Massive thank you to writer and Russ Meyer fan Justine Smith for giving me permission to re-post this piece of hers on this blog as part of MEYER MONTH. The original, and lots of other fantastic writing on film, can be found on the Little White Lies website.
There was no sex in Russ Meyer’s early films. Throughout the 1950s, some filmmakers found a loophole in America’s strict censorship laws: documentary. By shooting films in nudist colonies, filmmakers were able to bring nudity to the big screen. While censor boards attempted to stifle these attempts, legally, they had very little to ground to stand on. With the opportunity of a lifetime, Meyer was about to transform the genre and change the landscape of American film forever.
During World War Two, Meyer worked as a wartime photographer, and after returning to the US he planned on starting up a career in Hollywood. He had little success, and it was only in the late-’50s that his career took a turn as the nudist colony films, often referred to as ‘naturalist’ movies, started to gain prominence. Although Meyer was initially reticent when offered to make one of these films for $24,000, he had a plan.
Combining the adolescent fantasy of x-ray glasses with the basic tenants of the naturalist film, Meyer came up with the concept for his first film, The Immoral Mr. Teas. In the film, the titular Mr. Teas acquires x-ray powers after visiting the dentist and can now see women naked. While shot in full colour, the film is relatively primitive; it features no sync-sound and is little more than a series of vignettes. Working within the scope of what was allowed in naturalist films, the nudity features no sexual touching and, despite the lechery of Mr. Teas, was relatively chaste.
While even the naturalist films were screened in underground cinemas, The Immoral Mr. Teaswas given a wider release. Its meagre budget produced a healthy profit, and independent producers raced to imitate it, spurring a new genre which came to be known as ‘nudie-cuties’. These films would feature female nudity within the scope of light-hearted comic premises and proved relatively successful, if not continually controversial. Mr. Teas would also initiate Meyer to the court system, as he had to defend the film against obscenity charges. In one Philadelphia case, a judge ruled that the film was not pornography but was ‘vulgar, pointless and in bad taste’.
After the success of The Immoral Mr. Teas, Meyer made two more nudie-cutie films, Eve and the Handyman and Wild Gals of the Naked West. With thousands of imitators, it was clear why Meyer’s films rose to the top: he had a cinematic eye, boundless imagination and an ironic sense of humour. Inspired by his fantasies, Meyer felt that what turned him on would translate to a broader audience. But he quickly grew tired of the achingly adorable genre he invented and began taking even greater risks.
Among these new films were Lorna and Mudhoney, gritty black-and-white Southern Gothic noirs that integrated nudity into the storylines. Inspired, improbably by Italian neo-realism, these are among Meyer’s most earnest efforts. Gone were the goofy antics, and the more camp aesthetics he’d refine over the decade were also absent. Both films were big successes and required Meyer to defend his projects against new obscenity charges, paving the way for other filmmakers looking to take risks in terms of nudity and sex on the big screen.
While the immediate benefactors from his success were other sexploitation filmmakers, the reality was that Meyer’s films (and their subsequent obscenity cases) were paving the way for post-Code Hollywood and the New American Wave of the 1970s that integrated sex and nudity into dramatic plots.
Meyer’s work only gained in prominence over the ensuing decade, gradually refining his style with Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, Vixen! and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. While his films are not for all tastes, his travails in pushing the boundaries of sex on screen brought about significant changes, forever altering the look and feel of American film.
Russ Meyer has a true ebb and flow when it came to his nudie cuties. For every advance forward, there was a trepidation followed by a slight retreat. Eve and the Handyman improved on The Immoral Mr. Teas in a fundamental way by ditching the multitude of women in favor of one central female character. Erotica, Eve and the Handyman’s follow-up, cycled backwards in terms of subject matter but found some fresh and creative photographic advances that would serve him well throughout the remainder of his career.
Wild Gals of the Naked West was Meyer’s next film in his nudie cutie cycle and his penultimate effort in the subgenre (excluding 1964’s Europe in the Raw, a film better classified as a nudie travelogue). Moving back towards the strengths of Eve and the Handyman while also beefing up the comedic bits strung along the length of the film, Wild Gals of the Naked West is probably Meyer’s most successful blend of his type of raucous comedy in the service of a mostly plotless phantasmagoria of tits and ass.
From the jump, one of the clearest differences between Wild Gals and the Naked West and the nudie cuties that came before it is the absolutely gorgeous photography that populates the opening narration. Beginning with a brew of stunning horizons and landscapes interspersed with quickly-cut dutch angles, Meyer shows the high level of his talent by taking us out of the muddy cricks and swimming pools of his previous work and expanding his visual world outward to capture some truly painterly compositions of the western vistas. Meyer cleverly maneuvers around the film’s microbudget by utilizing symbols and western iconography to stand in for the lack of action; the first-person perspective used in the ghost towns and broken down structures feel like the spirits of the past that are somehow still alive.
In fact, so beautiful is the opening to the film that it finally draws attention to one of the biggest elephants in the room when it comes to Meyer’s work; in short, this is the first film in his filmography where watching it creates a general sadness when you realize that, due to Meyer’s lack of care in the preservation of his own work either during his natural life or in a testamentary capacity, these movies will likely never get upgraded beyond their current full-frame video scans and will eventually be lost to time due to almost-certain deterioration of the original material. It seems unthinkable that this is truly the case but… well… there’s a reason Martin Scorsese fights so hard for film preservation.
