Sorority Girl
USA | 1957 | 61 minutes
Credits
Director
Screenplay
Music
Photography
In Brief
Roger Corman
Ed Waters (story by
Leo Lieberman)
Ronald Stein
Monroe P. Askins
Cast
Sabra Tanner
Mort
Rita Joyce
Tina
A poor-little-rich-girl feels
alienated by her mother and
enacts a string of revenges on
her fellow pupils at a girls’
boarding school. However, she
is outcast when one of her
stunts nearly drives a girl to
suicide.
Susan Cabot
Dick Miller
Barboura Morris
June Kenney
SORORITY GIRL (1957) - a portrait of a sociopath
For a film from 1957 about a “bad girl” (Sabra) manipulating others for her own selfish gain, you might expect a “bad seed”-esque
portrait of an evil monster. However, what we have here is a tragedy borne out of what Sabra thinks it means to be human, like a
robot feebly attempting to blend in with the human race. Director Roger Corman, utilizing the bluntness of characterization and plot
machinations of exploitation films of the time, manages to craft a fairly realistic portrait of a sociopath, even by modern Hollywood
standards.
The key to the movie is to simply look at the interactions between Sabra and her mother. Sabra insults her mother by saying she
doesn’t care (honestly, as many may deem it), so her mother rips up a check written out to Sabra in retaliation. Mother tells her “you
were a brat the day you were born”, and Sabra responds by suggesting that this particular character trait may have been inherited.
Dearest mother retorts with “the only thing you’ve inherited is money”, meant to suggest that Sabra is riding the proverbial gravy train,
and any personal problems are self created, surely absolving mother of any responsibility in the matter. Quite ironically, she accidentally
defines their relationship with that very statement, that money is the extent of her parenting and, therefore, the totality of their
relationship.
This mother/daughter dynamic defines Sabra’s relationships. Once Sabra is granted power over a pledge named Ellie, similarly to how
her mother held sway over her, she resorts to employing this diseased dynamic. For Sabra, a relationship is essentially an extortion
between two people, an attempt to gain from the other, just as she would attempt to pry money out of mother’s cold hands. Sabra
attempts to advise Ellie along the way, cruelly insulting her under the guise of “tough love”, just as mother would snarkily point out
Sabra’s flaws.
Sabra’s roommate finds out about her forcing Ellie to do things under the banner of “sorority initiation”, making her do situps and wash
her stockings, amusingly quaint given the modern hazing that goes on. She threatens to reveal this to the dean, but Sabra blackmails
her into keeping quiet. Relationships for Sabra are, after all, not about love, nor sharing, nor compromise, but rather, a means to an
end. In this case…self-preservation.
Sabra appears to be conscious of this “diseased dynamic”, as I put it. She intermittently reflects on her situation in a rather realistic
way (instead of simply supplying the audience with plot information), wondering why she doesn’t have any friends, despite being
pretty and having money and driving a fancy car. In her world, these kind of things determine a person’s worth. At times her voice over
reflects her lack of empathy with others, like when she thinks about stealing away Rita’s (Ellie’s roommate) boyfriend Norm, played
by Corman regular and regular studmuffin Dick Miller. Sabra does so seemingly not out of maliciousness, but in complete ignorance
of Rita’s feelings, viewing Norm as simply an object to be acquired.
Still, other times, Sabra recognizes that there is something wrong with her. Perhaps you’ve experienced something similar, where
you’ve realized you have a problem, but continually try to push it into the background or justify It to yourself. Self-psychoanalyzation
is a desperate hole, where a naïve soul can bury themselves in logic and reason. Ironically, Sabra goes to her mother for help, as she
has no one else to talk to. She pleads to her in a desperate cry for help, and all her mother can say is “there’s nothing wrong with
you…there shouldn’t be, you’ve had the best money can buy”. Mother, sadly but predictably, assumes it’s all a ploy to extort money.
This story takes a turn for the tragic when our flawed heroine attempts to redeem herself. She finds out that Rita is pregnant, with only
her and Ellie knowing the truth. Sabra vows to help Rita, and hopefully right the previous wrongs against her, and, indeed, all of the
wrongs she hath previously wrought. Sadly, her flawed concept of relationships dooms this attempt. I won’t reveal what happens,
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except to say that this is not a tragedy akin to Hamlet or MacBeth, but rather, a sad character
descent fitting of a 19 or 20 year old of the time period. Sabra is left alone on the beach, crying,
with all of her peers staring at her in disgust. The human race, in microcosm, has decided that
they want no part of her.
http://cinemagonzo.blogspot.co.uk/
Roger Corman
Roger Corman is the stuff of legend – a one-man production army who kicked off his filmmaking
career in 1948 as a messenger on the Fox lot. From the very beginning he was a tireless worker,
volunteering to come in on Saturdays so that he could learn the business fast. Within the year
he was promoted to script reader and his coverage helped to transform a rejected screenplay
into the Gregory Peck vehicle The Gunfighter (1950). Unfortunately, Corman got none of the
credit for this success. He quickly realized that the best way to climb the corporate ladder was
to write his own screenplay, and promptly left for Europe to seek inspiration. After a semester
at Oxford, studying 20th century English literature, and a brief stint in Paris, he returned and
sold a script called “The House in the Sea” to Allied Artists.
