Born Reckless

Amateur night at the rodeo. As barroom singer Jackie Adams, sort of a fashion-plate cowgirl (her western hat tilted to one side), Mamie Van Doren is dressed to kill, peroxided and puckered for a kiss that never comes. This lady knows her way around a photogenic pose but, unfortunately, she has no personality; when asking someone a simple question, she squints her eyes and quivers her lips as if trying to comprehend the theory of relativity. Van Doren is so stilted on-screen that she's hardly even a presence, yet the drooling cowboys in her path don't seem to notice. Mamie hitches up with a hunky rodeo cowboy and his grizzled cohort, but the so-called screenplay isn't interested in the (often crooked) rodeo circuit. What the filmmakers really want to do is get their sexy starlet into compromising positions (which she then squirms her way out of). Joseph F. Biroc's cinematography is compromised by poor stock shots of rodeo crowds (which must have pained him), and every performance leans toward the extreme: extremely wooden or extremely hammy. Either way, the picture is extremely awful. * from ****