They Were So Young (1954)
An early widescreen movie. It's low budget (showing how mainstream the format had become this first full year of its use), but has some terrific scenes and a fun twist of a plot about a scheme to trap young European girls into a modeling gig in Rio that turns into a kind of prostitution slave-girl trade.
The big star is Raymond Burr, who is excellent in his brief appearances, but the main man is a likable Scott Brady, who is an archetypal nice guy American who sees trouble in this foreign land and saves the damsels who would otherwise perish. It's an odd twist that the bad guys in Brazil are actually American, too (Burr), but that's probably good, not to typecast the South Americans as the bad guys.
Director Kurt Neumann is famous for the idiosyncratic and important original version of "The Fly" as well as the notoriously awful "She-Demon." The long list of his films includes a lot of dregs, including a series of half-length movies (called streamliners) that were super low budget fillers. But because of all this work he was an experienced pro by 1954, and adapted to the wide screen exotic scenario here pretty well. The story, however streamlined itself, is a believable and frightening one. If the outcome is too predictable, that's true with half of Hollywood, so just go for the ride.
An early widescreen movie. It's low budget (showing how mainstream the format had become this first full year of its use), but has some terrific scenes and a fun twist of a plot about a scheme to trap young European girls into a modeling gig in Rio that turns into a kind of prostitution slave-girl trade.
The big star is Raymond Burr, who is excellent in his brief appearances, but the main man is a likable Scott Brady, who is an archetypal nice guy American who sees trouble in this foreign land and saves the damsels who would otherwise perish. It's an odd twist that the bad guys in Brazil are actually American, too (Burr), but that's probably good, not to typecast the South Americans as the bad guys.
Director Kurt Neumann is famous for the idiosyncratic and important original version of "The Fly" as well as the notoriously awful "She-Demon." The long list of his films includes a lot of dregs, including a series of half-length movies (called streamliners) that were super low budget fillers. But because of all this work he was an experienced pro by 1954, and adapted to the wide screen exotic scenario here pretty well. The story, however streamlined itself, is a believable and frightening one. If the outcome is too predictable, that's true with half of Hollywood, so just go for the ride.