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Burma (Harley Wood) is a decent girl who won't even let her boyfriend Dick (Richard Erskine) kiss her on a date. But when they are at a party thrown by shady Tony (Hugh McArthur), she and her girlfriends are tricked into smoking marihuana, which leads to her giggling wildly and making out with Dick, while the other girls go skinny-dipping. But then one of the girls drowns in the process and a scandal is about to break involving Burma's name, and furthermore she gets pregnant of course, and thus she runs away from her well-to-do family - thinking her mother (Juanita Fletcher) has always preferred her sister (Dorothy Dehn) anyway - and asks her boyfriend to marry her. He agrees, but to get some money to sustain the 2 (or 3) of them, he takes up a job with Tony and is soon shot dead when drug running. Burma, now as a future unwed mother at the mercy of Tony, has him sell her baby to a rich couple, but in return becomes his top drug pusher, selling not only marihuana but also harder stuff - which leads to her becoming hooked on heroin. To sustain her expensive lifestyle, she then talks Tony into abducting her sister's daughter (Gloria Browne) for ransom, but the police has already caught up with them, arresting Tony, while Burma, after learning her sister's daughter is actually her own child she gave away, overdoses on heroin, the last image before when dying being the little girl, just saved by the police.

Now of course, by objective standards, and especially seen from the vantage point of 85 years later when marihuana has experienced more than one re-evaluation, this film is purely ridiculous, as not only are the effects of weed grossly misrepresented, also everything is done in such an on-your-nose way that leaves little room for subtlety - but of course, subtlety was never on this film's agenda, nor was a serious discussion on the effects of drugs, heck not even anti-drug propaganda. As most of exploitation maestro Dwain Esper's films, this one was made to titilate the audience, to lure them in with a properly provocative title then give them just so much of the "forbidden fruit" as it can get away with (including bits of nudity and strong sexual allusions), but all packed in a morality-style narration to not leave the viewer with a bad taste in their mouth and cause any provocation that would be bad for business (busienss being burlesque houses, roadshows and other adults only venues, as this film wouldn't have passed the censor to play in regular cinemas and wasn't intended to).

Now technically the movie sure is no revelation, but it's put together coherently enough and is a definite step up from Esper's earlier, thematically similar Narcotic - and actually the film is good fun to watch, exactly for its lack of subtlety, and its from today's point of view almost innocent attempts at provocation - basically it's a pretty pleasant trip down the sleazier side of memory lane, really.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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