Film Forum

U.S., 1950
Directed by Bernard Vorhaus
Starring Paul Henreid, Catherine McLeod, Rita Moreno, Anne Francis
DCP courtesy of Bruce Lawton. Approx. 91 min.

“Humane psychiatrist Paul Henreid takes on superintendent Cecil Clovelly and sadistic head matron Grace Coppin at a correctional home for girls. Effective study of female juvenile delinquency. – Leonard Maltin.

Presented with support from the Robert Jolin Osborne Endowed Fund for American Classic Cinema.

Reviews

“Began as a project developed by Hollywood director Bernard Vorhaus, inspired by a news account of a juvenile detention center for delinquent girls. Vorhaus enlisted writer Hugo Butler and his wife Jean Rouveral, who researched the subject and wrote a script called Runaway. Paul Henried, an aging but still bankable leading man, would play the role of a supportive psychiatrist…It seems likely that the studios backed away because Vorhaus, Butler, and Rouveral had all been Communist Party members and few Hollywood studios were hiring Communists that season…The Danziger brothers then took over the project with the proviso that it be shot in New York…They avoided studio shooting and dubbed all the dialogue in postproduction. The main location during the seven-week shoot was the Yonkers campus of the Jewish Guild for the Blind, near the Sawmill River Parkway at 75 Stratton Street South. Some interiors were shot at the Ninety-Second Street YMHA, while other location included the abandoned Ruppert Brewery’ the laundry of the Vanderbilt Hotel; a potato patch in Wantaugh, Long Island and the Carousel in Central Park. All these locations were very well shot by Don Malkames, especially the hellish laundry sequences.”
– Richard Koszarski, “Keep ’em in the East”: Kazan, Kubrick, and the Postwar New York Film Renaissance