On Repeat: The Breast of Russ Meyer 1
One cinema visit this week marked with a *. Warning: contains boobies. Lots and lots of boobies. And a few naughty words. So then, Russ Meyer. Back in the late 70s, there was one of those buy every week builds into a collection things called The Movie, and over the weeks I bought the lot. I think that this is where I first read about Russ Meyer, because The Movie was the kind of movie encyclopedia that left no stone unturned. There was no area of cinema that The Movie did not cover, and this includes what some would call pornography, what others would call erotica, and what Russ Meyer would undoubtedly have called the fantastic American cultural blind spot that enabled him to become a millionaire.
My first Russ Meyer screening took place in dubious surroundings. There was a cinema in Station Street in Birmingham called the Tivoli (now it’s the Electric, an altogether classier joint), and back in the 1980s, the owners had a second-run screen upstairs (this was where I first saw The Thing (1982) and Cat People (1982) on a double bill) and downstairs, they showed dirty movies. Now, these were cut dirty movies, of course, but it was softcore smut all the same. For the most part, I had no interest in what was shown, but on 2nd December 1985 and for the week around it, they had on a Russ Meyer triple bill. My curiosity had been further piqued by the short section on him in Kim Newman’s highly recommended book Nightmare Movies (1984). Because I followed the example of The Movie encyclopedia in my own moviegoing, there was no area of film in which I had no interest, I had to go. I was not exactly prepared for what I saw.
The films were Vixen! (1968), Cherry, Harry & Raquel! (1969) and Up! (1976). They had been censored and projectionists had removed frames they’d taken a fancy to (my favourite in this area was a print I once saw of Ken Russell’s Mahler (1974) in which nearly every frame of Georgina Hale’s brief topless scene had been removed by a generation of projectionists). But there was still something incredible going on here. Quite clearly, Russ Meyer is not a great filmmaker. I would go so far as to say that he isn’t even a great pornographer (all those quick cuts hide more than they show). But in many ways, and as the films themselves demonstrate, he is a filmmaker of note who should not be readily dismissed.
If there are moments in all this where I seem to be unusually knowledgeable about the odd twists of Meyer’s life and the unusual ways in which his films were made, it is all down to Jimmy McDonough’s excellent 2005 biography: Big Bosoms and Square Jaws: The Biography of Russ Meyer, King of the Sex Film. In a first for this blog, I’m actually going to supply a link to the paperback on sale at Amazon:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Big-Bosoms-Square-Jaws-Biography/
This sequence of films is taken from the 12 disc set of Russ Meyer films as released in the UK by Arrow Films along with my copy of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). I’m not following the discs, I’m following the chronology of Meyer’s filmography. I may occasionally break off from Russ Meyer movies to watch some proper films because all of the bouncing flesh has started to get to me, so I apologise in advance. If we make it out the other end, we may all have grown as people and reached a new place in our lives. At the very least, we will have seen the largest breasts known to Man, tracked down and filmed for us by a man for whom they were the be all and end all of all existence.
If he even liked women, if he wasn’t gay, if he hadn’t had a serious mother complex, if he wasn’t who he was, and all the rest of it. I will also be approaching this blog in a completely different way. I won’t be making it all up on Sunday (or indeed Monday), but I’ll be adding to it after each film daily in my WP of choice but only posting on Sunday. It won’t seem any different to you, except it will be much longer, but I’ll know the diffference, and, you know, I’m okay with that.
Trailer Reel
All 12 of the Arrow Films DVDs include this, and I urge you to check it out if you haven’t already. Since Meyer’s films are in many ways already trailers for themselves, and occasionally pause to deliver absurdist monologues on the activities of the leading characters in order to pad out the running time, they’re an essential addition to the canon. In addition, Meyer, “the rural Fellini”, supplies many of the priceless voiceovers himself. A couple of the trailers include the phrase “The management of this theatre urges you to see…” which is a lovely insight into how exploitation movies were sold in the 1960s. This ballsy phrase wasn’t added by cinema management, it’s part of the hype of the distributors. My favourite trailer is the one for Cherry, Harry & Raquel! (1969): three minutes of incomprehensible monologue about marijuana abuse allied to endless footage of naked flesh that makes it completely unnecessary to see the actual film, since the actual film doesn’t in the end consist of anything more in the way of content than that which is in the trailer. Genius!
