SoCalMovieLover Review of Claudelle Inglish

Claudelle Inglish (1961)

Complex Emotional Drama -- Well-worth watching.

[8/10 · 2 June 2012]

This movie premiered this evening on Turner Classic Movies and was well worth watching. The film is a very well-acted and intense emotional drama about a high school girl who is navigating the confusing territory of transforming from a girl into a woman and having her first experience with love and betrayal. Claudelle is a beautiful and innocent 17 year old girl about to graduate from high school when she is "wooed" by, and falls in love for the first time with, a handsome and seemingly sincere local boy. She trustingly gives her heart and soul and body to the young man she loves, shortly before he must leave to serve in the army. Her lover "Linn" (Chad Everett) is assigned to a military base far from home, but he promises to marry Claudelle as soon as he is done with his 2 year stretch in the service and he asks her to wait for him. Claudelle is deeply in love and promises to wait for Linn. She eagerly awaits her lover's letters, every day, until she receives one in which he tells her that he has become involved with another young woman and is going to marry his new girl -- not Claudelle. Claudelle is absolutely devastated and heartbroken. Her mother, a woman who is bitter from a life of hard work and unrealized dreams of her own, is unequipped and too narcissistic to help her daughter deal with the pain of betrayal and her first broken heart. Claudelle wants to "get even" with the lover who spurned her, just as she begins to realize the power of her own beauty and sexuality . . . and the hold which she seems to so easily have over just about every man in town -- young and old. But the pain of being betrayed and spurned is so raw that Claudelle fails to realize that she is inflicting far more pain on herself than on any of the men who she she becomes involved with -- least of all her first lover, Linn. Claudelle's father (George Kennedy) is a decent and loving man, but is unable to help his daughter deal with the raw pain of her broken heart and her self-destructive behavior -- until the end of the movie. Unfortunately, but all too typical of the mores of the time in which the story takes place, the plot is resolved by a need to kill off the "slutty wanton woman", because of the havoc she wreaks on the lives of the many weak and delusional men who want her but cannot have her -- and who cannot control their own emotions. Why is it that the promiscuous woman always has to die in these movies? (Think about Elizabeth Taylor in Butterfield 8, Kim Novak and Bette Davis in "Of Human Bondage") Why can't the men just learn to deal with their own emotions without resorting to violence? In fairness, one sincere young man loses his life when he fights to defend Claudelle's honor (but mostly his own ego and "manhood"). And, I was really thinking and believing that Claudelle and her loving and protective father could pack up and move to a new town, and get a fresh start. But oh no. The wanton, beautiful and sexual woman always must die! Is it maybe because of all those stories were written by men? Is it because a woman who enjoys and trades on the power of her own beauty and sexuality is just too threatening to the patriarchy and must be punished? What is it? Happily, this motif begins to change with the advent of the sexual revolution in the mid- to late 1960's. I was so happy when I again saw the "The Sanpiper", recently, and observed that Elizabeth Taylor's character didn't have to end up dead -- even though she and Richard Burton thoroughly enjoyed an illicit, extramarital affair. Amen! LOL!