Hard, Fast and Beautiful!

A melodrama about a mother and a daughter entangled in a dream of an athletic career. Teenage Florence (Sally Forrest) is a tennis prodigy. Her frustrated mother (Claire Trevor) sees her daughter’s talent as a chance to change their lives. She could finally escape her boring middle-class existence, while the daughter could climb up the social ladder and join the elite of professional sportspeople. Meddling in the girl’s life and manipulating the girl’s managers, she puts Flo’s career onto new tracks. As it turns out, though, Flo hopes for something more than sport results. The movie protagonist is a typical teenager who slowly but surely loses her childhood trust in her mother and grows up to take independent decisions. At the same time, what Florence shares with the other Lupinian ‘nice girls’ is a sincere but naive belief in true love. Sports turn out to be another corrupt game adults play. The parents are nothing else but prisoners of two typical postwar roles, that of a bored housewife and that of a failing breadwinner.