Big girls? They don’t cry-yi-yi; it’s just an alibi. But what about bad girls? Oh, they totally do, as would you if you became a daytime whore.
Sally Downs (former burlesque star Misty Ayres) is just a small-town girl living in a lonely world, aka the big city to which she’s moved. Clothes start to shed before the film hits the three-minute mark, as Sally strips to her undies to don her “best ‘get a job’ dress.” It works, because in the next scene, she’s behind a diner counter, tending to a customer who encourages the naive girl to become a “model”; naturally, he happens to know a guy.
Being a dumb blonde, Sally immediately decides to pursue this line of “work,” only to find herself making a negative career move from slingin’ hash to slingin’ leg. Yes, Sally has become a professional prostitute at a bona fide whorehouse — or, from the looks of the two rooms in which most of the hour-long movie takes place, the living area and master bedroom of someone involved in the production.
In those two spots, the ladies lounge on the couch, dance and wrestle, sometimes in lingerie. Ayres’ beauty was a Marilyn Monroe-esque one, but the similarities did not extend to talent. In that aspect, Ayres is in great company, for Bad Girls Do Cry is full of performances and other things that fail to reach even mediocrity. The directorial debut (and next-to-last effort) of character actor Sid Melton (1951’s Lost Continent) and shot a decade earlier than its release, the drama has nothing to it but a time-capsule look at ladies’ undergarments. Its highest stakes arrive when a drunk hooker unknowingly takes a big swig of spoiled milk. —Rod Lott