This is producer/director William Castle’s second-best movie with the number 13 in its title. Its premise is that Candy (Kathy Dunn), an American diplomat’s daughter who attends an exclusive boarding school, becomes a spy. She’s 16 years old.

I point that out because not once, but twice, does Candy throw herself at older men, in an unsubtle sexual manner that would never pass muster today.

Like Nancy Drew with a multicultural cast, the bright, boisterous Girls pits Candy mostly against the ne’er-do-wells of “Red China.” The film has her scurrying up and down a dumbwaiter, tossing a guy off a balcony to his death, and saved from a booby-trapped car from that hunk known as Murray Hamilton. But nothing is as awesome as the prologue, which finds her driving her fellow students in a bus, and practically killing them all because of a spider dangling in front of her. She swerves all over the damn road; has she ever heard of brakes?

At a party sequence about 38 minutes in, a couple pops up who may remind you of our First Family in their late teens. It was during this scene, with all the boarding school girls being catty to one another (“Ooh, you man thief!”) that prompted my wife to comment, “Man, spies are bitches.” —Rod Lott

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James Cagney plays Ralph Cotter, a convict with a heart of mold. During an escape from a prison farm, his co-escapee (Neville Brand) falls behind, so Cotter shoots him in the head. Cotter than forces his way into the apartment — and arms — of the guy’s sister, Holiday (Barbara Payton). He’s a real dime-store Richard III. 



While he’s talking his way into Holiday’s life, a moment of violence erupts that is nothing like any scene I can remember. Holiday, furious, throws a knife at Cotter, which just knicks his ear. He storms into the bathroom, wets a towel, wrings it out, then dabs it at the cut. Suddenly, he whirls toward her, draws back his arm, and begins savagely thrashing her with the wet towel. Back to the wall, she screams for him to stop, then throws herself into his arms and weeps that with her brother dead, she has no one. He suggests that she has him, and the moment ends with a kiss. 



What keeps us reeling is the way the film portrays the standard noir characters of the evil femme fatale and the hapless sucker who knows she’s using him, but still can’t break away. In Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, Cagney’s character is the dangerous dame, and Payton’s is the entangled schmuck.

Payton is gorgeous, but her career didn’t last very long. Her own worst enemy, she died at age 39, abetted by drugs and drink. Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (a great noir title, by the way) was directed by Gordon Douglas and the screenplay was by Harry Brown, from a novel by Horace McCoy. —Doug Bentin

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