Mike Vraney (1957-2014)

Mike Vraney, collector of weird movies, weird movie memorabilia, and founder of Something Weird video, succumbed to cancer on January 2.  He is survived by wife Lisa Petrucci and two children, Mark and Danielle.  Vraney was 56.

As a teenager, Vraney was exposed to exploitation and sexploitation films when he worked as a theater projectionist in Seattle.  According to Something Weird's press release, he became active in the local punk rock music scene, being instrumental in the founding of the local music venue The Showbox, and going on to manage bands such as the Dead Kennedys, TSOL, and Seattle's own The Accused.  He founded Something Weird in 1990 as an outlet for his burgeoning collection of penny-arcade nudie loops, prints of exploitation and sexploitation films, trailers, short subjects and film ephemera.  First marketing his films on VHS with covers based on original one-sheets and lobby cards, he went on to the DVD medium in 1999 when he entered a production deal with Image Video.

His unique approach to marketing video began with his VHS releases, the two-hour length of which he would typically pad out with two features (which we commonly an hour or less), along with as many trailers, loops, odds and ends, and supplementary material as he could fit.  When he graduated to the DVD format, he could utilize the 220 minutes of a double-layered DVD to fit in even more of his seemingly endless collection of sleazy obscurities and bits and bobs.  His endless quest to seek out and preserve these forgotten and half-remembered slices of history led him to befriend and collaborate with a number of figures from the exploitation film scene, in particular David F. Friedman, who boosted Vraney's collection with films from his own vault and who also appeared on some 25 commentary tracks with Vraney, and who paid him the best compliment when he dubbed Vraney "the forty-first thief" (a reference to the exploiteers' reference to themselves as "The Forty Thieves"), in recognition of his love for these films and his efforts to preserve them.  He also got to know other exploitation and sexploitation filmmakers such as Joe Sarno, Doris Wishman and Herschel Gordon Lewis.

I own something like 25 or 30 DVD titles from Something Weird, and they occupy a place of honor in my home, not only because they are fun to watch and were great value for money, but also because they were put together with the right combination of love, humor, and respect.  When SWV was getting off the ground in the nineties, it was a hey-day of alternative music, art and publishing, of photocopied zines, alternative newsstand magazines, comics and cassette music releases and even radio, and the Something Weird DVD collection carried the DIY spirit from the analog realm into the digital.  Putting on a SWV DVD always manages to carry me back to that era of exploration and discovery.

Something Weird Video, in its announcement of Vraney's death, promises to carry on the mission further, and in addition to DVDs, the company also has an on-demand channel with Comcast and also some of its titles on Netflix.

For my part, I still intend to continue writing this blog, although I am also devoting considerable time to my sister blog, on atheism, on Wordpress.  Again, the best way to keep abreast of my blogging is probably to use a blog aggregator, as I don't finish things quickly, though there are always works in progress.


This clip has opened SWV's video releases from the analog into the digital era and puts the weirdness, wildness, and coolness of the films (and Vraney's approach to them) into a two-minute nutshell.

Something Weird Video on Facebook
Something Weird Video on Wikipedia
Something Weird Video Official Site

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.

Glen Or Glenda (1953)

After 30 years of working in Hollywood as actor, screenwriter, director, producer and pulp novelist without artistic or financial success, Edward D. Wood, Jr., recently evicted and staying with his wife at a friend's North Hollywood apartment, his health broken by years of alcohol abuse, his films largely forgotten, died in 1978 at the age of 54. In 1980, Harry and Michael Medved, in their book The Golden Turkey Awards, called his Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), the "worst movie ever made," and sparked a revival of interest itheradiatorn Wood's colorful and trsequencemic life and bizarre career in cinema; today he is probably one of the best known, and also most well-loved, makers of cult film. He has been the subject of essays, books, documentaries and even a Hollywood bio-pic directed by Tim Burton in 1994, Ed Wood.

While the Medved brothers' largely patronizing and derisive treatment of Wood definitely set the tone for much of Wood's posthumous reputation, the books and films mentioned above have done much to rehabilitate his status from a laughing-stock to cinema's quintessential outsider artist, someone whose devotion to movies was heartfelt and passionate enough to surmount lack of funding and contacts, public indifference and even his own lack of aesthetic discernment, craft, and sophistication: Wikipedia's article on Wood lists thirteen feature films directed by him, three television films, and seventeen produced scripts written by him. His drive and zeal, his love of his chosen medium, and his pride in his own work would do any artist credit, and his films have the power to delight, enchant and even inspire. They are uncynical, bewilderingly different from just about anything else, and above all personal, bearing witness to his own enthusiastic, ebullient and eccentric personality.

