What an amazing career Linda Blair has, seriously! Of all my favorite actresses, she's the one with the most remarkably uneven repertoire. In the 80s, the lovely Mrs. Blair was a B-movie/sleaze-queen with some questionable but courageous career choices ("Chained Heat", "Savage Streets", "Night Force",...). But in the 70s, as a teenager, she pretty much exclusively starred in prominent productions ("The Exorcist", Airport 1975") as well as in very respectable and melodramatic TV-movies ("Sweet Hostage", "Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic", and - of course - "Born Innocent").
I wonder she often contemplated during the 80s about where exactly her career took a complete U-turn...
To be entirely honest, "Born Innocent" isn't my favorite type of film-story at all. I only watched it because of Linda Blair, but the subject matter is far too dramatic, sentimental, and socially moralizing for me. It is, obviously, a very forceful and engaging film. Blair stars as Christine "Chris" Parker; a 14-year-old and very intelligent girl who gets committed to a sort of detention home for girls after she ran away from home for the fourth time already. Chris clearly doesn't belong here, and both she and social worker Barbara Clark realize this. For quite a while, the viewer also genuinely wonders how Chris ended up in a depressing place like this, until we're painfully confronted with the fact her family members are complete jerks and the poor girl really doesn't have any luck in her life whatsoever.
The script is also very (over-) ambitious, because next to the tragic tale of Chris Parker, it simultaneously attempts to criticize a whole lot of things that are wrong with American society, like parenting and the guidance of troubled teenagers into adulthood. Chris and the other girls in her group are supposed to evolve into better persons at the detention center, but they only grow more cynical and nihilistic. "Born Innocent" not exactly a cheerful movie, but the performances of the ensemble female cast (and Richard Jaeckel as the loathsome father) are stupendous, and a handful of sequences (like the unsettling shower moments or the funeral) are impossible to forget.
I wonder she often contemplated during the 80s about where exactly her career took a complete U-turn...
To be entirely honest, "Born Innocent" isn't my favorite type of film-story at all. I only watched it because of Linda Blair, but the subject matter is far too dramatic, sentimental, and socially moralizing for me. It is, obviously, a very forceful and engaging film. Blair stars as Christine "Chris" Parker; a 14-year-old and very intelligent girl who gets committed to a sort of detention home for girls after she ran away from home for the fourth time already. Chris clearly doesn't belong here, and both she and social worker Barbara Clark realize this. For quite a while, the viewer also genuinely wonders how Chris ended up in a depressing place like this, until we're painfully confronted with the fact her family members are complete jerks and the poor girl really doesn't have any luck in her life whatsoever.
The script is also very (over-) ambitious, because next to the tragic tale of Chris Parker, it simultaneously attempts to criticize a whole lot of things that are wrong with American society, like parenting and the guidance of troubled teenagers into adulthood. Chris and the other girls in her group are supposed to evolve into better persons at the detention center, but they only grow more cynical and nihilistic. "Born Innocent" not exactly a cheerful movie, but the performances of the ensemble female cast (and Richard Jaeckel as the loathsome father) are stupendous, and a handful of sequences (like the unsettling shower moments or the funeral) are impossible to forget.