Shaded Tobacco

Parrish (Warner) is the celluloid name for Troy (Surfside 6) Donahue, who has a wheatfield of golden hair, ripply pectoral muscles and a pair of sapphire-tinted eyes --in a word, a dreamboat who by his own tally is "No. 1 on the fan mail list at the studio and No. 2 or 3 in all of Hollywood right now." Troy plays the part, as the ads put it, of an "intruder in Connecticut's Million-Dollar Mile," which sounds like moneyed exurbia and turns out to be rich tobacco country in the Connecticut River Valley.

Based on a modest bestseller by Mildred Savage, the film is supposed to prove that "our youth is neither beat nor lost." Instead, as represented by some featherweight personalities out of Warner's TV training camp, American youth is merely sullen, sadistic and sex-obsessed. "This is my bedroom, in case you get lost," says Connie (Hawaiian Eye) Stevens, a limber branch of the Jukes family tree, just half a minute after she meets Donahue. "We can have a lot of fun together."

There are minor compensations. Parrish brings Claudette Colbert back to films for the first time in five years. As Troy's mother, she is mostly wasted on Karl Maiden, her loutish husband, and on script inanities (these young people "are just trying to fight with their own identity"). But she makes a splendid animated advertisement for Sophie of Saks Fifth Avenue, whose clothes she models with crisp Technicolored distinction. And there are some heart-stirring shots of quilted green land and shimmering lakes, of whaling boats and silver-spired churches taken on location around Windsor, Old Saybrook, Mystic and Essex. Audiences will also learn about tobacco--possibly more than they care to. Item: those acres of flimsy shade-tobacco tents (which don't quite obscure the dedicated dalliance of Troy and girl at the fadeout) are made of cheesecloth, which filters sunlight and raises the temperature around the plants by 15 degrees.

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