Not quite a series of episodes as his previous three features, Wild Gals of the Naked West tries for something that resembles a plot. Sure, it’s simple and padded out by copious post-credit narration before the wraparound framing device involving a storyteller is introduced, but the bedrock of many of Meyer’s themes he’d take with him into his Gothic period begin to sprout and take form just as some of his more sophisticated framing devices began to pop up in the previous year’s Erotica. In Wild Gals of the Naked West, we are spun a tale by a fourth wall-demolishing old man (Jack Moran), still living among the ghosts of a dilapidated western town that fell into rack and ruin due to too much goodness. But it wasn’t always like that, according to our faithful raconteur. Hell, once upon a time, the town was so marinated in sin that they dared not even give the location a proper name.
And it is here is where the basic story comes into play as the film functions as a before and after, the tipping element being the introduction of a do-gooder Stranger (Sammy Gilbert) who descends on the town with designs on pulling a reverse High Plains Drifter by painting the town virginal white. Set up in the front half with wanton hedonism at a breakneck pace only to be knocked off in the back half as The Stranger executes his righteous morality, Wild Gals of the Naked West unwittingly figured a way for Meyer to indulge in as much bawdy sexuality as he wished as long as he laced it all with a light dose of trite morality. Given how much play both the dopey, square-jawed hero and the tongue-in-cheek pontifications on freedom, ethics, and what-have-you factored into so much of his later work, it’s not inappropriate to see Wild Gals of the Naked West as one of Meyer’s most substantially consequential nudie cuties; the yang to Eve and the Handyman’s yin.
The film is additionally blessed by being well-acted and the imagery is wildly modernistic in its approach, both of which cause the film to really pop. And even if the film’s numerous running gags seem limited and finally run out of gas, the film never drags and it makes a real effort to rise above its throwaway title and to try and wring something a little more creative out of the nudie cutie than what was the standard, mediocre fare at the time. There is a pure visual joy in juxtaposing the authentic exteriors with the Chuck Jones-adjacent interiors where painted backgrounds resembles the angular impossibilities in Jones’s background cel art. Again, this lays some early groundwork for Meyer to work with later during his “Bustoon” period of the seventies which would be chock full of Looney Tunes inspired action replete with fully animated buildings that rock and undulate to keep up with the action happening inside of them.
And there’s more in Wild Gals of the Naked West that speaks to Meyer’s actual thematic concerns that would continue to pop up throughout his work. The masculine hero being a sexual impotent, the celebration of just a splash of hedonism in a balanced life, and the dismissal of male authority figures such as members of law enforcement (Meyer’s old man, a cop, walked out on the family when he was a child) and religious leaders are all rolled out in this seemingly innocuous piece of fluff.
With just one more nudie cutie and a trip to Europe to go before he began his personal narrative films that made up the Gothic portion of his career, Russ Meyer was looking more and more like a talent ready to break away from the confines of his own creation and into something a little more substantial. Wild Gals of the Naked West was a pit stop to that goal but, in terms of Meyer’s cinematic education, it ended up being a more substantial one than anyone thought it would be.
(C) Copyright 2022, Patrick Crain
Patrick Crain is a freelance writer and film programmer for the Oklahoma Film Society. He spends his days in semi-retirement by pacing around his home in Oklahoma City, watching movies, writing about them, and then pouring wine for both he and his wife at around 4:30CST. His scribblings about the motion pictures can be found at www.apollotwin.com. He can be found on Instagram here and on Twitter here. He is also on Letterboxd.
I found this article on The Criterion Collection website and thought it would be great to share on what would have been Russ Meyer’s 100th birthday. You can find the original here but I’ve typed it out below as well. Happy 100th Birthday Russ!
The following account of a visit to the Beyond the Valley of the Dolls set is excerpted from a piece that originally appeared in the January 7, 1970, issue of the University of California, Los Angeles, newspaper, the Daily Bruin, under the headline “18—Count ’Em—18 Couplings and an R Rating: Russ Meyer in Hollywood.”Its author, who went on to become a television writer as well as a friend of Meyer’s, was a UCLA student at the time.
Countless boring and laughable sexploitation films prove that it takes more than naked women to make arousing nude scenes. Surprisingly, many of Hollywood’s best directors have been unable to make use of their talents when dealing with nude scenes—probably because of lack of experience in that field. Realizing this, Richard Zanuck, president of Twentieth Century-Fox, started looking in some unlikely places to find a man to direct a sequel to Valley of the Dolls. In his travels, Zanuck evidently took in quite a few films which did not meet the traditional Hollywood standards of “good” movies. One of the films was Vixen!, a dazzling assortment of adultery, incest, lesbianism, racism, violence, and even politics, all photographed well enough to rival any Hollywood production—a rare achievement for a sexploitation film.
