Nobody Knows Anything

Warning: contains boobies. Lots and lots of boobies. And strong language. Especially as Meyer’s movies become more insane and sexually explicit. Once again, whatever facts about Meyer and his films I may possess are drawn from Jimmy McDonough’s excellent 2005 biography. Buy it here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Big-Bosoms-Square-Jaws-Biography/

Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers! (1968)

It starts with a topless go-go dancer jiving out in the salt flats wearing a motorcycle helmet, presumably for reasons of health and safety. Fifteen minutes later, nothing more interesting has happened. It’s unusual to encounter a Russ Meyer movie with a glacial pace and a laboured setup; the departure of long-time screenwriter John Moran may well be responsible. Standing in for his sparky dialogue is an endless scene in which the male lead (he gets naked as well), the manager of a topless go-go joint, has his chest hair shaved by a top-heavy peroxide blonde prostitute reminiscing about her childhood among the Amish. I am not making this up.

The female lead, Anne Chapman, has none of the attitude of Alaina Capri, and her charisma-free performance from behind a Botoxesque mask emphasises that for Meyer’s films to work they need the outlandish quality that people like Capri and Tura Satana were able to bring. When it’s missing, no amount of absurdist intercutting in the sex scenes can help (the most notorious here being the footage of a demolition derby that accompanies a swimming pool romp). Eventually the rather tiresome narrative threads that were so painfully set up earlier come together back at the go-go joint, which is subjected to the 60s most incompetent attempted heist. It all ends in a bloodbath shootout and poor old Anne Chapman is sort of assaulted on a pool table; her expression doesn’t change (perhaps it can’t). As a minor note, just prior to this, one of the criminals subjects Chapman to a scene in which he whispers the phrase “Kiss me”, while jabbing a gun into her face. This is so similar to the notorious “Fuck me” scene in Wild at Heart (1990) that I’m convinced David Lynch must have sat through this movie as well. Poor us.

Vixen! (1968)

Oh, Canada! Bush country! What joy Meyer must have felt at finding another willing accomplice in the shape of Erica Gavin. A graduate of The Losers, the same topless bar that employed Haji and Tura Satana, Gavin, who does not underwhelm in the bosom department, was amused at her audition to find herself almost dismissed as not chesty enough for Russ. Fortunately, Meyer recognised her other qualities.

We first meet Vixen (Gavin) bedding a Mountie, which may well have more cultural significance for Canadians than I can appreciate. Vixen is an immoral, incestuous, bisexual, racist, conservative, nymphomaniac troublemaker, so she has more than a few issues to work through; the wonder of Gavin’s performance is that not only does she play all of these attributes so convincingly, but they don’t stop her being fun to watch as she tears through the other characters. Gavin’s up-for-it gameness was signalled early on in the filming when she dangled a freshly-caught fish in her cleavage and then put it in her mouth and sucked on it, making Meyer most happy.

The introduction of sex scenes into Meyer’s movies was gradual (and resisted by his wife, Eve, whom they annoyed because she feared the local censorship battles they would have to fight - and she wasn’t wrong) but here they reach their first peak. Vixen was the first American-made film willingly to adopt the newly-created MPAA rating of X, before the X was permanently sullied by the hardcore pornography that would co-opt the rating in the 1970s. Vixen! was a big hit in 1968, and its breakout into mainstream theatres, and some kind of female audience as well, must have been at least partly due to this: Erica Gavin, or rather Vixen, looks like she really enjoys sex, which is pretty much a first for a Russ Meyer movie. And the lesbian sex scene scored with a saxophone may be responsible for every single saxophone-scored sex scene that’s followed in its wake.

Oh yes, and there are tits on bare wire bedsprings shot from underneath the bed, another bona fide Russ Meyer “what the fuck?” moment (and one which led to complaints from actors who didn’t like the springs digging into their skin; I mean, who would?).

Cherry, Harry & Raquel! (1969)

Although there’s an anti-marijuana rap at the start, this film isn’t about marijuana or drug smuggling at all, it’s about a drug kingpin attempting to kill a former associate called Apache, who’s gone into business for himself, by employing the services of a corrupt border patrol guard, Harry (the mighty jawed Charles Napier in the first of many appearances for Meyer) and his friend, Enrique. Mysteriously, this process involves a plethora of sexual encounters between these characters and Cherry (Linda Ashton), Harry’s wife, and Raquel (Larissa Ely), a local prostitute, not to mention a ton of quick cutaways to Uschi Digard (Meyer’s second ethereal character) bouncing around the desert in a variety of guises to pad out the running time.