Glen Or Glenda was originally to be a film called I Changed My Sex, capitalizing on the notoriety of George Jorgenson, who became Christine Jorgenson after the world's first gender-reassignment surgery. When Wood agreed to producer George Weiss's offer to write and direct the project, Wood rapidly turned the bulk of the film into a docudrama about cross-dressing. For one of the major aspects of the Ed Wood legend was his cross-dressing: he was particularly drawn to angora sweaters -- the latter are so much associated with Wood that one of the above-mentioned documentaries was called Look Back In Angora.

The film opens in a rented room where Patrick, a man who has been arrested four times for wearing women's clothes in public, lies dead in his favorite outfit, a suicide who would rather die a happy woman than live as a miserable man. Inspector Warren (Lyle Talbot), the detective in charge of the case, is puzzled by the young man's motivation for suicide and consults psychiatrist Dr. Alton (Timothy Farrell), who tells him of one of his patients: Glen (played by Wood himself under the name "Daniel Davis"), a man with a compulsion to wear women's clothes. Glen agonizes over whether to tell his fiancée Barbara (Wood's then-girlfriend Dolores Fuller) about his "other self," Glenda, whom Glen becomes when in women's clothes. Dr. Alton also tells Inspector Warren of another case: Alan-Ann ("Tommy" Haynes), who decided to actually go ahead and have his gender reassigned, and who, after hormone therapy and many grueling surgeries, faces the world as a happy and attractive young woman. The detective and the doctor return to Glen's case and discuss how Glen and Barbara worked out the problem of "the other woman" with the help of true love and the understanding of modern medicine.

In essence, Glen Or Glenda is a film about "gender identity" decades before the term would be coined and defined through reams of abstruse academic and polemical prose. Dr. Alton takes pains to define what transvestitism is and is not: it is not homosexuality (and indeed it isn't: cross-dressers are overwhelmingly straight males who are very secure in their sexual orientation and masculinity), neither is it transexualism. Here it is difficult to tell how "accurate" Wood is in his assessment of men who want to be women: Alton refers to Alan-Ann as a "pseudo-hermaphrodite" who carries physical characteristics common to both genders. What is clear is Wood's open, tolerant, and non-judgmental attitude towards all the groups discussed: if one is only allowed to be what one feels one is, then one is happy. As a denizen of the Hollywood fringes, Wood knew all sorts of eccentrics and people whose lifestyles did not fit the molds of a repressive time. At a time when gender, class, and race were strictly defined and as immutable as the law of gravity, Wood's message was subversive and forward-thinking, and one that is more comprehensible and relevant today than he probably ever imagined.

Ahead of its time though it may be, and historically significant for its message, Glen Or Glenda is still an Ed Wood film, and the message of tolerance comes in Wood's own inimitable way. While Dr. Alton discusses the stories of these two patients, the comfort of women's clothes as opposed to men's, and the differences between transvestites, homosexuals and transsexuals, actor Bela Lugosi, whom Wood befriended and revered as a sort of touchstone of the old Hollywood films which inspired his own career, appears at intervals in a dark study-laboratory set and offers cryptic comments, strange metaphors, mysterious platitudes about modern life, and nursery rhymes. At one point he fiddles around with laboratory glassware, mixing vaporous potions with his test tubes and flasks; at others, characters such as Glen, Barbara and Alan-Ann enter and kneel before his chair and disappear with a wave of his hand. Often he utters his cryptic pronouncements while looking at crowded streets in split-screen, or superimposed over shots of stampeding bison. Billed as "Scientist" in the credits, Lugosi's role in the picture resembles nothing so much as a distant, god-like figure, observing his creation and offering his comments to the viewer, but never deigning to intervene or even to judge.