Production values aside, the most impressive thing about Vixen! is a matter of simple economics. The film cost $70,000 to make and its estimated gross is in the neighborhood of $6 million. This arithmetic did not escape Zanuck, and so he invited Vixen!’s creator, Russ Meyer, to come to Twentieth to produce, direct, and help write Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
Meyer’s progress in the studio system is of special interest because his background as a one-man show puts him in the same position as many of the talented young people who are graduating from film schools. Prevented by odd hiring practices from working for the studios, Meyer had to go into independent production. Constrained by lack of funds, he had to do his best with very little. In the process, he became adept in directing, editing, writing, and in most of the other skills that are required between the time a film is conceived and the time it appears on the screen.
For Meyer, the offer from Twentieth was the fulfillment of a long-standing ambition. As a fourteen-year-old in Oakland, he was given an 8 mm movie camera and projector by his mother as a Christmas present. Captured by the thrill of making his very own movies, Meyer started shooting what would have to be called documentaries. One of them, shot on Catalina, won an award from Kodak. In 1942, at the age of eighteen, Meyer joined the army and was trained as a combat photographer by Art Lloyd (who filmed the Our Gang comedies) and Joe Ruttenberg, another noted cinematographer. For all his subsequent achievements, Meyer still rates the time he spent shooting combat newsreels as the most memorable time of his life. “It was real action and excitement! Nothing could compare to it!” Meyer said with boyish enthusiasm.
After his discharge, things didn’t go so well for Meyer. He came to Hollywood to work as a cinematographer, but he couldn’t get into the union, so he had to go to work making industrial films in San Francisco. (When he returned to Hollywood more than twenty years later, he had little difficulty entering the screen directors’ union. “You just pay them your two thousand dollars, and they’re glad to have you,” he said.) Spending his time making educational films for employees of supermarket chains, oil companies, and others, Meyer grew bored and took up magazine photography. His glamour photography appeared in Playboy and similar magazines, as he rose to the top of the field. But Meyer didn’t stay away from movies for long.
Meyer’s first girlie film was little more than a recording of a burlesque show. Called The French Peep Show, it was done for Pete DeCenzie, owner of Oakland’s El Rey burlesque theater. In 1959, DeCenzie decided to break from current trends in nudies and make one with a story. Meyer more or less took over the project, and the result was the most famous girlie film up to its time—The Immoral Mr. Teas. In it, one of Meyer’s old Army friends played a delivery boy who sees all the women he encounters as naked. For the film’s finale, there is a fifteen-minute sequence in which Teas sees the three principal girls sunbathe, swim, and hike through the woods—in the nude, of course.
Mr. Teas was filmed in four days, and it cost $24,000 to make. Its gross of $1 million enabled Meyer to make more films, refining his techniques and developing his skills all the while. In films like Eve and the Handyman (which starred his wife); Erotica; Wild Gals of the Naked West; The Naked Camera; Heavenly Bodies; Europe in the Raw!; Lorna; Mudhoney; Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!; Motorpsycho; Good Morning . . . and Goodbye!; and Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers!, Meyer shows what amounts to an overriding concern for exteriors, which goes beyond the attractive (and inexpensive) natural scenery that graces most of his films and his perfectionistic photography. His concern for surfaces also affects his characters, for they rarely turn out to be more than they appear to be. A puffy delivery boy turns out to be a harmless voyeur, even in his own fantasies; the ubiquitous busty women are invariably oversexed; and an evil-looking dark-haired girl is capable of breaking a man’s back with her bare hands. “I don’t pretend to be some kind of sensitive artist,” Meyer sneered. “Give me a movie where a car crashes into a building and the driver gets stabbed by a bosomy blonde, who gets carried away by a dwarf musician. Films should run like express trains!”
Among the arts, movies would seem to be particularly hospitable to object-oriented people. Not that these people can compete with Bergman or Antonioni, but they have the potential to make exciting action films, broad comedies—and good nudies. Not too surprisingly, Meyer has indicated that he wants to work on action films (one possible project: The Final Steal, which may star Johnny Cash), and later, perhaps, comedies, “if I can ever find someone like Bill Fields.”
The as yet unreleased Cherry, Harry & Raquel!, which may be Meyer’s last low-budget sexploitation film, reflects its creator’s changing interests. To be sure, there is still the element of comedy, which has been present to one extent or another in most of Meyer’s work, from the wisecracking narration of Mr. Teas to the sexual parody of Vixen!. Cherry also boasts plenty of action—a couple of gunfights and an exciting car chase. The action, in fact, overshadows the sex when at the film’s end Meyer intercuts Cherry and Raquel’s gratuitous love scene with Harry’s tense gunfight. Despite the fact that the scene is a very revealing view of lesbian lovemaking, it comes off as a distraction to the important action of the shoot-out.
