They Were So Young 1954

A group of attractive European girls answer an advertisement to be fashion models in Rio de Janeiro. Their employer is really an escort agency, and the girls are expected to go out with rich men. The boss Lobos, Gert Fröbe, runs the operation and keeps the girls’ passports locked away. When one of them, Eve Ullmann, Johanna Matz, is approached by Richard Lanning, Scott Brady, a drunken American who enters her room, she breaks a bottle over his head.

The agency confiscates their passports and informs Eve that she must work off her debt at the duties the employer decides upon. Eve and her friend Connie Voorhees, Ingrid Stenn, escape, but trouble follows quickly. Eve goes to a police station, while Connie attempts to reach the Dutch consulate but is kidnapped by her employer’s thugs and brought back, drugged and beaten. When the police bring Eve back they refuse to believe her story and tell her to straighten out her problems with her employer by herself.

Eve realises the only person she knows in Rio is Lanning, and she goes to him for help. Lanning, a US Army Engineer in Germany during the war and now a mining engineer outside Rio, believes Eve and brings her to his powerful employer, Jaime Coltos, Raymond Burr, who agrees to help. Unknown to Lanning, Coltos is actually head of the escort agency and plans to imprison Eve and Connie aboard a riverboat to sexually entertain agricultural and mining workers.