Thoroughly entertaining for most of the time, this is the story of a bored, wealthy young woman who forms a gang with like-minded friends and has a whale of a time robbing gas stations, trashing schools and making men sexual offers they can't refuse. They are occasionally employed by Sheila, a splendid older gang moll in a tight sweater, whose appearance sadly only lasts a couple of minutes prior to her being gunned down. The plot runs from one absurdity to the next including two cop cars racing to a disturbance at a school and going in with all guns blazing, as if Bonnie and Clyde were in there. Unfortunately Mr Wood seemed to forget what the audience had paid to see, and devotes nearly a fifth of the running time to the patently phony moralizing required to justify everything else. This provides some fun in itself, with the veteran actor playing the judge clearly reading his interminable lines, while the distraught mother bemoans giving her errant daughter Paula 'a new dress instead of a caress'. In fact Paula, played by the glamorous Jean Moorhead, looks ravishing in the one-piece she wears at the pajama party, no doubt from 'Victor Most of California', who gets a credit. Pity the film was so short and the ending such a washout.
Review of The Violent Years