Cherry, of course, doesn’t lack the ingredient that has made Meyer famous. There’s enough nudity to satisfy the patrons of any “art house.” Unlike Meyer’s earliest films, Cherry depicts a number of sex acts. “Did you notice?” Meyer asked. “We had a very frank blow job at the beginning.” Nevertheless, the shift in emphasis from sex to the relatively new field of violence is revealing of Meyer’s basic orientation in objects and exteriors. “I’m tired of sex. I’ve shown every position and combination of partners, and there’s not much else to do, is there?” Of course there is. For one thing, relatively few films have contributed any sort of psychological insight to sexual matters. But Meyer’s interest is in what people do, not why they do it, and so he goes to Twentieth Century-Fox to film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
In early December, I wanted on to the Dolls set where the Westmont High senior prom was being filmed. The set was unimaginably sleazy and cheap, and the extras looked extremely uncomfortable. In other words, it looked just like a real high school dance. Onstage were two graduates from Playboy’s centerfold, Dolly Read (May 1966) and Cynthia Myers (December 1968). Along with dancer Marcia McBroom on drums, the girls comprised a rock trio which, through the course of the film, makes it big and then goes to pot—literally and figuratively. According to the script, the prom scene is preceded by a flash-forward which may never be filmed if Meyer wants an “R” rating, as he claims he does. In this earlier scene, we are treated to an extreme close-up in which a gun barrel traces its way up the middle of a sleeping girl’s naked body. The barrel is then inserted into the girl’s mouth and only after a few enormously suggestive seconds does she realize that what has been thrust into her mouth is cold steel and not something else. She screams, and her scream becomes that of Dolly Read singing at the prom.
The prom scene was filmed in a way that must have seemed strange to a man who in the past had to be so careful about budgetary restrictions. The one song that the girls perform was shot at least a dozen times, all from different angles. Later, during the editing, pieces of each shot will be incorporated into the sequence. “We’re getting a lot of coverage,” Meyer said, and he can well afford it, as his budget is somewhere between one and two million dollars. But what about the old ways that had served him so well in the past? Did he feel that the forty assistants required by studio production would prevent him from controlling every aspect of his film, as he was used to doing in the past? “I love it here. With all these people helping you, you’re not so tired at night. I’d never go back to the old way.” His previous experience had been quite an asset to him, though. The film has been progressing right along on schedule, and it has not exceeded its budget. Meyer’s work in low-budget films has also enabled him to juggle shooting schedules, so that if an actress brings the wrong costume, for instance, he can shoot a completely different scene without so much as a day’s warning.
Meyer may like the studios, but there’s evidence that he may not fit in as well as he would like. Invariably dressed in Levi’s, a pullover sweater, and track shoes, Meyer is six feet tall and, at 240 pounds, is not a roly-poly fat man, but rather a wrestler or maybe an ex–football player—in other words, mean-looking. And the uncompromising toughness that is required by a one-man show is no asset in an industry where a bruised ego can mean a ruined career. Therefore, Meyer is making a special effort to be “diplomatic.” One afternoon, an actor kept forgetting his lines, through some fourteen takes. Not once did Meyer lose his temper, and instead, after every few takes, he offered the actor an opportunity to sit down and rest. Meyer’s patience was rewarded by take fifteen, a flawless glimpse of a dirty old high school principal. In addition, Meyer allots a generous share of his time to the press, even though he is resigned to being portrayed by them as a “casting-couch director.”
A few days later, Dolls was being filmed on the “French” street of the Twentieth Century lot. To save money, Meyer is shooting most of the film on the lot, and he is using sets that were originally built for other films. For this film, the French street was an alley behind a nightclub. As one of the girls in the rock trio leaves by taxi, a bisexual girl emerges from the back door and stares hungrily at the departing cab. “Who’s that girl in the doorway?” asked one of the technicians. “She’s the reason I’m here,” answered Meyer.
“That girl” was Erica Gavin, the star of Vixen!, the film which finally made the industry take notice of its director. Fortuitous as the film was for Meyer, its star has not even been able to use it as a credit when looking for acting assignments . . . which is hard to believe, because her portrayal of Vixen will long be remembered by anyone who has seen the film.
[ . . . ]
Who would believe that I had been on the set of a Russ Meyer movie and had not seen him film one of the scenes that had made him famous? I mentioned this to Meyer, and he replied that whenever one of the principal actresses is involved in a nude scene, outsiders and even some of the crew were barred from the set, “but this Wednesday we’re filming some stuff you might like.” Meyer’s estimation of my taste was accurate. Along with about forty members of the crew, a dozen actors and actresses, a few janitors, and assorted others, I watched Meyer direct a photo studio sequence which required a model to remove her bra for the critical appraisal of her female employer—and the admiring stares of the rest of us. It wasn’t much compared to Vixen!, but in keeping with Meyer’s policy of maximum coverage (or uncoverage), the sequence was shot about nine times.
Later that day, I saw the familiar face and even more familiar body of Haji, who has appeared in two of Meyer’s earlier films. She is one of the more than half dozen actors and actresses in Dolls who have worked for Meyer before. “They’ve done some-thing nice for me, so I thought I’d give them an opportunity to appear in a big film,” Meyer said. In addition to his own troupe of actors and actresses, Meyer used unknowns to fill out the cast of Dolls, because they don’t ask for as much money as “names,” and they’re less likely to become prima donnas. If the unknowns don’t have the acting experience of their more famous colleagues—well, as Meyer says, he relies heavily on action, quick cutting, and “express-train pacing,” which make sensitive performances unnecessary anyway.
After the day’s shooting, Meyer confirmed that his days as the foremost maker of exploitation films had left him relatively free of money worries. “I’ll tell you one thing, last year my company paid more than $400,000 in corporate taxes.” Why then does he continue making films? “I’d like to be recognized as a good filmmaker.” But could his desire for recognition drive him to make a film which might enhance his reputation but nevertheless be a financial failure? “No . . . absolutely not. There’s nothing more sad than a film that doesn’t do well at the box office. A couple of years ago, I made a film called Mudhoney. It got good reviews, but no one went to see it. Critiques aren’t worth shit.”
