Reckless Decision (1933)

Release Date:

1933 (USA)

Genre:

Drama

Plot:

A mother and father try to find a way to protect their young daughter against the influences of booze, wild parties and (gasp!) dancing during the Jazz Age. |

Plot Keywords:

Daughter | Exploitation

Cast

Doris Eaton	...	Doris Devereaux
Barbara Kent	...	Beth MacDougall
Don Dillaway	...	Larry Bennett
Warwick Ward	...	The Duke (scenes deleted)
William Farnum	...	Rev. John MacDougall
Leila McIntyre	...	Mary MacDougall
Walter Tennyson	...	Bill
Mary Rorke	...	Bill's Mother
Edward Woods	...	Billy McGee
Adeline Hayden Coffin	...	Nurse Anna
Dorothy Granger	...	Hortense
Adele Riggs	...	Ellen, Helen's Mother
Marion Quigley	...	Helen 'Sugar' Devereaux
Donald Thompson	...	Tom Devereaux
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Clarence Geldart	...	Detective Cahill
Margaret Halstan	...	Doris' Stepmother
Otis Harlan	...	Justice of the Peace Michael O'Connors

Also Known As:

Protect Your Daughters (video catalogue title)
Suspicious Mothers

Runtime:

53 min

Country:

USA

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Company:

High Arts Pictures Corp.

Trivia:

Contrary to the speculation noted on page 2102 of the "AFI Catalog: Feature Films 1931-40" (which lists this picture as "Suspicious Mothers"), all of the flashback scenes in "Reckless Decission" were filmed specifically for this production, and (as with the rest of the picture) are direct dialog.

Movie Connections:

Edited from Marriage on Approval (1933)

AN UPDATED COMMENT

AN UPDATED COMMENT This is an exploitation film produced by John Noble for High-Art Pictures, and has also been released with two other titles: PROTECT YOUR DAUGHTERS and SUSPICIOUS MOTHERS, highly cut while incorporating a large portion from an earlier feature from the same year: MARRIAGE ON APPROVAL, also a pre-Code work, mild as it may be in delineating the differences between improper and socially correct behaviour. The premier historian of American sound film during the period 1929/60, Les Adams, who possesses the work's original pressbook, supplies this data, and adds that the production of MARRIAGE was most likely sold for television reproduction c. 1949 and that the alternated titles subsequently appeared. The long first scene is obviously a latter-day appendage and is marked by such poorly structured action and patently didactic dialogue that one is apt to view with cheer the subsequent evidence of a fall from grace on the part of teenaged Beth (Barbara Kent), daughter of a preacher (William Farnum), at the hands of her lover and friends. The acting is variable in quality, as Kent, Doris Eaton, Edward Woods, and Don Dillaway contribute their best considering the material, while Adele Riggs is excruciatingly bad with her delivery, but it all matters little, as the lesson to be delivered to the audience is lost as this morality play wobbles to a weakly happy ending.