Meanwhile Dr. Alton compares present-day objections to transvestitism and transexualism with the objections that were supposedly once raised against automobiles and airplanes. Men and women say "If the Creator had intended us to be born [boys/girls] we would certainly have been born [boys/girls]," accompanied by extreme close ups of faces and ears. A close up of the radiator in Patrick's room accompanies the reading of Patrick-Patricia's suicide note, for no discernible reason (it has been reported that this random cutaway inspired the "woman in the radiator" sequence in David Lynch's Eraserhead). But the centerpiece of the film has to be the nightmare sequence, where Glen's fears of social ostracism and losing Barbara are played out. "Normal" men and women point and laugh, Glen alternately appears as himself and as Glenda, in a jumbled, half-struck version of the set that served as Barbara's apartment, where Glenda cannot lift a log that pins Barbara but Glen can. Glen and Barbara are married by a minister with the Devil (played by a man credited on IMDB as "Captain DeZita" and who also appears in the film as Glen's father) as witness. Suddenly a number of shots of scantily-clad women, dancing, posing or even in light bondage appear to blaring jazz music, with the faces of Glen, Glenda and Lugosi's character intercut at intervals (this last being added by producer Weiss after Wood completed the film). Glen awakens from his nightmare determined to come clean with Barbara, and after explaining everything to her, Barbara reels in shock... but slowly decides to accept him as he is, and in a moment that is as touching as it is ridiculous, removes her angora sweater and gives it to Glen.

God knows what George Weiss, whose name can be found associated with films from the forties to the sixties, from burlesque to poverty row noir to sexploitation, thought of what he received from Wood, but it was released because it had already been presold to theaters. However, from this point on, Wood became his own producer, going on to make films like Jail Bait (1954), Bride of the Monster (1955), Night of the Ghouls (1959) and The Sinister Urge (1961) before he became unable to find financing. As the sixties wore on, he did more screenwriting, production assistance, and occasional acting on titles like The Violent Years (1956), Anatomy of a Psycho (1961), Shotgun Wedding (1963), and Orgy of the Dead (1965), this last a nudie-cutie with a horror theme directed by Stephen Apostolof that breathes pure Ed Wood in its cheapness, overblown dialogue and an appearance by television psychic and Plan 9 player Criswell. His only other appearance as a lead is in one softcore sexploitation film, The Love Feast (1969), which is also worth checking out. He also made at least one hardcore porn movie, again with a horror theme, Necromania (1971). Screenwriting and pulp writing occupied his last years.

(My own library contains three titles published by Four Walls Eight Windows in the late nineties: Killer In Drag and Death of a Transvestite, and his memoir, Hollywood Rat Race. Feral House had reprinted a number of his other titles, but have suspended publication and sales of their Wood titles as of late last year. The Ed Wood article at Wikipedia, linked above, explains why.)

Dolores Fuller (b. 1923) appeared in two other Wood films: Jail Bait and Bride of the Monster, after which their relationship ended. According to the IMDB, She went on into the music business, writing songs for Elvis Presley, and started a record label, Dee Dee Records, where she was instrumental in the careers of Johnny Rivers and Tanya Tucker. She also has frequently appeared at showbiz conventions, often with the angora sweater she wore in her Wood films. Since 2003 she has been living in Las Vegas.

Lyle Talbot (1902-1996), an actor of some ability, performed in A and B pictures, often as a heavy. He also appeared in Plan 9 as a general. A busy, prolific actor, his career in films and television lasted from the early 30s to the 50s. Timothy Farrell (1922-1989), who also appeared in Jail Bait, was an actor of less ability, with a stone face matching his monotonal delivery, but memorable to exploitation fans in such films as Girl Gang (1954) and Dance Hall Racket (1955), a film directed by Phil Tucker (Robot Monster) and written by Lenny Bruce, who also plays Farrell's violence prone henchman.

I viewed Glen Or Glenda on a 2000 Image Entertainment DVD, which contains the original theatrical release version and a trailer. Another version, which I viewed some years ago on VHS, contains a longer cut including some footage of Glen being approached by a homosexual man.

Postscript: 5-14-11: The Los Angeles Times reported that Dolores Fuller passed away at her home in Las Vegas on May 9 at the age of 88. She is survived by husband, film historian Philip Chamberlin, a son, three grandchildren, and a number of stepchildren and stepgrandchildren, to all of whom we send our condolences and best wishes.