After Erica Gavin, Ashton and Ely are major disappointments; they serve a purely decorative function and initiate none of the action (except for a gratuitous lesbian scene late on that intercuts with the bloody climax of the plot). If Linda Ashton is English, how come she sounds like an American trying to imitate an English accent? After Vixen! (1968), this is a major disappointment, yet it still proved so absurdly profitable that it caught the attention of 20th Century Fox at a vulnerable time in the history of that company, beset by heavy losses after a number of expensive films had tanked at the box office. They figured that if they could get Russ to do his thing on the cheap for them, they’d be laughing all the way to the bank. This ploy actually worked and Meyer’s first film for them would be a big hit, but it would also embarrass the company so much that they would then spend 20 years in denial pretending that they had never made it in the first place. The film?

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970)

Let the games begin. If you’ve made it through Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966) and you want a second point of entry to the Meyer oeuvre, look no further than this, the first of Meyer’s collaborations with Roger Ebert, but don’t bogart the joint, man. In the tradition of Head (1968), this film starts where it ends with murder in the dark and a gun suggestively inserted into Erica Gavin’s mouth. There’s then a quick rewind to earlier times and a high school prom performance from The Kelly Affair (later to be renamed The Carrie Nations by Z-Man), a manufactured pop group who knock the Monkees into a cocked hat. There is no sense in which Dolly Read, Cynthia Myers and Marcia McBroom remotely resemble proper musicians, which only makes their performances even better. And the songs are terrific too, Mamas and the Papas knockoffs that sound better than the real thing (I’m listening to them now).

The pace of the opening twenty minutes is astonishing with a prologue, a band gig, a journey to LA and a scene at a fashion studio, all rendered in insanely quick cuts with breakneck dialogue and so completely disorienting that you either abandon the film before the first party scene or give your body to the ritual. There are kind of two plots at work here, the first is an Inheritance Plot involving Dolly Read and her fashion designer aunt that just stops before it’s resolved, which is when the Other Plot kicks in: a demented series of narrative threads that climax in a costume party with murders, couplings and marriages at Z-Man’s clifftop mansion. They were heavy. Beyond is an absurdist melodrama that reaches peaks of satire, hysteria and poor taste like no film before or since, it’s the ultimate contact high. It signals the end of the 1960s as effectively as the breakup of the Beatles, the Charles Manson-inspired Tate/LaBianca massacre or the on-camera murder at Altamont in Gimme Shelter (1970). Gentle will be all your steps as you walk beyond this valley. Hang cool, teddy bear. This is my happening and it freaks me out.

You’re a groovy boy, I’d like to strap you on sometime. Why did Meyer think it was a good idea to marry Edy Williams? Or make another film for Fox, The Seven Minutes (1971), an apparently disappointing anti-censorship film that satisfied no one? Meyer had snuck into Hollywood by the back door, but it was just as quick to show him out the same way when it suited them.

Black Snake (1973)

In an act of desperation, or stupidity, Meyer thought it would be a really good idea to hitch himself to the blaxploitation bandwagon of the early 1970s, take a number of English actors inherited from Hammer Films to Barbados, and cast flat-chested Anouska Hempel in the lead after his original choice dropped out (but fear not, Hempel is body doubled by a bustier actress in her sex scene). Interestingly, Meyer’s film precedes Mandingo (1975) by a couple of years, but it’s no more successful at recreating a twisted phase in history. Are plantation films an excuse to wallow in offensiveness and racism, exploitation films in a nastier sense, or are they the indictment of racism and slavery that they ought to be?

Black Snake is full of white people whipping racial slurs at black people, when they’re not whipping them in actuality. I don’t think that because these roles are reversed by the end of the film and the nasty white people get their comeuppance in the same way, that this then justifies all the unpleasant sadism. Meyer was too far out of his element and not in sufficient control of the material. He has quite clearly not thought this through and stepped into a minefield he would have better avoided. There is a slightly interesting Martin Luther King/Malcolm X dialectic at work among the slaves, and there are intended parallels drawn with the French Revolution. This doesn’t rescue the movie. It’s just not much fun.

