Okay, it's '50s week for the FFB folks. I have one for you.
We talk about books now and then that we say are "very much of their time." Nothing could be truer of Juvenile Jungle. There's a ton of hep '50s teen slang in John McPartland's "Party for the Kids," and no doubt it helped to fuel the fear of those nasty juvenile delinquents in many an old white male reader's heart (the story appeared in Esquire). I guess Americans always have to have someone or something to fear, and in the late '40s and a lot of the '50s it was J. D.s as they were often called. Check out the movie trailer below for a filmic example. (Besides the J.D.s, we had the Dirty Reds, too, not to mention The Bomb, but that's another story.)
James T. Farrell was a big name at one time, or at least a medium name. In the '50s, reprints of his books were all over the place, mainly the ones in the Studs Lonigan trilogy. "Scarecrow" is the oldest story in the book, from 1930, and it's as rough and raw as the stories in the trilogy, which I read when I was in high school. It's not about the threatening J. D.s like those in McPartland's story, but it's scary in its own way.
Jonathan Craig's "The Bobby Soxer" isn't about a threatening J. D., either. It's about an attempted rape of an underage girl by an older man, who's arrested and charged. The story's very short, and it has a nice little snapper of an ending.
Hal Ellson made a career out of writing about J. D.s, the threatening kind, and "Pistol" is a good example. No good can come of it when a pistol falls into the wrong hands.
The next time you want to time travel back to the time of J.D.s and zip guns, give this book a try.
I could write about the bad SF movies of the '50s every week here because I saw most of them. Including this one. What's my excuse? Well, I was a teenager, and it's about a very attractive 50 ft. woman wrapped in bed sheets. Need I say more? Okay, I will say more. This is the kind of thing that was often shown on the weekends at the Mexia Theatre, and everybody went to the movies on Saturday night.
How bad is Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman? Just watch the trailer below and you'll have a pretty good idea. You'll also have seen most of the movie. Sadly the great scene in the poster to the left doesn't appear in the movie. If it did, the movie would be a lot better. As it is, the special effects are terrible, the acting isn't much better, and the story is goofy. There are continuity errors to match anything in an Ed Wood movie.
But what does any of that matter? It's about a 50 ft. woman! Wrapped in bed sheets! This time it's not an atomic accident that creates her. I'm not sure what does. She meets a giant in a flying saucer, he steals her diamond ring, and she gets really big. This is bad news for her philandering husband, and you guys should take note of what happens to him and his blonde hottie. There's definitely a moral to the story, as there often was in this kind of movie back then.
Some of you might be wondering if I knew this movie was bad when I saw it. Sure I did. But did I care? Nope. It was fun to be a kid and go to the movies, no matter how bad they were, and there was always something to like in even the worst of them. Did I mention the 50 ft. woman wrapped in bed sheets?
Did we laugh at how bad some of the movies were? Yep, we did that, too, and after the movie we'd go to the Dairy Queen or the Dairy King or maybe drive out to the lake and dance to music on the jukebox. I miss the old days.
