Cry Baby Jack

THE CRY BABY KILLER-1958-A confused juvenile delinquent named Jimmy (skinny Jack Nicolson in his film debut) gets beaten up by a sleazy dude named Manny (Bret Halsey, one year before RETURN OF THE FLY) and his two punk underlings. Manny's new girl Carole (Carolyn Mitchell) is Jimmy's old one and he wants to get her away from Manny. They go out into the parking lot and somehow Jimmy gets his hand on Manny's gun and shoots Manny and one of the punks. Thinking he's killed them, Jimmy takes a kitchen worker (Smoki Whitfield) and a lady (Barbara Knudson, who died in March of 2014) with a baby hostage. Police lieutenant Porter (familiar TV actor Harry Lauter) investigates. A TV reporter (Ed Nelson) does a live report as a large crowd gathers. There's a lot of expounding on kids, family and growing up while the police (and his mom) try to talk Jimmy (now called "the boy with the gun") out but everything seems to go wrong. Frank Richard is Gambelli, the uptight owner of the bar (character actor Herb Vigran plays his lawyer) and Lynn Cartwright is a proselytizing waitress.

NIcolson is pretty funny as Jimmy, desperate, then crazed then sorry. It's really not that much of a role as most of the rest of the cast has the best lines. It's interesting that there is a sympathetic black character who tries to talk Jimmy into surrendering but by the end of the story he's not even thanked. The lieutenant just gives him a blank stare.

Actor Leo V. Gordon (who was married to actress Cartwright) wrote the screenplay (he performed this chore for Corman several more times) and appears in some crowd scenes (with Bruno Ve Sota). Producer Roger Corman (who's seen briefly as a TV technician) claimed this was the only movie he ever released that didn't make money!

I think this is the only feature film directed by Justus Addiss who usually worked in TV. His last work was for Irwin Allen in the '60's.

The great theme song is sung by Dick Kallman.

To read more about featured actress Carolyn Mitchell go here: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0593198/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm

The version I saw was just called THE CRY BABY.

Thanks for reading!