old gent pants, "You're kinda flowering all over like a pretty peach tree." But Claudelle knows she's damaged goods, so she's not looking for security with some 'ol geezer--she prefers backseat sex with every hunky hick that brings her dimestore candy. As she tells one who knocks on her bedroom window in the middle of the night, "If I go out with you, tell me I'm pretty, pretty all over." Next time the widower comes by, Mama--who knows a good thing when she sees one--puts on Claudelle's best dress and runs off with him. "You want to know where Mama is?" Claudelle asks her father. "They're down by the willows. We watched them!" PAGE 1 | 2 |
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In the movie's feverish finale, Claudelle has sex with the father of her only decent suitor, Will Hutchins, then--in the midst of Hutchins's marriage proposal--she goes off to make it with a total stranger who scores her just by saying, "You're not the marrying kind." The stranger then runs down Hutchins with his car. Understandably, Claudelle's father wonders how all this happened. "Oh Papa," cries Claudelle, "I wanted to be bad--as bad as I could be!" Just then, the dead lad's dad arrives. "You're still alive, with your painted lips and your wickedness," he snarls, and shoots Claudelle dead. Don't laugh, gals, it could happen to you. This movie dares to show the real danger of having pre-marital sex: it's not just that once you've done it, boys can tell, merely by looking at you. That's bad. But then those boys will write books about you, and studios will make hilarious movie versions of those books, and the movies of your promiscuous life will never go away. Columns like this will make sure of that. You have been warned. What did you think of this movie? Sound off in the Movie Forum. PAGE 1 | 2 |