In our movie this week, Mamie and her sister are arrested for vagrancy and hitchhiking, and sentenced to 30 days labor picking cotton. It's got a lot of teensploitation tropes, and a handful of womens' prison tropes (eg, the cat fight which leads to mutual respect), and like nine songs in 80 minutes (one by Eddie Cochran!). The food is awful (it's actually dog food), the labor is literally deadly, and the judge was in cahoots with the cotton-farmer.
Sidebar: This one's kinda long, and doesn't have much to do with wisecracking robots, so feel free to jump down below. Sixty years after this film, our for-profit prisons are at least as bad as this movie would suggest, with way too many people jailed way too long for way too flimsy reasons. And it's only gonna get worse. I decided I wasn't going to talk about this in this post, I really wasn't. Until the evil cotton farmer was named "Tropp."
Sure, he's evil, he harasses the help, and he puts profit above everything else in life. Sure, he makes secret deals to enrich himself, no matter who gets hurt. Sure, he's a duplicitous sociopath who has no respect for women. But Russ Tropp only hurts the people in his town, not the whole damn planet.
And, since it's a Hollywood movie from the 1950s, there aren't many nonwhite people around for Tropp to oppress. How do you make a movie about cotton picking, Warner Brothers, and cast zero African-Americans? (There's one character who's textually Latina, but she's pretty incidental.)
The movie tries to be honest about the realities of life, leading to a scene where Joel has to say "Gee, I'm sorry we even made fun of this movie." But it's just so obviously fakey, like most of the studio teen movies of the time, that I can't take it very seriously.
And the movie's concept of female empowerment isn't great: the female judge has easily been suckered into the scheme by emotional manipulation. Her overdue enlightenment leads her to do the right thing, but the movie doesn't bother to differentiate how much of that is from her hurt feelings over the betrayal.
The cartoony corruption in this movie is solved easily, and it's hard to believe that about real life. It's hard to hear naive characters say things like "I don't think Mr. Tropp's that kind" without feeling dark about our future.
Right. So, the movie is okay, I guess, as far as teensploitation potboilers of the 50's go. It's got some good songs, thanks to Eddie Cochran (whom I adore!) and the whitebread rock stylings of Les Baxter, early in his film career. (He also scored two of the Corman Poe films I saw a few years ago, though I know him best from his contributions to the exotica music scene.)
It's nice to see Joel and the bots deal with a different type of film. This was their first movie without any horror or sci-fi elements, and I'm sure they questioned if MST3K could work with something like this. (I keep forgetting to pull out my dogeared copy of TACEG to check these things.) The fact it does is testament to the dexterity of movie riffing as an artform, and more specifically to the strengths of the show's format. (I'm also happy to see Gypsy show up in the theater, even if I don't think her run of jokes is particularly strong.) (And speaking of firsts, here's the first reference to Jeff Dunham, long before America loved him for his xenophobic nonsense.)
And how do they deal with the film? While the host sketches aren't particularly great, the riffing is pretty sharp. The jokes are reaching that rarefied breadth and scope I love most about the show, with plenty that made me laugh out loud. Sure, there are a lot of easy ones about The Wizard of Oz and Andy Griffith, but there's also callouts for Tom Waits and Tobe Hooper and Squeaky Fromme. It's a heady stew, and a lot of us who grew up on the show got a certain percentage of our cultural education from those jokes.
This is my second show in a row to reference Disneyland, Boss Hogg, and Fawlty Towers (instead of Monty Python). They also make a reference back to SPACOM, from my previous movie.
Bonus feature alert: The DVD has an intro from Joel, and an interview about his one-man show, "Riffing Myself." There's also an interview with Mamie, and she's still energetic and active.
A joke I had to look up: "It's Vic Tayback!"
A joke that didn't age well: "Wait, so you’re my grandma, my sister, my mom ... did you marry Bill Wyman?"
My favorite joke: "Hey, it's Blonde Lemon Jefferson."
Odds I'll rewatch this: 4/10. The worst thing about this episode is how I feel about our country right now. I'm pretty sure that my lessened enjoyment of a silly puppet show isn't important, either, so let's move on and someday I'll laugh at this again.
Overall, I rate this one 6/10. The host sketches go nowhere, and I can't wait for better Gypsy material (no pun intended, sorry), but otherwise, it's pretty good.
Up next, we bid farewell to Josh (and Larry), in #113: The Black Scorpion.
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