The Wayward Girl

Ric Roman is engaged to Katherine Barrett. Drunk, he assault her stepdaughter, Marcia Henderson. She clunks him one on the head with the whiskey bottle he's been emptying. He goes down and Miss Henderson rushes from the room. She runs into Miss Barrett, and tells him what happened. The older woman proceeds to beat Roman with the bottle.

The next thing we know, it's Miss Henderson on trial for manslaughter; she has no memory of the events. She goes to prison, with boyfriend Peter Walker vowing to wait for her. In prison, she is schooled in jailhouse violence, and then sold for $3,000 to farm owner Whit Bissell, who speaks of himself in the third person.

It's a muddled story on the screen, with muddled details, and it lacks even the deshabile of an entertaining exploitation flick, or the lesbian subtext of a women's prison flick. The best that can be said of it is that everyone speaks their lines as if they mean them. With Barbara Eden, Ray Teal, and Herb Vigran.

Marcia Henderson plays Judy, a nice young lady who ends up going through hell...and through no fault of her own. She lives with her step-mother and the step-mom is a needy mess of a woman. She's engaged to a man who is no good and who keeps putting his dirty paws all over the teen...but the step-mom makes it clear that nothing the man does will result in her telling him to leave. Not surprisingly, a short time later the man tries to rape Judy and Judy fights back...hitting him in order to get away from him. When the step-mom comes into the room and realizes what's happened, she is enraged and kills her fiancé! However, she pretends as if she did nothing and there were no witnesses and Judy is convicted of Manslaughter and sent to prison.

After serving part of her sentence, Judy is eligible for parole. The problem is that she has no place to go so it looks as if she'll be stuck in prison. However, some 'nice people' come to the parole board and ask that she be paroled to their farm so that she can have a place to live and work. Surprisingly, the parole board agrees and doesn't even investigate the place. What they don't realize is that the 'brother and sister' who so kindly have offered Judy a place to live are actually planning on prostituting her. After all, if she doesn't agree, they'll just have her sent back. So what's coming next for this sad young woman?

I think the choice of having a no-name actress play Judy was a good idea, as otherwise she would have seemed more like an actress than a young lady in trouble. Also, while the film is very salacious, it is ahead of its time and talks about sexual abuse and human trafficking....very important topics which were generally ignored up until then and which STILL don't receive enough attention. Well worth seeing and surprisingly well made.

By the way, if you do watch this one, look for Barbara Eden in small part near the beginning of the picture.