Titles
The titles of the films here are taken from the title cards of the films themselves. Some of them have exclamation marks, some of them don’t.
The Immoral Mr. Teas (1959)
Well of course it’s terrible. The improvised music score is cheap and irritating. There’s no sync dialogue, just endless narration intoned by a voice awfully close to South Park’s Mr Garrison, and when the nudity around a lake sets in and the narration starts dispensing facts about water and sailors, you start losing the will to live. It all looks pretty terrific, though, like a risqué postcard from the 1950s or a Bettie Page session. The initial nudie fantasy dream sequences take place in front of pastel coloured backgrounds, adding a surreal touch of Pop Art to the proceedings. It certainly doesn’t look revolutionary, and yet it was. The reason is that Meyer moved beyond the nudist camp premise of earlier let’s film naked people movies, and added a shade of narrative, a touch of voyeurism and no attempt to hide that what Teas, this movie, Meyer himself, and the great unwashed American populace that would be his audience wanted: naked women and lots of them. The film is Playboy with moving pictures; it may put its female characters on pedestals, but it ensures that its male characters remain harmless schlubs. There is no sexual threat to this film (Meyer knew that any hint of actual sex would have been disastrous) and the end result is all rather innocent. Almost Edenic.
In America, no one had ever done this before. Ever. Shot in 4 days for $25,000, this film grossed a million dollars plus in 1959. By accident, Meyer had started American cinema on the road that would lead to Paula Prentiss’ full frontal nude scene in Catch-22 (1970) and Chloë Sevigny’s much-debated on-screen blow-job in The Brown Bunny (2003). Meyer started by being ahead of his time at the right moment in history, and he would end his career behind the times, out of touch in a world that no longer needed his brand of outré sexuality when they could rent hardcore on VHS from their local store.
Eve and the Handyman (1961)
There was one thing missing from Russ Meyer’s first film, and that was his second wife, Eve. Theirs was by all accounts a tempestuous relationship which became a solid business partnership that degenerated into divorce when Eve finally tired of Meyer’s relentless philandering. The follow-up to Teas is a slightly loopy combination of film noir and bad comedy, signalled by a corny music score that goes for the full Carry On and signals the arrival of each hot babe with a blast of raspy trumpet burlesque stripjoint style bump and grind. Classy it is not.
Sporting Amy Winehouse’s eye makeup, Eve is the first of Meyer’s strong woman archetypes, and she plays multiple roles in her only onscreen performance for him. One of the many contradictions of Meyer’s oeuvre is his interest in casting women as the active protagonists of his films at a time when this was unusual while also requiring them to play a more passive, decorative role. The film still doesn’t have sync dialogue, but does have some unsubtle foley work and great views of San Francisco at the beginning of the 1960s. It’s episodic and slight and has a quite stupid twist ending.
There’s now a slight gap in the filmography as three of Meyer’s next four films have been out of circulation, withdrawn by the director himself, since their original theatrical release: Erotica (1961), Heavenly Bodies (1963) and Europe in the Raw! (1963). They are apparently little different from the other three films to which we do have access.
Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962)
The exception is this, yet another entry in the nudie-cutie series. It is basically an excuse for Meyer and his chums from the 166th Signal Photographic Company to run around an ancient B-Western set dressed up as cowboys and indians alongside a bunch of naked women. The Topanga Gulch Players, as they are billed, all have multiple roles. There’s still no recorded dialogue, but signs of the distinctive Meyer style have started to appear. The editing is much faster, someone is dressed up in a gorilla suit for no reason whatsoever, and the onscreen action has become deliberately rhythmic and repetitive. The absurdist frenzy has begun.