Child Bride (aka Child Bride of the Ozarks, Dust To Dust) (1938)

Child marriage in the mountain hinterlands is the topic of this low-budget exploitation film, billed as "A throbbing drama of shackled youth." Progressive schoolteacher Miss Carol (Diana Durrell) fights to abolish the institution of child marriage in her native community of Thunderhead Mountain with the help of her fiance Charles (Frank Martin), who works in the state capital as an assistant state's attorney, while crooked moonshiner Jake Bolby (Warner Richmond) schemes to wed young Jennie Colton (Shirley Mills) by framing her mother for her father's murder, much to the dismay of Jennie's sweetheart, Freddie (Bob Bollinger).

Sensation and scandal were the stock-in-trade of exploitation films, which were made on low budgets by independent studios and producers. Like many exploitation films of the time, it used socially redeeming messages to justify the showing of titillating content that the large studios, who subscribed to Hollywood's self-regulating Production Code, wouldn't touch. These films were calculated to be shocking, but their shock value usually diminished over time until they eventually came to be appreciated by audiences mostly for their unintended humor. In contrast, Child Bride might well be more shocking to viewers today than it was intended to be by its makers, director/screenwriter Harry J. Revier and producer, Raymond L. Friedgen.

What makes Child Bride shocking today is its flirtation with pubescent eroticism, the only non-standard feature of an otherwise standard poverty-row potboiler. Twelve-year-old Shirley Mills occupies center stage on two levels: an actress whose talent is immediately appearent, her Shirley Temple-like style of acting and irrepressible presence standing out in the midst of a mostly mediocre cast, but also a nymphet costumed in obviously outgrown dresses which highlight her legs and budding breasts. She also shows more skin in this film than would have been possible for an adult actress at the time, mainly in a swimmin'-hole sequence in which she is spied upon by Jake. It's a sequence that, to my mind, is more sensual than sexual when viewed in context, and shows her innate propriety and natural lack of shame. It also spotlights Jennie's puppy-love relationship with Freddie, which is affectionate and intimate without being sexual, but it's also a sequence that no amount of defense will redeem to someone determined to find something inappropriate (to give some context, art-house director Catherine Breillat, in her films of recent decades, treats the theme of pubescent eroticism more seriously, and more explicitly: compared to films such as 36 Fillette and Fat Girl, Child Bride comes out looking like Little Women). It has to be said about Jennie that there is nothing sexually precocious about her character, nor is she shown to be an object of lust to anyone but Jake, who's had plenty of chances to be pegged as a villain by this time, and it goes without saying that she comes through her experience in the film with her innocence and faith in human nature intact.

The film's treatment of Jennie hits present-day sensitivities in a way that nearly guarantees that we forget the other elements of the film: the lurid melodrama, the cartoonish picture of mountaineers, the confusing and sudden finale, in a word all the bad-movie characteristics we have come to cherish. Actually, the outdoor scenes are effectively and beautifully shot, and if the characters are mostly corn-pone stereotypes, the extras used in this picture have an appropriately hard-bitten look that suggests the hard life of the mountains. Some typical bad-film moments include Charles's pleas to the governor to support anti-child marriage legislation, Miss Carol's narrow escape from a tarring and feathering by Jake and his henchmen for stirrin' up trouble, and the appearance of midget Angelo (Angelo Rossitto, credited as Don Barrett) along with his dim, oversize buddy Happy (Al Bannon), along with a typically jolly Rin-Tin-Tin-like dog named Ritz.

The film benefits greatly from Shirley Mills's (b. 1926) appearance, which was her first in films and shows her as a skilled professional even at the age of twelve. She went on to a busy career in the forties and fifties in films and later, television, a career highlight being John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath (1940) in which she appeared as Ruthie Joad. In addition to acting in feature roles, she was a talented dancer and appeared in several films during the war with a dance group called the "Jivin' Jacks and Jills." She also worked in photo and ad modeling, night clubs and the stage. She went into business in the sixties, first in the computer data processing field and later as an independent entrepreneur. After retirement she made frequent appearances at movie conventions. In 2009, the 83-year-old Mills ceased to make public appearances due to bad health. We wish Ms. Mills all the best. Her official website has a page devoted to Child Bride as well as to other films of her career.

Because the film has passed into the public domain, I found this film at the Internet Archive, where it is hosted in a few formats including one suitable for burning to DVD. But according to the Internet Movie Database, the film is also available commercially on DVD through Amazon.