13 Frightened Girls (1963)

The most obvious problem with William Castle's 13 Frightened Girls (1963) is that there are actually fifteen of said girls, most of whom never get that frightened anyway.  In fact it was shot under the title The Candy Web and had its premiere (in Australia) under that title.  But a few years earlier Castle had had a hit with 13 Ghosts (1960), so maybe hoped that the number thirteen would prove lucky for him again.  In truth, the original title was probably more indicative of the film's actual content as it focuses mainly on only one of the titular girls - Candy - while most of others play only a background role.  Nevertheless, the film's new title and advertising try to make it seem like some kind of women (or rather girls)-in-peril type of thriller.  In reality, while it has some mild thriller elements, it is more of a teen comedy satirising espionage films - it comes from a period when many of Castle's films were becoming overtly comedic, having been immediately preceded by Zotz! (1962) and was followed by his remake of The Old Dark House (1963).  With its mix of thriller elements and comedy and its juvenile leads, the film it most closely resembles in Castle's canon is probably Let's Kill Uncle (1966), although its humour is never as dark as that of the latter film.

As noted, the central character of 13 Frightened Girls is Candy, a sixteen year old girl attending an exclusive Swiss school for the daughters of international diplomats goes, with her fourteen schoolmates, on a holiday in London, where her father is a senior diplomat at the US embassy.  Conveniently, the other girls also all seem to have relatives working as diplomats in the city.  Candy has a crush on her father's colleague, Wally, an intelligence analyst at the embassy, whose job is on the line due to a series of failures and mishaps.  In order to help Wally, Candy uses her friends' diplomatic connections to feed him intelligence, using the codename 'Kitten'.  While much of the intrigue that follows centres around the Chinese embassy (where Candy's friend Mai-Ling's uncle is a senior diplomat), the film's plot becomes rather episodic, as the 'web' Candy spins brings her encounters with a murder, blackmail attempts and a teenaged hitman, before winding up with a life-threatening encounter with a double agent back at the school.  This format means that the movie never really builds up any momentum, with each new plot strand being hurriedly wound up before the commencement of the next.  It also means that tension and suspense are minimised, with only Candy's brush with the teen hitman, where she finds herself in real peril, feeling particularly tense, culminating with a drugged Candy on the verge of being pushed off of a window ledge several floors up.  Unfortunately, like many of the film's set-pieces, it ends up being resolved in a somewhat perfunctory fashion.

In terms of production values, 13 Frightened Girls is pretty much on a par with Castle's other films of the era, it's main novelty being the use of colour film stock, rather than the director's usual monochrome.  The colour process used - Pathecolor - however gives the film a rather garish, softly focused and slightly over lit, look, making everything look artificial.  Also in common with Castle's other productions, the film is largely studio shot, adding to the sense of artificiality, with only some of the school scenes using actual exteriors: aside from establishing shots using stock footage, 'London' consists entirely of, mainly interior, studio sets.  While Candy, played by Kathy Dunn, is the main character, the film's main 'star' names are Hugh Marlowe (as her father) and Murray Hamilton (as Wally), while Khigh Dhiegh is inevitably on hand playing the Chinese diplomat, (despite seeming always to be cast as a 'wily Oriental', Dhiegh was actually an American of Egyptian and Sudanese descent).  Of the other girls, a few subsequently became recognisable faces on film and TV, most notably Alexandra Bastedo, playing the English girl, Lynne Sue Moon as Mai-Ling and Judy Pace as the Liberian girl.  Overall, the cast are perfectly adequate for what is required of them by the script, the main problem being that their characters are pretty much stock and superficial, none being given strong enough material to be truly memorable.  Dunn's Candy, in particular, comes over the sort of entirely generic middle class American teen girl you could see in countless youth orientated films and TV series of the era. If you take the film as intended - a teen comedy, (significantly, it was used as a support feature to Gidget Goes to Rome (1963) - rather than as it was marketed - as a spy thriller - then 13 Frightened Girls is a perfectly enjoyable, but typically insubstantial, William Castle presentation.