National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, Inc. New York 3, New York ONE WAY TICKET TO HELL (Reviewed, September ­ 1954)

The use of marijuana and even heroin by maladjusted teenagers is a new evil in American society. It dates from the end of World War II, and, according to the police of several large cities, is increasing.

Bamlet L. Price and his wife, FORBIDDEN PLANET star, Anne Francis at the movie's premier

The present film deals with this ghastly problem by depicting some of the less degraded states in a Los Angeles high school girl¹s descent from decency to heroin addiction. It was written, directed and produced by Bamlet L. Price as his thesis for a University of California post graduate degree. It eschews the sensational.

Though Price¹s resources were limited, his resourcefulness was not, and ONE WAY TICKET TO HELL is no amateurish job. Price could not afford to sync dialogue, but the forceful narration he wrote for his film, which is spoken by the one professional Price was able to hire, effectively tells a terrible story. His cast, which includes himself as a young Mexican who further corrupts the girl, is wholly non-professional.

The teenager who takes to dope in ONE WAY TICKET TO HELL is the misunderstood and rejected daughter of ³much-married mother.² Her adolescent need ³ to belong² prompts her to associate with a gang of boys and girls who ride motorcycles to isolated spots out of town where they smoke ³reefers.² The girl at first resists and then, to be accepted, succumbs. Her school acquaintances fall away, her marks reach an all-time low, but the boy who loves her, and knows nothing of her associations or vice, proposes, and she marries him. In a matter of weeks she is back with the gang. She becomes a peddler, a stool pigeon, and finally a heroin addict and the accomplice of young Mexicans who steal cars and transport them across the border to pay for their drugs. The film ends with the girl being put on a train for the Federal Narcotics Hospital at Lexington, Kentucky, and the statement that less than 2 % of heroin addicts are ever completely cured.

The devices by which Price pictorializes his story, though often crude, are ingenious and surprisingly effective. Parents and teenagers should see this film. (Published in Films In Review, November ­ 1954)

In many respects Bamlet Lawrence Price¹s ONE-WAY TICKET TO HELL (1954) was one of the last great exploitation films about drugs. It followed in the tradition of THE PACE THAT KILLS (1928), REEFER MADNESS (1936), and ASSASSIN OF YOUTH (1937), but was a unique product of the 1950¹s. ONE-WAY TICKET TO HELL exploited the worst fears of middle-American parents during the post-World War II years. Troubled teen Cassandra Lee hooks up with a pack of motorcycle-riding toughs. Cassandra caves in to peer pressure, starts smoking marijuana, and finds her grades on the skids. She escapes into a quickie marriage with her high school sweetheart, but is frustrated and stifled in her do-nothing role as a housewife. Soon Cassandra is popping sleeping pills, and then it¹s on to heroin. Alienated from her husband and parents, she begins selling dope to school kids, gets involved with local hoods, and then with an international smuggler.

Negligent parents, troubled teens, pressuring peers, divorce, the evils of drugs and motorcycles, internal and international subversion of American youth ­ all of these anxieties are on parade in ONE-WAY TICKET TO HELL. But by 1956 the MPAA had relaxed its restrictions on movies about drug use and soon all the major Hollywood companies had jumped on the bandwagon, making their own drug films such as HATFULL OF RAIN (1957) and STAKEOUT ON DOPE STREET (1958). It was just a matter of time before a flood of dope films marked the ³turned-on² 1960s.

Beyond its role as a document of social attitudes of the 1950s, ONE-WAY TICKET TO HELL is important for several other reasons: Made on a shoestring budget and shot on location, it pointed to the direction that both exploitation and independent films would take in the 1960s. Its rough-hewn look reminds us that a ³realist² aesthetic was operating at every level of the film industry during the postwar era. And it¹s an example of the kind of energetic and enthusiastic filmmaking that can happen even when money and time are in short supply.

--Eric Schaefer, author of ³Bold ! Daring ! Shocking ! True !²: A History of Exploitation Films, 1919-1959 (Duke University Press, 1999)