Child Bride (1938)

Child Bride 
Directed by Harry Revier
Written by Harry Revier
1938/USA
Produced by Lloyd and Ralph Friedgen
First viewing

[box] Tagline: A THROBBING DRAMA OF SHACKLED YOUTH![/box]

This exploitation film is not a barrel of laughs.  In fact, it’s sort of icky.

Billed as an anti-child marriage message film, this is the sad story of little Jennie, played by 12-year-old Shirley Mills.  She loves to go to school where her teacher crusades against the underage marriages so prevalent in her backwoods community.  Jennie has an innocent friendship with young Freddie but has been cautioned by teacher that she should no longer skinny-dip with him.  (So Freddie turns his head during the creepy skinny dipping scene.)

Jennie’s father is a drunk and her mother had been having an affair with her father’s partner Jake.  While Ira is beating his wife for her infidelity, Jake seizes the opportunity to murder Ira and threaten the mother with pinning the blame on her.  Jake uses this leverage to force mom to consent to his marriage to poor Jennie.  Will teacher’s DA boyfriend persuade the government to change the marriage age laws before Jennie is deflowered? With little person Angelo Rositto (Freaks, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome) as the instrument of vegence.

The trailer for this movie, which I will not embed here, makes it pretty clear that the main draw was the skinny dipping and a few topless scenes with Shirley Mills.  The trailer has a couple of clips of women being whipped which do not appear in the film as well, just to make it abundantly clear what kind of audience it was trying to attract.  While the content is pretty tame by today’s standards, that doesn’t make the movie any less vile.