AN UPDATED COMMENT This is an exploitation film produced by John Noble for High-Art Pictures, and has also been released with two other titles: PROTECT YOUR DAUGHTERS and SUSPICIOUS MOTHERS, highly cut while incorporating a large portion from an earlier feature from the same year: MARRIAGE ON APPROVAL, also a pre-Code work, mild as it may be in delineating the differences between improper and socially correct behaviour. The premier historian of American sound film during the period 1929/60, Les Adams, who possesses the work's original pressbook, supplies this data, and adds that the production of MARRIAGE was most likely sold for television reproduction c. 1949 and that the alternated titles subsequently appeared. The long first scene is obviously a latter-day appendage and is marked by such poorly structured action and patently didactic dialogue that one is apt to view with cheer the subsequent evidence of a fall from grace on the part of teenaged Beth (Barbara Kent), daughter of a preacher (William Farnum), at the hands of her lover and friends. The acting is variable in quality, as Kent, Doris Eaton, Edward Woods, and Don Dillaway contribute their best considering the material, while Adele Riggs is excruciatingly bad with her delivery, but it all matters little, as the lesson to be delivered to the audience is lost as this morality play wobbles to a weakly happy ending.
Review of Reckless Decision