A particularly outrageous sequence opens the film in which the history of the West (sort of) including cavalry charges, indian attacks and gunfights is conveyed by single props: a trumpet, a spear, a gun and a palette of oil paints and shots of clouds, wild brushland and running water. It’s the first bona fide Russ Meyer “what the fuck?” moment. For no doubt budgetary reasons, the interior sets have all been drawn on coloured backings, including a piano keyboard painted on a plank of wood. The film climaxes with a surreal “sex” scene of abstract natural images and shots of an empty bedstead swinging past the camera. It’s all very out there.
Like all fads do, by 1963 the nudie-cutie genre had burnt itself out. It was time for something new.
Atonement (2007) *
But not quite that new. I did say I’d be watching some proper films as well, didn’t I? Joe Wright’s second film is a pitch perfect adaptation by Christopher Hampton of Ian McEwan’s 2001 novel. The leisurely buildup of the opening 1935 section could lull you into thinking you’re in solid Merchant Ivory territory, unless you’re really paying attention or are already familiar with the book. Clues and hints are dropped subtly into the mix of looks and gestures between the characters. The film is also able to pick up on the novel’s concerns with what happens and what you think has happened, and what has actually happened. Nothing is certain. Only one thing is for sure; Russ Meyer would never have cast Keira Knightley in one of his films.
Lorna (1964)
Filmed in black and white because it was cheaper (and not because it was more artsy), Lorna finds Meyer moving into his second filmmaking phase: deranged gothic melodrama. Lorna almost looks like a real movie. It has sync dialogue at last, 35mm stock, a title song, a jazz score that actually complements the images (except for the irritating drums that bang away with every cut to the escaped convict) and a wish I was in the big city neon sign montage as Lorna yearns to escape from her rural prison. There’s a lot of yearning in this film, and the times have moved on just enough for there to be bedroom scenes that would have been unthinkable five years earlier.
Everything else is way more problematic, however, for there is now violence to go along with the sex. Lorna’s hoped for better life arrives in the form of an escaped convict who rapes her in a rape that she eventually extracts sexual fulfillment from in the way she hadn’t from her husband, all of this seven years before Straw Dogs (1971) would present similarly complex themes. Although the violence against women in Lorna is unpleasant (the Iago character Luther is introduced as he follows a drunken woman home to have sex with her, but beating her up will do just as well), there’s a certain amount of unfiltered, exploitation-style honesty about the man/woman relationships presented here. This is the war of the sexes taken literally, and more episodes will follow. It’s like Meyer is aware that women have sexual and emotional needs as well, but this has to be presented alongside a gratuitous nude bathing scene. In an attempt to appease the Southern distributors, Lorna has an absurdist, moralistic, sermonising ending along the lines of a Cecil B DeMille picture: as long as the sinners pay in the end, they can sin as much as they want to on the way there.
There then follows a disastrous interlude in Germany working on Fanny Hill (1964).
Mudhoney (1965)
Hal Hooper starts here as he left off in Lorna (1964) playing another mean old bastard who rapes his own wife. This is a period film set in the Great Depression (though you can barely tell) adapted from a novel that takes place in Meyer’s favourite location: a desert shithole a long way from anywhere, containing more rural madness and passion, more abused wives and more violent husbands. The toothless Princess Livingston plays a character called Maggie Marie, the slutty mother of two sluts, who basically runs a whorehouse on the outskirts of town, hopped up on homebrew. Stuart Lancaster appears for the first time as the farm owner over whose inheritance the slim plot takes place.
It’s much more downhome than Lorna, the accents are stronger and the supporting players are stranger. The exaggerated, cartoonish elements are played up and the low budget realism is played down. There is nothing apologetic about Mudhoney, it plays everything to the hilt and beyond, climaxing with a burning, a shooting and a lynching. Meyer has arrived at the pitch of hysteria he was to spend the rest of his career exploring and repeating and remaking again and again.