Supervixens (1975)

Fun that was put back on the agenda by Meyer’s next film, a return to the desert and a return to what he does best but also what he’s done before. As a sidenote here, I’ve called these Meyer pieces On Repeat, but I’ve actually found the films to be a lot more different from each other and a lot less repetitive than harsher critics would acknowledge. There remains a sense that the films aren’t really about anything except the bust sizes of their leading actresses, but quite frankly you could say that about The Outlaw (1943), The Girl Can’t Help It (1956) and One Million Years B.C. (1966) as well, to name but a few. The only difference with Meyer is that this might be what all of his films are about.

For no reason, all of the women in the film are called SuperSomething. As a “treat” for any female patrons who may come across the movie, Meyer introduces a two foot dildo called Wilbur that is “attached” to the film’s male characters and would go on to play almost a featured role in Up! (1976). So that’s considerate of him. Unfortunately, Supervixens is blighted by the murder of SuperAngel (Shari Eubank), perhaps the most extreme of Meyer’s bitchy villainesses, a bad girl provocateur intent on demeaning men until they’re ready to satisfy her insatiable sexual needs (possibly). Charles Napier, playing another nasty psychopathic cop, Harry Sledge, stomps SuperAngel to death in a bathtub as part of Meyer’s revenge on Edy Williams, with whom he was going through an unpleasant divorce at the time. Meyer giving full vent to his psychosis and bitter feelings may have been good for him, but it’s still no fun for us to watch and impossible to defend.

SuperAngel’s husband, Clint, then goes on the run as Sledge has framed him for his wife’s murder and the movie’s tone lightens appreciably into a series of on the road style vignettes that recall Homer’s Odyssey, only with high speed car chases and big tits. No one, I repeat, no one milks a cow like Uschi Digard. The Digard/Lancaster stopoff features a funny, exuberant outdoor sex montage that is Meyer at his best, it’s crazy healthy sex done tongue in cheek. Shari Eubank returns as SuperVixen, a good girl garage owner dressed in white, but Clint is too dumb to notice the resemblance to his ex-wife. It reaches a mad climax in the deep desert that is deliberately reminiscent of Warner Bros’ Roadrunner cartoons.

Up! (1976)

no fairy tale…this! Meyer’s third ethereal actress, Francesca “Kitten” Natividad, kicks off the proceedings of his most unhinged film yet. It begins with a lightly-bearded man dressed in a Puritan costume with our old friend Wilbur attached to him whipping the bare backside of one Adolf Schwartz who has his head buried between the outsize (and not entirely real) breasts of Mary Gavin aka Candy Samples who sports a zipped bondage gimp mask while in the background the naked female Ethiopian Chef with an Afro stirs an oversize cauldron. And then it gets really weird, climaxing in Adolf’s murder (after other climaxes, naturally).

“Murder most foul”, as Kitten claims, so who done it? Might it be “the least likely suspect”? Might they not have a bizarre and unusual motive they will only reveal in a torrent of insane dialogue while running naked through the woods at night clutching a knife? Oh yes. Up! is about the murder suspects, in as much as it is about anything (and it might not even be about this). The Digard/Lancaster stopoff from Supervixens (1975) has become the model for all of the sex scenes in Up! and the sex scenes have taken over the film entirely, interspersed with violence. Baring the brunt of the brutality is the hapless Raven De La Croix as Margo Winchester, channelling the spirit of Mae West, who is raped while lying unconscious in a riverbed, but it’s okay because she kills the rapist afterwards. Do you see what he did there?

I think when critics focus on the crazy repetition of Meyer, they’re taking most of their evidence from his last three real films, where the quick cut sex scenes dominate the mise en scène, as the French like to say. It’s fun to watch, but none of it is especially erotic because it’s so off the wall.

Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens (1979)

So, then, what is Meyer’s last real film about? Well, “Kitten” Natividad, who has by now become Meyer’s girlfriend, plays dual roles as Livonia, another in the long line of Meyer’s frustrated hausfraus, and Lola Langusta, a crazy Mexican stripper, though Kitten would like us to point out that this is one woman and Lola is just Livonia’s alterego, and an excuse to moonlight at a stripjoint called The Other Ball, something I know we’ve all considered ourselves from time to time. So why is Livonia frustrated? Her husband, Lamar, another of Meyer’s dumbass losers, has “rear window tendencies,” which Livonia wants to redirect to “good straight sex and no funny stuff”.

