The Thrill of Youth

The Thayer family has everything: Power, wealth, opulence. Whatever they desire is theirs for the taking... until brothers Jack and Chet both find themselves falling for free-spirited Jill Fenwick. Family patriarch Jeff Thayer is unable to impart any fatherly advice, as he is desperately pursuing Seena Sherwood who is already married. The passions, jealousies and secrets of the Thayer clan pit brother against brother and threaten to tear the family apart. Thrill of Youth could rightly be seen as an early precursor to the daytime and prime-time soap operas (Dallas, Dynasty) that thrived on the airwaves decades later.

Director Richard Thorpe (1896-1991) enjoyed a long Hollywood career beginning with a long string of low-budget Western silents. At MGM in the 1930s, he began directing more important films, including the classic thriller Night Must Fall (1937), and several of the studio's popular Tarzan series with Johnny Weissmuller. Big-budget success awaited Thorpe with Ivanhoe (1952) and The Prisoner of Zenda (1952), the Dean Martin comedy Ten Thousand Bedrooms (1957), and the Elvis Presley rock 'n' roll classics Jailhouse Rock (1957) and Fun in Acapulco (1963).

As a special bonus, this DVD also includes an episode of "The Loretta Young Show," the popular dramatic anthology series that ran on NBC from 1953-1961.

Virtually none of the male characters in THE THRILL OF YOUTH could pass muster as a role model. As an old man preaches against the sexual promiscuity of the early 1930s, the man's middle-aged son galavants around with a married woman -- while his sons regularly entertain good-time girls in their own bedrooms. In no position to pass judgement, dad not only condones his sons' behavior, but also slips them a few slugs of bootleg booze. Things come to a head when the libertine father, his paramour, his sons and their tootsies all converge at a mountain cabin. Naturally, everyone is duly punished for their sins, but they all seem to be having a high old time before the final reckoning.