Mom, Donna, and Cindy

The 1970 film Cindy and Donna is yet another Crown International film about suburban malaise, out-of-control youth, hypocritical adults, and the difficulty of wearing a miniskirt without flashing the entire world.  In the grand Crown International tradition, it’s 65 minutes of nonstop sex and drugs, followed by 10 minutes of moralistic posturing and wrathful punishment.

Cindy and Donna tells the story of two half-sisters living in the suburbs.  Donna (Nancy Ison) is 17 and has several boyfriends.  Cindy (Debbie Osborne) is 15 and wishes that she had several boyfriends.  She both admires and resents her older sister.  Their mother (Sue Allen) spends most of her time drinking, which keeps her from noticing that her husband and Cindy’s father, Ted (Max Manning), is having an affair with a local stripper.

When the stripper leaves town, Ted gets drunk and ends up having sex with his stepdaughter, Donna.  Cindy happens to see this happen and, as a result, she decides that she’s going to stop worrying about being a good girl and instead, she’s just going to have a good time.  Soon, under the influence of her friend Karen (Cheryl Powell), Cindy is smoking weed and flirting with boys on the beach.  And, since this is a sexploitation film from 1970, marijuana leads to nymphomania.

Meanwhile, Ted is still trying to convince his stripper to come back home and Donna is posing for sleazy photographers and hey, it’s all a lot of fun, right?  No harm done, just a little experimenting, right?

THINK AGAIN!

This film is from 1970, after all.  And, as we all know from watching other films made around this time, there can be no pleasure without subsequent punishment.  Everyone’s fun is ruined when one of the sisters walks in on the other having sex with her boyfriend.

Needless to say, this all leads to someone getting tossed out into the street where they are promptly run over by a truck….

Plotwise, Cindy and Donna is your typical softcore exploitation film.  It’s better acted than most but otherwise, it’s fairly predictable.  And yet, I couldn’t help but enjoy it.  As I’ve stated many times in the past, I’m an unrepentant history nerd and everything about Cindy and Donna — from the clothes to the music to a few random comments about a protest on a college campus — screams 1970.  And, as a lover of melodramatic films, there was no way I couldn’t help but enjoy how every dramatic thing that possibly could happen in Cindy and Donna eventually did happen.

But, honestly (and perhaps surprisingly), the main reason that I enjoyed Cindy and Donna is because I’m the youngest of four sisters.  And, oddly enough, the sisterly dynamic between Cindy and Donna felt very honest and insightful.  Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not saying that Erin and I ever did anything close to what Cindy and Donna do in this film.  But still, once you removed the film’s more dramatic and sordid moments, there was so much about their relationship that felt real and true.

Like many films from Crown International Pictures, Cindy and Donna is available in a few dozen different Mill Creek compilations.   The next time that you’re feeling that you missed out on having a good time when you were in high school, watch Cindy and Donna and see what could have happened.

(Though, in all honestly, it probably wouldn’t have…)