It could be argued that this isn’t a large enough subject on which to base an entire film, and I think you’d be right. The first attempt falls to Lola Langusta, who slips Lamar a Mickey Finn at the stripjoint and has him transported upstairs to her bedroom where she intends to carry out her cunning plan: “The black sock never fails.” But it does. Next is a visit to the world’s worst dentist and marriage counsellor, Dr Lavender, an awful camp stereotype. There is much nonsense with Lamar being trapped in Lavender’s closet while Livonia is treated by Lavender’s nurse to a seventeen inch double-ended dildo in a clear contravention of the safety at work rules, especially in the field of dentistry. Finally, radio evangelist Eufaula Roop succeeds through laying her healing hands (and other body parts) on Lamar in a bathtub and Lamar is returned to “the straight and narrow” via the miracle of Jesus.

So if you ever find yourself in a similar situation, you’ll know what to do. The film doesn’t know when to stop. Its crazy fast sex scenes are more akin to extreme calisthenics than reality. According to him, Meyer’s own penis turns up in closeup (nice), though Kitten maintains that it’s Jim Ryan’s. It has at least three endings in which the characters’ lives are resolved, one with Stuart Lancaster narrating offscreen, another with him onscreen and another with Meyer himself onscreen, though his voice has been dubbed. The final image of Meyer’s last real film is a coffin on a mountain swaying because there are two people inside having sex. That’s all, folks. Except there would be one postscript.

Pandora Peaks (2000)

Ultravixens was Meyer’s last real film but his brand of mad erotica had ceased to be financially viable by 1979. Why would anyone pay to see Meyer’s nearly hardcore hijinks when they could slink into the XXX theatres which had established themselves in American towns and cities during the 1970s or rent real hardcore on video, which was clearly the coming thing?

Throughout the last twenty years of his life, it was well known, mostly because Meyer talked it up himself, that he was working on an eight hour, autobiographical film about himself called The Breast of Russ Meyer (that’s if you don’t accept that Meyer’s films as a whole don’t already fulfill this function, which they do). A snippet turned up in Jonathan Ross’ interview with Meyer in 1988, and some of the material would be used in Meyer’s last work, a straight to video production in which real breasts have been abandoned and replaced with silicone. It’s all very sad.

Empty and useless, Pandora Peaks is a return to the dry well that produced Mondo Topless (1966). There are endless cutaways from the redoubtable Ms Peaks, who would appear to be in complete denial as to the verisimilitude of her plastic breasts and is subjected to “hilarious” boingy, whistly sound effects as various bits of her body pop into view, to Tundi, a German woman Meyer shot for Playboy in the early 1990s, who spends most of her time in the bath or playing with net curtains, and whose breasts, though large, seem to be genuine. Unfortunately, Tundi’s footage is drenched in an appalling, mammary-obsessed monologue voiced by Uschi Digard.

For no reason whatsoever, these two basically unattractive women and their oversized charms are intercut with a terrible public information film about Palm Desert and the Mojave and places in Germany, in which Meyer and a few of his chums wander around aimlessly and leer at the women, footage of whom are cut into this, and so on, and so on, for 71 endless minutes. And the music’s shit as well. Considering this has its basis in autobiography, Meyer reveals nothing personal about himself, except that he likes large breasts, which it’s safe to say we already know.

What have I learned from 19 Russ Meyer films:

1. There is such a thing as too much topless.

2. No one better represents the schizophrenia of American popular culture towards sex than Russ Meyer and his films.

3. At his best, Meyer makes sex fun, and this is not a criminal offence.

4. At his worst, Meyer makes nudity boring, and this is.

5. Meyer was ahead of his time, in tune with his time, and then behind his time, a fate that beckons us all.

6. I really, really want to get back to watching proper films.

I’m going to leave you with the words of Russ Meyer himself, from page 319 of Jimmy McDonough’s biography: “If I wasn’t so into tits I probably could’ve been a great filmmaker.” There’s a lesson there for us all.

