Live Fast, Die Young (1958) Poster

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6/10
A crime is a crime only when your caught
sol121822 October 2004
***SPOILERS**** Wild and untamed youth of the 1950's USA is the story in this movie about young Jill Winters, Norma Eberhardt, who leaves home and school for the big time in a life of petty crime. That lifestyle leads to her hooking up with a gang of mail and jewel thieves who plan to knock off the local post office of a package that contains $150,000.00 in diamonds.

Jill started out rolling costumers in bars all along the California coast after getting them drunk. Jill has the customers buy her as well as themselves drinks, thinking that she'll go to bed with them, and then taking their money. In one case their car Jill ends up fencing some jewelry that she took off one of her victims and the fence tells her that she can get a job working with a gang of crooks led by Rick & Artie, Mike Connors & Troy Donahue. The two hoods specialize in stolen jewelry and electrical equipment selling the items to an eager public for a steep discount.

Arti and Jill get themselves jobs as Christmas help at the local post office where they can disarm the security alarm. Rick is later to barge in at closing time to rob the place of a package of $150,000.00 in diamonds thats being sent to that facility as registered mail. Meanwhile Jill's older sister Kim, Mary Murphy, leaves her drunken dad Pop Winters, Gordon Jones, behind and goes out looking for her little sister before she ends up in the clink or even worse.

Finding where Jill is with the help of a kindly and handsome truck driver Jerry, Sheridan Comerate, who earlier in the movie gave Jill a lift Kim finds her way to the town where Jill is staying at. Kim then together with Jill and Artie gets a job at the local post office for Christmas not to rob the place but to prevent her kid sister from doing it and ending up in a federal jail with a long prison sentence.

Decent story about restless youth in the 1950's America with Mary Murphy really good as Kim who has to deal with an unemployed and drunken father as well as a unstable and disturbed younger sister. All his while working six days a week as a waitress to put food on the table and beer in the fridge as the only bread winner in the family. Kim also has a phobia about men since one of her dad's drunken friends tried to put his hands on her when she was a teenager. It was her experience with the kindly and feeling Jerry that cured her of that fear.

At the end of the movie Jill is given a suspended sentence by the judge for the attempted robbery of the post office, which Kim prevent her as well as Rick and Artie of doing. We then see Kim and Jerry leave the courthouse hand in hand where now all three, Jill Kim & Jerry, can now new start a new life and forget about the past.
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6/10
Directed by who????...
AlsExGal20 November 2020
.... that would be Paul Henreid. Yes, THAT Paul Henreid of "Casablanca" and "Now Voyager" and all things Warner Brothers in the 1940s. But that was then, this is the 1950s.

Our heroine isn't going to be stuck at home with her drunkard father like her "good" older sister, so she sticks out her thumb and heads for a life of crime, small-time at first emptying wallets in a clip joint, but she quickly graduates to grand theft auto and books to the west coast. She joins a gang led by movie tough guy Troy Donahue and becomes part of a caper to rob the local post office of a shipment of diamonds. The gang all get jobs with this federal agency without any identification except their nice white bread faces and busily prepare for the big day. The "good" sister arrives and tries to intervene, but it all goes south and the teenage vermin are dealt with accordingly, probably something minimum-security because of those nice white faces. It's full of bad dialogue and teenage posturing.
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7/10
Good but Typically Flawed
rowenalite20 January 2016
This film has a problem typical of its genre. The actresses who play teens are MUCH too old for their parts. One was 27 and the other 29. They don't look especially young for their ages so the "juvenile delinquent" aspect is quite flawed.

However, the film has an adequate script and a certain amount of emotional power. The embittered Dad is believably depicted as is the dissatisfaction of the daughters.

The grown up criminals are appropriately sophisticated in their immorality. Since I am a Peggy Maley fan, I want to give her oh-so-immoral depiction of gang leader Sue a special plug.

Not a great film but not a bad way to spend some time.
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7/10
Trashy fun.
planktonrules21 May 2024
The number of 'youth gone wild' movies increased dramatically during the 1950s, as apparently American society was concerned about the rise in leather-clad teens and the like. Because of this, "Live Fast, Die Young" is just one of many such films, though it focuses more on a girl gone wild.

Jill (Norma Eberhardt) is a trashy, nasty, rebellious teen when the film begins...plus she thinks she knows everything. So she quits school, tells her no-good father to get lost and she heads to the big city to make her fortune. Once there, she becomes a 'B-girl'...a lady who hangs out in bars...encouraging men to drink more and robbing them at every opportunity. But the thrills of rolling drunks gets old very fast and soon she ingratiates herself on a gang leader (Mike Connors) and helps him plan a seemingly fool-proof robbery. Much of the time, her bland as skim milk sister is hanging about, though she seems to have absolutely no idea why she's there or what to do...a major weakness in the story.

This is a good 'bad' film. It's trashy and sensational and never tries to be an artistic triumph. Instead, it's just a silly, albeit reasonably well made, exploitation film.
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3/10
Live fast
BandSAboutMovies17 March 2024
Warning: Spoilers
Jill Winters (Norma Eberhardt) runs away, become thieves and live "a sin-steeped story of the rise of the Beat Generation." Directed by Paul Henreid (the Cardinal from Exorcist II: The Heretic) from a script by Allen Rivkin and Ib Melchior, they find themselves working with Rick (Mike Connors) and Artie (Troy Donahue) and go from slipping guys a mickey when they take them back to their motel rooms to knocking over a post office to get six figures worth of jewels.

Meanwhile, Jill's sister Kim (Mary Murphy) gets sick of their drunken father and decides to find where her sister is, getting mixed up in all this crime. She's just lucky that she meets a truck driver named Jerry (Sheridan Comerate) who treats her well and helps her forget that her dad's drunken friend once tried to touch her.

These girls are supposed to be teens but are instead in their late 20s. Such is the juvenile delinquent film. It played with Girls On the Loose and you can often see pictures of Eberhardt being worn by Slash from Guns 'n Roses.
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Juvenile female delinquents
searchanddestroy-114 May 2023
Late fifties and early sixties was the period for juvenile delinquency films, in America and also in Europe. So this good fast paced movie describes rather in a good way this search for precisely fast way of living, and also dying. Paul Henried however satisfied me better in his next movie GIRLS ON THE LOOSE, also with female but this time no more juvenile delinquants, but mature female gangsters armed robbers, rougher, tougher than men. Women with men's characters, no more no less. This very one LIVE FAST... focuses on small scale hoodlum girls. Not bad, I repeat, worth watching. Universal studios produced it, very surprising. And the alarm system trick was obviously inspired by RIFIFI, where the gangsters "disconnected" the alarm systen the very same way. This is here a medium noir film, with some gangsters and a heist scheme too, but too much juvenile oriented for my taste.
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