13 Frightened Girls (1963)

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

Buy it at Amazon.

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