Movie review – “Marihuana” (1936) **

Anti-drug drama from Dwain Esper, the auteur of Maniac, Sex Madness and Reefer Madness. So there are lots of scenes where young people puff on cigarettes at parties, causing them to laugh wildly, kiss passionately, roll around on the floor and jitterbug, quote Shakespeare and go skinny dipping. You know, people laugh at these films – but I’ve seen marijuana actually make people do this stuff. The skinny dipping scene is quite raunchy – all the girls do it and you see their bare arses and everything.

All this fun must inevitably be punished and it is. One of the girls drowned, another gets pregnant then turns to crime. This film is a bit easier to follow than Reefer Madness as it focuses more on one character – Burma, who gets knocked up, gives up the baby and becomes a drug dealer. Burma’s a decent character with an understandable motivation (mum preferred her sister). Indeed, after the great skinny dipping scene it turns into a kind of standard tough woman melodrama with Burma running around with a bad crowd but discovering a mother’s love at the end. There is a fun scene where Burma shakes down a druggie client (a middle aged woman) but the rest of the second half is fairly conventional. And correct me if I’m wrong, but does she die at the end of the film of a marijuana overdose?

Movie review – “Sex Madness” (1938)* / ***

Everyone’s thinking about sex. A couple of girls start talking about a burlesque show, get excited by the thought of strippers and go see it. (One of the girls is a predatory lesbian who feels up the other one during a show). One of dancers says bed “isn’t for relaxing - that’s for action”. Then the story kicks in: one of the burlesque dancers has syphilis. She was an innocent who moved to the big smoke to find fame and soon wound up with the clap. She can’t get married til she’s cured (“we’re dealing with a ruthless foe”) – but then it turns out the doctor who cured her is a quack, and she ends up killing her baby and husband with the disease. There’s also a plot about the son of the anti-syphilis campaigner who (irony!) winds up with syphilis, also from a burlesque dancer. Most of the fun from this is had in the early scenes which are quite sexually explicit and you wish there was more of them. There’s hand held camera work of backstage at the burlesque but a tour of syphilis victims at hospital. Lots of pious platitudes and knuckle-gnashing and not very good acting.

Movie review – “Reefer Madness” (1936) */***1/2

Famous exploitation film which became a cult classic among pot heads in the 1970s. Maybe you like it more when you’re stoned. It is fun with some over the top acting and a very melodramatic plot (an awful lot happens – the strong story makes it more enjoyable). Smoking marijuana seems like a lot of fun – you go to parties where you jitterbug, play piano and have sex (real sex, it’s almost spelt out) with loose women.
On the other hand, it does turn you into a rapist, make you drive over pedestrians and jump out windows, and sends you insane. Some classic moments – the sex scene, the piano playing scene with two people getting high, a girl jumping out the window (fantastic moment).
The story is quite engrossing; like a lot of these films there is a split narratives with a number of leading characters; there is no one "hero", it's an ensemble piece - which adds to the excitement since you never know who's going to live. (Pretty much all the main characters wind up dead, insane or in prison).
NB I would add though that of all the soft drugs which have done damage to my friend’s lives during their twenties, marijuana would be number one (alcohol is shaping up to be number one during the thirties and forties). I believe it should be decriminalised and all that stuff, but it turned one person into a full blown schizo and sapped any ambition or intelligence from a bunch of them. So marijuana can be harmful – but since these films are so obviously silly maybe they’ve helped blind people to the actual damage the drug can do.