Meyer apparently wants to be recognized as a good filmmaker not by the critics but by the moviegoers, who show their appreciation in cold cash. Meyer is careful not to enter into any ventures which look like they might be unprofitable, but once he has selected a project, his only concern is the quality of the film. One of the reasons for this is that the profits, large as they often are, sometimes take years to come in. Money aside, though, if he were given a large sum of money and asked to do the film of his choice, what kind of a movie would he make? “Oh hell, I wouldn’t make one—I’d go fishing.”
Massive thanks to the author of this piece and fellow Russ Meyer fan Justine Smith, who kindly gave me permission to re-blog her article here as part of this years ‘MEYER MONTH’. The original post can be found here, as well as transcribed below.
The Immoral Mr. Teas not only marks the emergence of one of the most interesting and disputed ‘auteurs’ of the American cinema, but also proved to be a crucial film in the emergence of more risqué adult cinema. Not only in terms of exploitation and pornographic cinema, but in paving the way for more lax rules for Hollywood, which was at this point, still stubbornly holding on to the production code. Over the course of the 1960s, the final blows to the production code would take place creating a more liberated cinema and there is little doubt that The Immoral Mr. Teas played a big role in this fight.
After working as a cameraman during WWII, Russ Meyer had returned to California in hopes of getting a job as a cinematographer. He didn’t find any work and turned mostly to work as a freelance photographer (including work for Playboy), occasionally picking up jobs shooting industrial films, as well as more salacious work doing cinematography for burlesque and naturalist films. The naturalist films of the 1950s were really the precursor of the sexploitation films. They were able to be made due to a loophole in obscenity laws, and filmmakers were able to present nudity under the guise of documentary, making films in nudist colonies. These films had little substance and hold little interest today aside from being an interesting historical footnote.
When Russ Meyer was approached to make another film of this type, he initially refused, since they held little interest to him. It was only later he decided to undertake transforming this style of film into a real film that he begun working on The Immoral Mr. Teas. Made for just $24,000, The Immoral Mr. Teas would be the first non-naturalist film since the pre-code era to be released with female nudity. It is often considered the first ‘skin-flick’ and would spurn over the next three years over 150 films in this style. Meyer was relying heavily on the 1957 ruling by the Supreme Court, Excelsior Pictures v. New York Board of Regents, which ruled in favour of the naturalist film The Garden of Eden, stating that nudity was not implicitly obscene. It is important to note though, that Meyer and the films that would follow in the ‘nudie-cutie’ period, did not contain sexual touching or physical contact.
Much like Hugh Hefner, another important figure in breaking taboos, Meyer firmly believed that his sexual fantasies would translate to his audiences and was he ever right. Though the film bears little resemblance to his later, more famous work, his physical type was very much in line with the favourite physical type of the day. All the women featured in the film were extremely large breasted with tiny waists and pretty faces. This ‘style’ of woman is not only reflected on the pages of Playboy magazine, but in the Hollywood stars of the day.
The Immoral Mr. Teas is an interesting film, and though very much a product of its time, has endurance thanks to Russ Meyer’s playful sense of humour. Though the naturalist films served as great inspiration to Meyer, there is little doubt that Playboy magazine has the biggest influence on the film. Critics have argued over the years that the film is little more than a film version of the magazine and the fact that the film has no synch-sound only adds to that impression. There is no dialogue in the film, only a playful narration describing the day-to-day activities of Mr. Teas and the many women he encounters. This is a play on the documentary excuse of the naturalist film, and a fairly clever one at that.
It can also be argued that the character of Mr. Teas is a surrogate for the Playboy reader. It is important to note that it isn’t until the late 1960s and 70s that pornography becomes ‘chic’ and young couples start to attend screenings of films like Deep Throat and Debbie Does Dallas. In spite of the film’s success, the impression of the viewers is no different than that of readers of Playboy: dirty old men. Mr. Teas really epitomizes this vision, and Meyer plays with this further by having the nudity exist only within his imagination. This is not a nudist colony where women are prancing around in the grass, doing day to day activities; the women are not actually naked… except in the surrealist fantasies of Mr. Teas.
Despite some legal problems the film would come to face in various states and cities (the MPAA did not exist at this point, and the state censor boards were still around), it managed to gross over $1.5 million dollars. Its success cannot be over-emphasized, and it became a game-changer in the types of films being made. This is also made possible by alternative theatrical venues that crop up during the mid-1950s, from arthouse to grindhouse. Meyer’s film and others of its type were able to find audiences in these counter-culture institutions. The growing popularity of more ‘adult’ foreign films also contributed to the film’s success, and would later force Russ Meyer to remain competitive and add richer scripts and themes to his work as a means of battling the growing popularity of European cinema in particular.
