Damaged Lives

This was produced by Harry Cohn's brother Nat at Columbia Pictures but released under the Weldon Pictures banner to provide some distance for the parent company. Workaholic Don Bradley Jr. (Lyman Williams) agrees to go to a nightclub dinner party where he meets bottle-blonde Elise (Charlotte Merriam). The two have a wild night of drinking and end up in the sack. Don feels guilty since he's engaged to marry nice girl Joan (Diane Sinclair), and the two decide to elope. Imagine Don's embarrassment when Elise contacts him some time later to inform him that she's tested positive for syphilis. Don hides his secret shame, but has he already passed it on to dear sweet Joan? Also featuring Jason Robards Sr. And Marceline Day.

This has all of the hallmarks of later films of the type: nice people brought to near ruin after a night's careless debauchery; a positive outlook after mostly doom and gloom; and a protracted sequence showing real cases of advanced venereal disease patients in all of their grotesque horror. The copy I watched ran a scant 53 minutes, but IMDb lists it as having a 64 minute run time, and another source lists 74 minutes, so most likely it depends on how much of the really graphic footage was cut from each print. This was produced in conjunction with the Canadian Social Health Council, and marked the ignominious American directing debut of Edgar G. Ulmer. He manages to add a couple of interesting visual touches that raise this above the crowd, but just barely.