Lovely Rita

Rita Moreno

Rented due to my lifelong, long-distance, one-sided and woefully imaginary love affair with Rita Moreno, Black Rebels (1960) is a b-movie proposing to expose racial tensions percolating in a California high school. That it segues into a lame back story about pot trafficking and a series of incongruous nude scenes (with an entirely different and ungainly cast) brings any lofty ideals down a notch for the Saturday night crowd it was tailored for. Too bad for us, because there’s a good picture buried in the mix, and Rita, just one year shy of West Side Story, is excellent under the circumstances.

    As the daughter of a motherless Mexican family, she’s having a clandestine fling with an ‘Anglo’ boy…or, rather, man. The actors playing the teenagers in this movie are all pushing thirty. (Rita was a ripe twenty-nine at the time.) Two undercover cops sign up for her social science class, one a half-black who makes a pass. We’d like to think that her lack of interest has something to do with him being the blue-eyed, white beefcake b-actor Mark Damon looking absolutely ridiculous in semi-blackface.

    Producer William Rowland, we learn from the IMDb, was involved in all sorts of mishegas, including one movie claiming to be called Curse of a Teenage Nazi (1948). Although Richard Bare, a TV vet, is credited for directing Black Rebels, it was Rowland who shot the stag movie inserts. There are some people who howl over stuff like this; we fumbled with the fast-forward button.

    Included on the new DVD from Something Weird Video is a co-feature, Murder in Mississippi (1965), in which white supremacists duke it out with civil rights activists. Pungent, in-your-face exploitation features everything from rape to castration, filmed on a budget of about thirty-nine-cents by director Joe Mawra, known in smoky back rooms for White Slaves of Chinatown (1964) and the randy Madame Olga’s Massage Parlor (1965).

At Amazon