This particular and early stage of the sexploitation genre would only last a few years. Often referred to as the ‘nudie-cuties’, most were in the ilk of Mr. Teas, featuring non-synch sound, no physical contact and thin plots. Some were just glamorized versions of the naturalist films, adopting the same structure, but with models in the place of real nudists. Though many of these films were rather tame and often dull, Meyer was not the only filmmaker to emerge from this trend as a visionary. His contemporaries included Doris Wishman and Herschell Gordon Lewis, who have since become cult favourites known for their clever sense of humour and, in the case of Herschell Gordon Lewis, an enthusiasm for blood-shed.
The Immoral Mr. Teas may not be as exciting as Russ Meyer’s later work, but it is nonetheless a fun ride. Already at this early stage of his career we have a sense of his vision and the film is far more creative than it has any right to be. The film’s magic lies in the details, from Mr. Teas profession as a salesman of weird objects of dentistry, to the almost Vertigo-like graphics that introduce fantasy sequences. Of course, above all – a certain appreciation of female breasts might help your enjoyment of the film, as they unapologetically make up a large amount of the screen time. Whether or not Russ Meyer interests you as a filmmaker, his incredible influence on the film industry cannot be denied, and this film in particular changed the face of cinema forever.
Russ Meyer had to take incremental steps to get to become the storied and respected filmmaker that he eventually did. His first step was being a gifted photographer who was as adept at his skill as mortars and debris rained down around him in the heat of battle as he was while studying the contours of his models’ bodies as they were lying at the base of an oak tree while bathed in dappled sunlight. His second step was punching through the wall of morality and releasing The Immoral Mr. Teas, his groundbreaking film that introduced actual nudity in a motion picture to those who would pay for the privilege to see it.
I would bet that Meyer’s most important decision in the evolution of his success was hooking up with and marrying the former Eve Turner in 1952. No doubt that Meyer had talent to burn and that his personality caused him to be a little shrewd but Eve took his game to a whole other level. At once both his business partner and muse, Eve Meyer pumped life into his output in which she was the subject by being both impossibly built and having a uniquely strong relationship with the camera. In terms of what they did for each other and each other’s work, you’d probably have to look to Jess Franco and Lina Romay for something comparable.
So it’s something of a shame that, as far as his motion pictures went, Eve Meyer was only ever in front of the camera in Eve and the Handyman, Russ’s follow-up to the previous year’s Teas. But her presence in it is both sly and smart; Eve Meyer is the primary woman on display in this film and it ends up being ten times as effective as Teas without having to resort to any nudity on her behalf.
Like Teas before it, Eve and the Handyman is little more than a sketch-pad for Meyer’s visual ideas and micro-budgeted creativity. A jack-of-all-trades handyman (Anthony-James Ryan) is stalked by a mysterious, trench-coated blonde whose constant, double entendre-stacked voice-over narration positions the film as a bawdy, Dragnet-style procedural in which every move of the handyman is noted and remarked upon by his voyeuristic pursuer. Gone is the gimmick in which naked girls pop up to awkwardly pose in the daydreams and hallucinations of our protagonist and replaced by the laser-focus of our bumbling hero as he completes his day-to-day tasks, never minding the many buxom women he encounters along the way (mostly all played by Eve Meyer in various get-ups).
Where Teas reflected women contented to be placed like statues and given little to do, Eve wants women to be the driver of the engine. Teas wants to be a moving centerfold and Eve wants to be the whole damn magazine. The jokes are livelier, the mood is more jovial, and, more importantly, Eve Meyer flips the script by giving the audience the first taste of what would be a Russ staple; the woman is on top and the man is the dope. Sexually oblivious, Bill Ryan’s Handyman gets saddled with Eve Meyer almost exclusively because her mission is to, ostensibly, wise him up. So she becomes everywoman in his path while remaining the detective that wants to sell him toilet supplies in the end.
Eve Meyer’s presence in this film couldn’t help but inform Meyer as to what exactly he wanted in the future. For Eve Meyer is the first “Russ Meyer Woman.” Eve Meyer showed Russ Meyer how to present a woman who looked like she wanted to be wanted. More importantly, she wanted the audience to know she knew they knew that she wanted to be wanted. Untangle all that and you’re are the heart of what makes Russ Meyer’s films stand so far apart from other films of their ilk that the massive delta between them renders it unfair to mention them in the same breath. Show me a Russ Meyer film that’s blessed with a narrative structure and I’ll show you a heroine that sprung forth from Eve Meyer’s roots which are so firmly planted in this film.
Once past the nudie cuties, the cinema of Russ Meyer is as equally hilarious and exhilarating as it is titillating. And even if the nudie cuties are tame pieces of antiquity, they aren’t bereft of a good laugh or two. The jokes in Eve take a while to unfold and your mileage with them may vary; they might or might not be worth it, depending on your perspective. But this film is the first to have this specific blend of broad, sight-gag humor and sex which was mostly missing from Teas, a film that feels like it can barely breathe lest it get caught doing what it wants to be doing. Additionally, in employing a panoply of visual ideas representative of intercourse and orgasm (the constant churning of oil wells, the coupling of trains, etc.), Meyer gives the thrust of the train into the tunnel at the end of Hitchcock’s North By Northwest, itself released a scant one year earlier, nowhere to hide.
