She Shoulda Said No! (aka Wild Weed) (1949)

On Sept. 1st 1948, police raided the home of actress Lila Leeds and arrested four people, including Leeds herself and film actor Robert Mitchum, both of whom were charged with possession of marijuana, then a felony in the state of California, after which followed an agreeably scandalous and highly publicized trial. Mitchum was still in the initial stages of his career, but a hot property, with a number of film roles under his belt (Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, Nevada, West of the Pecos, Crossfire), and a lot of potential. Leeds was a relatively unknown starlet, who before beginning in films, had as a teenager run away from her rural Kansas upbringing to become a dancer in St. Louis, and in LA met, married and was annulled from a bandleader who was already married. Twenty-one years old at the time of the bust, Leeds' filmography consisted of a handful of bit roles and walk-ons, often uncredited. Both were eventually convicted -- Mitchum of conspiracy to possess, Leeds of possession -- and served prison sentences. After serving his time, Mitchum picked up the thread of his film career with scarcely a murmur (Rachel And The Stranger, The Red Pony, The Big Steal, Where Danger Lives): his public image as a nonchalant bad-boy was even burnished by his recent brush with the law, and his conviction was eventually overturned in 1951. But Leeds' career, such as it was, ended with her arrest. Job offers simply stopped, except for an offer from producer Richard Kay to appear in a film called Wild Weed, written to capitalize on her recent arrest. The film's publicity made much of her desire to inform others her age of the dangers of illicit drug use, but as she confessed to a magazine in the fifties, she took the job because it was the only offer available, and she was broke.

Leeds played Ann Lester, a chorus girl in a nightclub who is working to put her younger brother Bob (David Holt) through college. Through friend and fellow chorine Rita (Mary Ellen Popel), she meets Markey (Alan Baxter), who proves to be a peddler of marijuana. Rita and Markey pressure Ann to try the drug at an impromptu gathering, and she soon becomes hooked. Reefer parties with Rita and her marijuana-smoking friends, as well as a dependent relationship with Markey take up most of her energy, and her work suffers, leading to the loss of her job. But Ann is soon working for Markey, helping him peddle dope to new customers. Finally Bob discovers the secret of Ann's new, sordid lifestyle, and commits suicide, after which she is arrested as a drug addict and sentenced to sixty days in prison. Ann is defiant and unwilling to divulge Markey's name to the cops when she enters prison, but she is soon plagued with guilt over her brother's death and has a nervous breakdown (or a drug withdrawal) in her cell. She leaves prison clean, reformed and determined to cooperate with Lieutenants Mason and Tyne (Robert Kent and Don C. Harvey) of the narcotics squad, and their superior, Captain Hayes (Lyle Talbot) to apprehend Markey and his boss, Treanor (Michael Whalen), by luring them into a phony deal with a big supplier.

Wild Weed (the original title -- others included The Devil's Weed, Marijuana: the Devil's Weed, and most unwieldy, The Story of Lila Leeds And Her Exposé of the Marijuana Racket) shared at least two personnel with a film hailed as the definitive "dope movie," and for many, the definitive "cult film" as well, 1936's Reefer Madness (aka Tell Your Children) -- story writer Arthur Hoerl (the screenplay was written by Richard H. Landau) and cinematographer Jack Greenhalgh. That film focused on high-school students being enticed into moral ruin and lives of crime as a result of exposure to the weed; while this film opens with a prologue that serves to introduce Markey -- he sells four teenagers some marijuana and they promptly crash their car in a stoned joy-ride, leaving one legless and comatose survivor -- the film otherwise dispenses with the teenage-maltshop angle and instead leavens its moralism with noir-esque situations, visuals and dialogue.

Shot on a six-day schedule, directed by Sherman Scott aka Sam Newfield, and marketed through independent distributor Eureka Productions, the film did poorly until the distribution rights were picked up by veteran showman and exploitation pioneer Kroger Babb, who showed the film "roadshow" style, booking venues for short dates and touring the film from town to town, bringing along Leeds to appear personally and even to lecture. Though figures are not available, this tactic was reportedly quite successful, as Babb could build up hype for the film and then blow for the next town before word-of-mouth and local reviews could depress attendance.

As was generally the case for Production Code-era "dope movies," She Shoulda Said No! was silly regarding the subject of marijuana and its effects and dangers. The drug is referred to in the film as "tomatoes" because it is shipped -- already rolled -- in labeled tomato cans. Smoking the short brown cigarettes leads to uncontrollable giggling, manic behavior, delusions, hallucinations, and utter indifference to the distress of others. One of the guests of Ann's tea parties (Rudolf Friml, Jr.), sits at the small upright piano and immediately imagines himself giving a recital at the Hollywood Bowl, playing virtuosic Romantic themes, only to show him picking out "Chopsticks" with two fingers. Brother Bob finally discovers what has been happening one morning after one of these get-togethers, when he finds the living room of their neat little house, left to them by their deceased parents, an utter wreck, as a strange man awakes and groggily rasps, "You got a stick?"