Warning: contains boobies. Lots and lots of boobies. And adult content. And all life’s plenty in a chocolate box of delight. May be unsuitable for neuters. Once again, whatever facts about Meyer and his films I may possess are drawn from Jimmy McDonough’s excellent 2005 biography. Buy it here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Big-Bosoms-Square-Jaws-Biography/

A Dirty Shame (2004)

Only John Waters could make a warm, loving film about sex addiction. Selma Blair, one of America’s most flat-chested actresses, turns up knowingly wearing an enormous pair of fake plastic breasts, in undoubted tribute to Russ Meyer and his own personal sex addiction (as an aside, Blair reports that when wearing the prosthetic, she felt perfectly clothed and would flounce around the set “topless”, disconcerting the teamsters). As a report from the more open, more accepting and more decent side of the Manichean divide that may or may not exist in American culture, A Dirty Shame is indeed a throwback to Waters’ earlier, filthier pictures, as if he was concerned that with Hairspray the Musical et al, he was losing some of his edge. Considering that the film is basically an encyclopedia of perversion about the quest for a new sex act, it is engagingly wholesome and oddly respectable. It’s the proponents of decency who come across as hypocritical assholes, and that’s just as it should be.

Motor Psycho (1965)

It’s a biker movie set in the desert. The three male biker leads are plain bastards, they talk in hep dialogue, one of them’s a Vietnam veteran before that was a fashionable character motivation, and another carries a transistor radio so Meyer can fill the soundtrack with trashy rock ‘n’ roll (which sounds great, by the way). The bikers harass anyone who looks at them funny, especially women, which leads to the Clockwork Orange (1971) style home invasion that sets in motion the rape/revenge element of the plot. The film is more ambitious too, it has car chases and an explosion (and you can bet that explosion made it into the trailer, possibly several times).

Let there be Haji, one of the few Meyer women who would hang around his world for more than one film. In a classic Meyer cut-to, we meet Haji and her appalling older husband as they’re in the middle of a full-bore marital spat, tearing chunks off each other as they barrel down the road. There’s no subtle character introduction, it’s just here you go. One of the first exaggerated low angle camera shots on a top heavy woman appears here; these would become such a Meyer obsession that entire scenes would be filmed from a low perspective in later works. The male violence presented here is genuinely unpleasant, and yet the female-instigated violence that would appear in Meyer’s next film is cool because the bastards they’re up against are even worse than the women are.

Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1966)

“Russ’ tenth film is, beyond a doubt, the best movie ever made. It is possibly better than any film that will be made in the future.” (John Waters, Shock Value (1981) p.192)

And doesn’t this movie have the best title that’s ever been given to any movie? If you ever wondered what the go-go craze was all about, check out the first few minutes of this film where some demented sad sack yells, “Go! Baby! Go!” as Varla, Rosie and Billie grind on stage. The crucial difference between this film and Motor Psycho is that what the girls do is a whole lot more fun than what the guys did. Three hoodlums breaking into a house to rape a woman who’s looked at them funny isn’t campy or funny, it’s a sick type of very macho violence. When Varla breaks the back of Tommy, the capped-tooth pretty boy who thinks he can outrace her, you cheer because Tommy has behaved like a dick since he first drove up to the trio and he deserves it. The kidnapping of Linda is also strangely acceptable because Linda’s such a whiny brat, and it’s not like they torture her or anything, and Linda later escapes from them twice and they don’t seem that bothered about it.

It helps that the action is more obviously cartoonish as well. When Lori Williams bristled at being asked to lie across a Porsche to deliver her dialogue with a “Who does that?”, Meyer snapped back, “You do.” The girls are all attitude, filmed with an excessive amount of low angles and high angled cleavage shots, but there is no actual onscreen nudity. This means that Faster, Pussycat! is the easily recommended film for the curious outsider who’s heard about Meyer but never actually seen one of his films. It also means that against all the odds, Faster, Pussycat! is a film of female empowerment. It’s not a feminist film, obviously, but in an odd kind of way, it’s proto-feminist (in that the women are independent and assertive) and post-feminist (in that the women are feminine but strong, in control of their own destiny). To the naysayers who doubt that this can be so in an exploitation film I can only offer this: What’s the matter? Don’t you like girls?