As stated before, there’s just not a lot of there there in the subgenre of the nudie cuties. They are what they are and the trick is to try and enjoy them with a sense of historical context because there just aren’t many of them that are going to stop the conversation at a dinner party and become the thing everyone will have to have seen before the next get-together. Depending on the director and the talent involved, they mostly all run the gamut between “unwatchable” and “pleasant enough”. With Eve and the Handyman, Russ and Eve Meyer joined forces to give the audience something a little more more memorable; electric burlesque compliments of Eve’s strong, palpable sexuality reminiscent of one of Howard Hawks’s joyously randy heroines and Meyer’s clean compositions, edited together like a breathless Gatling gun shooting off eye candy.
“The biggest catch in life, my friends, is a happy ending,” so says our heroine in the final line of the film. As much as that phrase meant something even in the creaky days of 1961, the film earns its right to use it as Eve and the Handyman, while not the best or bawdiest of Russ Meyer’s output, is truly his first effective mix of the sex and the sublime.
(C) Copyright 2021, Patrick Crain
Patrick Crain is a freelance writer and film programmer for the Oklahoma Film Society. He spends his days in semi-retirement by pacing around his home in Oklahoma City, watching movies, writing about them, and then pouring wine for both he and his wife at around 4:30CST. His scribblings about the motion pictures can be found at www.apollotwin.com. He can be found on Instagram here and on Twitter here. He is also on Letterboxd.
The original link to this fantastic article written in 2015 can be found here, but I have copied it exactly and published below as it is a great piece to have in this Russ Meyer archive. I hope you enjoy as much as I did.
Although this article doesn’t explicitly contain any significant spoilers, it is always advisable to watch a film before reading about it too deeply.
In his own words, the intended audience for Russ Meyer’s films was “some guy…in the theatre with semen seeping out of his dick.” His work in the sexploitation subgenre is credited with bringing nudity and sleaze into the American cinematic mainstream and his gravestone declares him ‘King of the Nudies.’ And yet his magnum opus has been reclaimed as a work of female empowerment, a subversive text that has inspired music videos by the Spice Girls and Janet Jackson, lent its name to a New York women’s bar and even been referenced in Xena and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Despite dismissing it after a first viewing in the mid-1970s as “retrograde male-objectification of women’s bodies and desires further embellished by a portrait of lesbianism as twisted and depraved”, feminist scholar and film critic B. Ruby Rich issued a diametrically revisionist reappraisal in 1995, considering it “a body blow to the idea that women are just victims.” She even went as far as to describe Meyer as “the first feminist American director”. The film in question is Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!and this August marks the fiftieth anniversary of its initial release.
The ‘Pussycats’ are sometime lovers Varla (Tura Satana) and Rosie (Haji) and fellow go-go dancer colleague Billie (Lori Williams). They are each vicious and sadistic mountains of sexual rage, both their lustful appetites and voluptuous bodies forever threatening to break out and lay waste to any unfortunate bystanders. After a little desert drag racing turns nasty, the three kill a wholesome all-American boy and take his girlfriend prisoner without much hesitation and no detectable remorse. On the run, they hatch a plan to swindle a wheelchair-bound perverted old man and his carved-from-stone son out of a small fortune the former received as compensation after an accident on a railway. Casted by a misogynist in order to be objectified, Satana, Haji and Williams craft deceptively sapient performances. Shot as pulp icons, they become towering comic book characters, Hellenic Gladiatrixes whose sheer physical and sexual strength are their own Lassos of Truth. But unlike Diana Price, these are no heroes. As the opening narration warns us, they are “evil creations,” and are as enthusiastic about murder as they are about their fast cars.
Meyer and co-writer Jack Moran’s script was little more than a set up that could lend itself to the maximum number of exploitation tropes possible, no subtext, just titillation. So how then was it that feminist intellectuals and the vanguard of nineties girl power came to lay claim to a film made by a man whose self-described sole incentives for directing were “lust and profit”? In part it is due to the emergence of sex-positive feminism, allowing for the re-evaluation of Faster as what Rich would call “a veritable Rosetta stone of contemporary attitude; ironic, irreverent, sexually polymorphous”. This notion was part of a wider continuing trend towards revisionism, seen for example in UCLA’s recent Film & Television Archive series “No She Didn’t!: Women Exploitation Auteurs”. The program aimed to “recontextualize old films so they can be seen in a new and different way” and study how “lurid exploitation subject turned into a crafty feminist allegory”. Exclusively showing female-directed exploitation films (such as Bad Girls Go to Hell and Slumber Party Massacre) Meyer obviously wasn’t involved but the principle is applicable. The difference however is that while some of the filmmakers in the series encouraged such readings of their films, Meyer rejected any academic attempt to interpret his films and when faced with questions on the subject of gender roles in his work he dismissively quipped he’d “never met a good-looking feminist.” Evidently, whatever ‘the King of Nudies’ achieved in empowering women he did so unintentionally.
