Admit it-there is no better way to spend a lonely night than curled in the arms of a psychotronic movie. You know the kind I mean-damaged, cheap, unpredictable, a little bit crazy, determined to entertain.

If that's what you're in the mood for, then look up Escort Girl for a good time. It's a low-budget bottom-of-the-barrel exploitation picture from 1941, full of the kind of stuff no respectable movie would dare touch, sloppily put together, and unyieldingly entertaining.

The curtain rises on one of the three sets this threadbare production bothered to slap up-it's supposed to be the tony apartment of a madam named Ruth Ashley (Betty Compson), but with some rearrangement of the furniture it serves as a couple of other apartment locations, too. Ruth is meeting with gangster Gregory Stone (Wheeler Oakman), who is at least her business partner but maybe more than that, too. Together they run a call-girl service that the new District Attorney has his sights set on bringing down.

Ruth and Greg are played by a pair of washed-up silent era stars whose once sparkling careers foundered and by the early forties were reduced to slumming it in Poverty Row. Between their hammy acting and the hard-boiled dialogue the script gives them, watching them do their scenes is a fully satisfying breakfast. For the ringleader of a major metropolitan prostitution syndicate, Ruth Ashley is one skittery broad, forever on the verge of succumbing to the vapors.

The cause of her stress is her daughter June, who is initially described as a sort of virginal goddess of purity and hope so pristine that Ruth's greatest worry is that the child will learn the truth of mommy's occupation. "June's all I have," whimpers Ruth, "You know I think I'd die if she ever suspected her mother ran an escort bureau." Ruth should be careful what she says, because that's precisely the direction things seem to be going-the girl's new boyfriend Drake Hamilton has a job with the DA's office sniffing out the escort services! Oops! Of course Drake (Bob Kellard) looks more like a wrestler than a lawyer, but then Margaret Marquis as June looks more like a corn-fed girlie knucklehead than the Last Hope for Femininity that mama's speech in Scene One suggested.

With June's beau on their trail, things are looking grim for the escort bureau, until crafty Gregory Stone starts to manipulate the situation to demoralize and dehumanize everyone else in the story. His machinations are needlessly cruel and deliciously spiteful, not to mention illogical and counterproductive. It all builds to a Shakespearean climax of mutually assured destruction and violence... but why am I telling you this? This movie ain't about no plot!

Any fool can write a story, but it takes true genius to constantly interrupt that story with irrelevant digressions that are vastly more entertaining. The heart of Escort Girl are its many vignettes of call-girl life, a 1930s version of HBO's Cathouse, plotless sketches that wallow in the sleazy atmosphere and flesh out a world bigger, if no more realistic, than the crime melodrama histrionics of the film's actual storyline.

We meet Ice Queen Suzy (Mary Daily), a hardened cynic who flexibly adopts the persona of "Fifi" to seduce a Francophile rube, and dispenses fallen-woman wisdom to her less-experienced fellow whores. Then there is scene-stealing "Snuggles," played by Isabel La Mal as a hillbilly slut version of Gracie Allen. This airhead floozy gets beaten and bruised by one client, robbed by another when she was too drunk to notice, and yet keeps coming back for more abuse. Brunette Rita (Kathryn Keyes) rounds out the female part of the team, but don't forget gigolo Jack (Ric Vallon), working a wealthy widow for the long game.

There is a startling frankness about sex in these scenes in Escort Girl that is out of place for the time. Prior to 1934, movies were freer about sex, but the Production Code effectively stamped all such licentiousness out of American cinema until the late 1960s. It is a jarring shock to see a film that looks for all the world like a cheapo Monogram-style film noir that includes a striptease scene (just a pair of pasties and a G-string away from total nudity) and a half-naked girl aggressively seducing a reluctant young man. Escort Girl manages to violate nearly every one of the Production Code's guiding principles (the film doesn't directly ridicule religion or include any interracial romance, nor does it defile a flag, but happily breaks every single other rule).

This is a story about strong women-their strengths arise from crime and sin, perhaps, but they appear more empowered than the drowsy love interests that flit so insubstantially through most other films of the era. Although the physical abuse of the escorts is dwelled upon at times, the girls (and boy) also exploit their clients in turn-they are neither one-sidedly victims or victimizers, but a blend of both. In the finale, Gregory Stone gleefully takes advantage of June's depression and inebriation to try to seduce her into joining the profession-one part honest acknowledgement of the psychological damage driving so much of the sex trade, ninety-nine parts melodramatic writing so overripe your TV will attract flies.

The script of Escort Girl is attributed to Ann and David Halperin, but in its delirium and giddy hyperbole it is a screenplay worthy of the pen of Ed Wood. In one lunatic scene, June and Drake go to the races-a bizarre choice of pastime for supposedly straight-laced model citizens. She puts her bet on a horse improbably named "Special Investigator," at which point her flesh and blood Special Investigator boyfriend Drake notes that the horse by that name is a long shot. "Sometimes long shots come in," she coos-and sure enough, she wins! Yeah, right, that makes sense.

Escort Girl has dancing, fighting, kissing, a shootout, guest star Arthur Housman doing his drunk act, slapstick, soap operatic shenanigans, and a striptease! What more do you want? This movie may not have class, but it puts out!

Producer: J.D. Kendis
Director: Edward E. Kaye
Screenplay: Ann and David Halperin
Cinematography: Jack Greenhalgh
Film Editing: Holbrook N. Todd
Cast: Betty Compson (Ruth Ashley), Margaret Marquis (June Ashley), Bob Kellard (Drake Hamilton), Wheeler Oakman (Gregory Stone), Guy Kingsford (Breeze Nolan), Isabel La Mal (Snuggles), Arthur Housman (Drunk), Ric Vallon (Jack), Mary Daily (Suzie), Kathryn Keyes (Rita).
B&W-68m.

by David Kalat