Meyer ran his sets like a military boot camp with a limited crew and expected the actors to pitch in and carry equipment and hold reflectors and “things of that nature”. Far from being an autocrat, there was nothing he liked more than dialogue lines or pieces of action suggested by actors. The only thing that Faster, Pussycat! is guilty of is being ahead of its time. It was a financial failure on its initial release in early 1966, but film buffs will be aware that this is one of the classic prerequisites for cult movie status. This didn’t make Eve Meyer happy though, and she demanded a sure fire hit which Meyer managed to deliver.

Mondo Topless (1966)

First shot of Mondo Topless: a sign that says Twin Peaks.

Young people will be unaware of the Mondo craze of the early 1960s, in which outrageous footage from around the world (including animal abuse) was glued together with portentous narration and issued as a serious documentary, when it was nothing but exploitation by another name. In the warm tradition of those films comes this striptease absurdity that contains nothing but a natural setting (or a theatre stage), a transistor radio (or a tape recorder) and a topless woman with large breasts (or a topless woman with very large breasts). And that’s it. For an endless hour. It’s proof, if proof were needed, that there is indeed such a thing as too much topless. The narrator seems on the verge of a hysterical explosion, edited in soundbites from the women are banal and uninteresting, and the garage band rock ‘n’ roll just keeps on rolling, right on the edge of psychedelia but not yet fully committed.

There’s no story, no content, just more topless, and in his 1988 interview with Jonathan Ross, Meyer correctly identifies it as “a piece of crud”. No one is going to mistake this as female empowerment. The only slight piece of cultural interest is that as a time capsule of style, the topless dancing, the big hair and the makeup are all very 60s. The summer of love was just around the corner, times had shifted again in just two years, and a movie with lots of boobies could be a big hit instead of being prosecuted to the full extent of the law. Meyer would shift with the times again and embark on the next phase of his career: five films in glorious Eastmancolor which would lead to the unthinkable: a shot at mainstream Hollywood.

Common-Law Cabin (1967)

Although it only runs 70 minutes, this has the feel of a two hour movie hacked down at random to fill a TV time slot. Although it has the appearance of an actual plot, various plot points pop up like someone was dealing a hand of cards, and individual moments don’t necessarily connect to what happened before or what happens next, prefiguring the narrative anarchy that would turn up in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). It probably wasn’t the smartest move to cast Babette Bardot in a lead speaking role, as her French-Swedish parentage renders her accent incomprehensible.

Alaina Capri (”It’s the bitch in me, dear”) is much more like it and is clearly the best thing in this movie and its follow-up; she’s definitely got that witchy attitude of utter disdain and contempt for all men that Meyer found such a turn on. And the men are such a bunch of sweaty, desperate creeps that her venom and distaste makes perfect sense. Part of what renders this movie so nuts is it takes place beyond the middle of nowhere at a shotgun shack dressed up as a Hawaiian hula joint to rip off very gullible tourists with more money than sense. Characters tear strips off each other verbally when they’re not trying to strip clothing off each other for kicks. That it all climaxes in an almost Shakespearean bloodbath that includes death by speedboat is merely a consequence of the hellacious conditions under which the film was made, a palpable insanity that has crept into the celluloid to astonish unsuspecting DVD viewers 40 years later.

Good Morning and Goodbye! (1967)

This movie begins and ends with slow motion footage of first Carol Peters and last Haji running around the countryside stark naked for no reason whatsoever. The narration then introduces 11 characters who will couple and bitch in any number of combinations throughout. Haji is the first of Meyer’s ethereal characters, a non-speaking witch who will restore Stuart Lancaster’s mojo with some special brew. Alaina Capri continues where she left off in Common-Law Cabin, playing a stepmom with big needs which her husband (Lancaster) can’t fulfill so she satiates her appetites by playing away from home with the rest of the town.

For nostalgia buffs, Alaina and Stuart’s daughter, Karen Ciral (who looks older than Alaina Capri), has a boyfriend with whom she communicates entirely in 60s argot: groovy, lay it on me and “things of that nature”, that is, when they’re not frugging like only 60s teenagers can frug. It’s like a crazed episode of Dallas where everybody hates everybody else, but cannot resist the compulsion to slag off, have sex with and fight each other because they’re utterly unable to control their passions. Years of soap opera have lessened the film’s impact, and the final fight scene where Stuart Lancaster reaffirms his machismo is more cute than intense.

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.