Child Bride (1938)

child-brideStubbly 40 year old men marrying 10 year old girls. It’s happening among the barefoot illiterates who live in Ozark Mountain Country (circa the 1930s) and this low-budget lid-blower is here to tell us all about it. The movie follows the local schoolmarm as she fends off harassment and murder attempts in a crusade to get the lice-ridden Appalachian villagers to see that screwing pre-teens just isn’t cool. The plot gets bogged-down in some confusing village-infighting, but overall, at a mere sixty-two minutes, this film delivers its sleaze at a fast-paced, though clumsy, clip.

The most infamous scene here is the ultra-creepy four-minute skinny-dipping sequence in which 12 year old Shirley Mills strips and then glides her scrawny nude body through a glittering pond over and over again.