But ultimately the point of these films was not to give a realistic portrayal of marijuana use any more than they were sincerely motivated by public service or moral uplift: these existed to give viewers a spicy, vicarious experience of sin and thrills denied them in mainstream Hollywood films. She Shoulda Said No! more or less closed the era of the "dope movie" until Frank Sinatra appeared in the serious-minded mainstream production The Man With The Golden Arm (1955) and made drug addiction a more palatable subject in American film, but the legacy of the old dope movies lived on in sexploitation from the mid-sixties onward, in movies in which the device of portraying illicit drugs as magical substances that turned chilly or timid good girls into exciting, up-for-anything bad girls resurfaced in films such as Alice In Acidland, Smoke And Flesh, The Brick Dollhouse, The Acid Eaters, and Aphrodisiac: The Sexual Secrets of Marijuana, films that made the suggestive innuendo of the earlier era a little more explicit.

To this end, She Shoulda Said No! exploits Lila Leeds' looks as well as her story. Many user reviews on the IMDB have commented on Leeds' resemblance to Marilyn Monroe, but this resemblance was superficial at best. The same age and, before her arrest, at roughly the same stage in her film career, Leeds shared with Marilyn a similar starlet packaging: shiny blonde bobbed hairdo, plucked and pencilled arched eyebrows, and catlike eye make-up. But Leeds was thinner and more angular than the voluptuous Marilyn, and she had none of the naive sensuality or childlike vulnerability that became key to Marilyn's persona. In every way, she looked the very image of the "bad girl," as though she had stepped off of a pulp-novel cover painting.

Jack Greenhalgh's camera focuses on Leeds' face in tight closeups throughout the film, whether dolled-up, molled-up, tortured or touseled (there is one scene, in fact, when she is awakened by her as-yet unaware brother the morning after one of her nights of tea-smoking, and her disordered hair, un-made-up face and eyes still puffy with sleep make her knock-down sexy in a way that her usual pancake-and lipsticked looks couldn't approach); the effect is almost a perverse, Poverty Row version of the wrenching closeups of Renée Falconetti in Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc. The intent, again, of the close scrutiny was to get the most out of Leeds' looks, but the cumulative effect is one of pathos, even empathy, especially if one is aware of the basic outline of Leeds' biography. She reminds me of one or two women I have befriended by chance over the years who could be labeled real-life "bad girls," women whose impulsiveness, poor decision-making or simple circumstances have sometimes led to hardship or even tragedy; they are often judged harshly and unfairly by others, but they also have a lust for life, testify to humans' resilience, strength and persistence in the face of adversity, and number among the most genuine people I have known. In between the limitations of She Shoulda Said No!'s script and Leeds' own limitations as an actress, Greenhalgh's closeups give you the sense that you can read her checkered past in her youthful, pretty, yet already careworn features.

With her aura of tarnished virtue, Leeds was clearly one of those actresses who would not have gone very far in mainstream Hollywood as a youthful ingenue in that repressive time. Given some maturity and some more acting chops, she might have made a good character actress in cynical-dame roles, a flair for which the third act of the film, in which she poses as a hard-bitten jailbird in order to trap Markey and Treanor, definitely shows. Born a few years later, she might have also been a natural for juvenile-delinquent films. As she was, she might have been a fixture in exploitation films, where being a "bad girl" was a more marketable asset than in the mainstream.

We have already mentioned the use of noir-style situations, visuals, and dialogue that make She Shoulda Said No! a more enjoyable film than Reefer Madness: the film also benefits greatly from a good supporting cast, who while not always A-list talent, were quite good at their jobs and kept the film on something like a solid foundation. Alan Baxter (1908-1976) was a busy lead in B-pictures and supporting actor in A-pictures in the thirties and forties, transitioning to television in the fifties and sixties, equally good at tough-guy leads or heavies. We met Lyle Talbot a while back in connection with his role in Ed Wood's Glen Or Glenda, and this movie is also notable for the debut appearance of Jack Elam (1918-2003), memorable in such noir classics as D. O. A. and Kansas City Confidential, as well as in westerns such as Rawhide and Gunfight at the O. K. Corral, and who later appeared in the opening scenes of Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West.

Lila Leeds herself appeared -- uncredited -- in one more film, The House Across The Street, her tenth film appearance, before leaving LA and films for good. She continued as an entertainer in the Midwest, working mainly in nightclubs, married and divorced twice, and reportedly began to use heroin at one point. In later years she developed a religious commitment, moved back to LA, and volunteered at various local missions. She passed away in 1999 at the age of 71.

A number of DVD releases exist of She Shoulda Said No!; I viewed the film on Passport Video's 5-disc, 24-film budget compilation, Girls Gone Bad: The Delinquent Dames Collection.