“The House in the Sea” originated with a striking final image: a cluster of houses sinking into
the Salton Sea. (The image may have inspired the end of The Terror a few years later.) The
ending was completely re-written, but Corman didn’t mind – he took the money that he’d been
paid for his screenplay and sunk it into his first production: The Monster from the Ocean Floor
(1954). Corman was savvy enough to exploit the atomic anxieties of the rising generation, and
to return to the idea a year later in The Day the World Ended. He produced and directed lowbudget films in multiple genres – including westerns and pictures about teenage rebellion –
but he is perhaps best remembered for his contributions to the science-fiction and horror
genres.
The Day the World Ended (1955), written by Lou Rusoff, is a forerunner of Night of the Living
Dead (1968), featuring the same essential plot of a group of strangers trapped in a house and
surrounded by hungry monsters. Like Romero’s film, The Day the World Ended is a
psychological drama, focusing more on the characters than the monsters. It Conquered the
World (1957), from another screenplay by Rusoff, sits comfortably in the shadow of Invasion of
the Body Snatchers (1956) and features a young Lee Van Cleef as a man possessed by a telepathic alien. Not of This Earth (1957), a
precursor to Corman’s later masterpiece X (1963), is one of the first horror movies to emphasize tongue-in-cheek humor.
The screenwriter on Not of This Earth, Charles B. Griffith, became one of Corman’s most frequent collaborators, adding the same
oeat humor to Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), A Bucket of Blood (1959), The Little Shop of Horrors (1960), and Creature from
the Haunted Sea (1961) – all notoriously cheap productions that outshined the competition. Bucket was shot in five days; Little Shop
was shot in two days (on a bet); Creature was made as an afterthought while Corman was in Puerto Rico shooting The Last Woman
on Earth (1960) – another highly underrated post-apocalyptic drama, written by Robert Towne.
By then, Corman was being recognized by French critics as an auteur – which surprised Corman himself more than anyone. Whether
that was the true prompt or not, he soon became restless – he founded his first distribution company (The Filmgroup) in 1960,
convinced American-International Pictures to allow him to make bigger, more lavish films (the beginning of the Edgar Allan Poe cycle),
and began planning his first “statement” movie (The Intruder, 1962). Filmgroup folded within a few years, but Corman cemented his
reputation as a director with a long-running and hugely popular series of Freudian adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe, produced for
American International Pictures (AIP): The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), The Premature Burial
(1962), Tales of Terror (1963), The Raven (1963), The Haunted Palace (1964), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), and The Tomb of
Ligeia (1965). Most of the scripts were penned by Twilight Zone scribes Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, with Robert Towne
filling in on Ligeia.
On a whim, Corman also made an attempt to “out-Poe Poe himself.” The Terror (1963) arose from Corman’s legendary thrift. After
the completion of The Raven, Boris Karloff still owed Corman a few days of shooting, so Corman hired Leo Gordon to write a script
utilizing the same gothic sets. The initial idea was simple: Instead of ending with a fire, The Terror would end with a flood. The first
two days were shot, and the rest of the film was finished over a period of months, up and down the California coast, by a variety of
up-and-coming filmmakers: Francis Ford Coppola, Dennis Jakob, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill and Jack Nicholson.
Corman had greater commercial success than any other independent filmmaker of his generation, but in the early 1960s he began to
worry that he wasn’t achieving his full potential. In between Poe adaptations, he made a handful of films that addressed important
changes in American culture: The Intruder (1962), The Wild Angels (1966), The Trip (1967) and Gas-s-s-s! (1970). Two of the films
highlighted Corman’s “outsider” mentality (The Wild Angels and The Trip) and became AIP’s biggest financial successes; the other
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two were commercial failures that left Corman frustrated.
After 1971’s Von Richtofen and Brown, Corman decided to take a
break from directing and concentrate on getting his new
distribution company, New World Pictures, off of the ground. He
has returned to the director’s chair only once since then
(Frankenstein Unbound, 1990), but has had enormous success as
a producer for nearly four decades – helping to launch the careers
of some of Hollywood’s most famous actors and filmmakers:
Jonathan Demme, Pam Grier, Martin Scorsese, Sylvester Stallone,
Joe Dante, Ron Howard, John Sayles, James Cameron, and Peter
Bogdanovich.
Despite this success, Corman has some regrets – voiced in his
autobiography How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and
Never Lost a Dime (required reading for any fan of independent
cinema!). “I’ve made quite a bit of money,” he says, “but I might
have made as much or more if I’d stayed as a director and moved
on to bigger films. My career has been moderately, not completely, fulfilling.” One can hardly overlook the fact that Hollywood was
revitalized overnight by big-budget exploitation films that might have been made by Corman himself. Most notably, Easy Rider (1969)
combined the talents of Corman alums Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson as well as the cutting-edge subject matter of
The Wild Angels and The Trip. In the late 1960s, Corman was eager to test his range as a director – on a film adaptation of James
Joyce’s novel Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Franz Kaa’s short story “In the Penal Colony.” Instead, he fell into his role as
a producer / distributor at New World Pictures, and later Millenium Pictures and Concorde Films. He remains active as a producer and
continues to inspire new generations of storytellers
Joseph Maddrey, http://classic-horror.com/
Sources:
Corman, Roger with Jim Jerome. How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. New York: Da Capo, 1990.
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