Themes: Mothers and Daughters, Innocence Lost, Faltering Friendships
Main Cast: Susan Cabot, June Kenney, Barbara Crane
Release Year: 1957
Country: US
Run Time: 60 minutes
Plot
Sabra Tanner (Susan Cabot) is a member of an exclusive sorority on a small California campus. Wealthy, attractive, and intelligent, she should be sitting on top of the world and feel like she is; but she's the product of an emotionally abusive upbringing, by an uncaring mother, and she's so twisted in her thinking, that she knows not a moment of peace. She believes that no one accepts her, and in her growing paranoia, lashes out at her fellow sorority members, their boyfriends and fiancés, and anyone else she can bully and threaten. Her machinations finally catch up with her, but not before she sets a tragedy in motion. This film was remade in 1994 for cable as Confessions of Sorority Girls. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Review
Roger Corman's Sorority Girl (1957) is easily among the strangest movies that he ever made, as an exploitation movie with a serious psychological underlying theme. Some of what's here was lifted from Calder Willingham's End As a Man and its screen adaptation that same year as The Strange One, and given the distaff treatment, moved to a sorority house at a small college. It's all almost too good for the script as it stands and most of the acting and Corman's directing -- at least, as it's represented here, on a shoot of less than two weeks and with a cast that was mostly unsuited to the roles they were asked to portray. Susan Cabot, in one of her best performances, is also bit outsized in talent for the surroundings here as the troubled Sabra, who is both tormented and sadistic. The rest of the cast seems like they're in a different movie, and they obviously come from very different acting worlds from the method-trained Cabot. It doesn't all work, and some of it is a hoot -- Dick Miller as the hero of the piece, just doesn't fit into a collegiate setting -- but some of it is, in its fragmentary way, quite haunting; strangely enough, some of the best moments come over the opening credits, in the graphics depicting an artist's conception of Sabra's tormented personality, melded with Ronald Stein's excellent score. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Fay Baker - Mrs. Tanner; Jeane Wood - Mrs. Fessenden; Dick Miller - Mort; Barboura Morris - Rita Joyce; Margaret Campbell
Credit
Roger Corman - Director, Charles Gross - Editor, Ronald Stein - Composer (Music Score), Monroe P. Askins - Cinematographer, Roger Corman - Producer, Leo Lieberman - Screenwriter, Ed Waters - Screenwriter