Sexploitation and Sweet Kittens
Early exploitation films typically centred around the social anxieties of their day, disingenuously posing as a warning, though truthfully tempting audiences to indulge in immorality and witness taboos being broken. The aim was to effectively ‘exploit’ the subject matter for kicks as opposed to critiquing it. Meyer’s previous work had always offered a wry, acknowledging smile to those watching. He established his reputation firstly through his ostensibly naive nudie cuties and then later with his roughies, which catered to the most repulsive fantasies of violence against women. With Faster Meyer did little to keep up the public service announcement charade. Its theatrical preview promised the opportunity to “go-go for a wild ride with the Watasi-cats” before advising viewers to “beware: the sweetest kittens have the sharpest claws! For your own safety, seeFaster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!”. The accompanying visuals were an assault on the seediest of senses, as the three ‘kittens’ twist and turn maniacally on the strip club stage, followed by a relentlessly edited few minutes of speeding sports cars, swift seductions and quick kills.
With this film, Meyer aimed to exploit some of mid-sixties white conservative middle-class America’s greatest fears. The Old Man represents a perverted, Southern Gothic depravity. The Pussycats, as supercharged outsiders coming to refuel and wreak havoc recall the anti-biker hysteria of the Hollister riot and subsequent Motorcycle Club films such as The Wild One. Meyer, however, went a step further, switching to the phallic symbol of the car and putting women behind the wheel. But whereas Brando’s Johnny is revealed to be a closet romantic, Varla, the de facto leader of the Pussycats, is nothing but evil. Yet the audience, being invited to indulge themselves, inevitably end up cheering for her as their homicidal heroine. This is the essence of exploitation cinema, tempting you to watch and enjoy what polite society would have you condemn.
Monsters and Masculinity
This then begs the question of how Varla, Rosie and Billie, characters who were designed largely as an excuse for the camera to ogle at their cleavage, came to become such oft-debated characters? The answer lies in them and the film’s male characters being representative of two key concepts that have informed feminist film criticism in recent decades; that of the monstrous-feminine and of masculinity in crisis.
When explaining her formulation of the first concept, Barbara Creed explains “the reasons why the monstrous-feminine horrifies her audience are quite different from the reasons why the male monster horrifies his audience… The phrase ‘monstrous-feminine’ emphasizes the importance of gender in the construction of her monstrosity.”
The Pussycats represent Meyer’s conception of female sexuality unleashed, a notion he evidently finds simultaneously arousing and monstrous. While the exact causes of this ideal might be difficult to pin down, his well-documented inability to last long in the bedroom and the affair that effectively ruined his first marriage are certainly somewhat to blame. As a young director he became involved with Tempest Storm, who at the time was already a legend on the Burlesque circuit and would star in a few of Meyer’s earliest films. However, when they first went to consummate the relationship, Russ was overwhelmed by her anatomy and couldn’t live up to his own ideals of masculinity, later explaining:
“When I first met Tempest Storm, I was so in awe of her great big cans that thoughts like performing badly or ejaculating prematurely ran through my mind – all connected to the dick bone. So when I made my move to hump the buxotic after the last show in her Figueroa Street scatter, I felt inadequate, plain and simple. Fuck, what can I say?”
Other than being an example of the degree of misogyny the man was prone to sprout, this quote is helpful in explaining the psychology of his sexuality. Storm would be the first sex symbol of his films, appearing topless in The Immoral Mr. Teas. She was one of the very few of his stars he slept with and thus from the beginning of his career, of his maturing as a filmmaker, he felt sexually insufficient and yet aroused when faced with the ‘monstrosity’ of a busty woman.
This experience would shape his future casting decisions as he made a career out of discovering Amazonian women: tall and chestily well-endowed with a rugged strength. For Faster he began in typical fashion by holding auditions in a seedy LA strip joint called “The Losers’ Club”. Tura Satana immediately caught his eye and was an extraordinary find. On and off screen she was a towering figure of independent womanhood. Born in Japan with a Native American background, her family emigrated to America at precisely the wrong time and at the age of five Tura was interned during the Second World War on the basis of her birthplace. After being released her family relocated to Chicago and at the age of ten she was gang-raped and sent to reform school, while her attackers simply bribed their way out of criminal charges. Upon her release she took up martial arts and started an all-girl gang to prevent others from suffering as she had. They reportedly carried ‘switchblades in their boots and razors in their hair.’ After the failure of her arranged marriage, armed with a fake ID she ran away to Hollywood where she first worked as a glamour model before returning home and beginning a lucrative stripping career at just 15. In his book on the film for the Cultographies series, Dean DeFino explains that five years later she ‘was earning $1,500 a week and had her own cult following.’ Her past suitors even included a certainly Elvis Presley, who obviously couldn’t keep up as she reportedly rejected a marriage proposal from the King.
Meyer wanted his Superwomen to be larger than life, as if exaggerated forms of patriarchal nightmares. Satana was just what he was looking for but came to be such through her own real experiences. As a mixed-race rape survivor living in a deeply sexist society, she was more than some sexploitation director’s wet dream, she was the real deal. A self-described deeply sexual person, she became enraged with Meyer when he insisted on the cast and crew not socialising and adhering to a strict policy of abstinence while filming so as to have the sexual tension saved for when the cameras were rolling. Satana however argued with him so ferociously he caved and they formed a pact in which she could enjoy clandestine rendezvous with a member of the crew. Her sexuality was all hers, and certainly not to be dictated by another.
Supporting Psychopaths
But in her director’s mind, this was not a positive trait. As DeFino puts it, Satana’s character Varla embodies ‘a number of archaic female stereotypes – lasciviousness, fecundity, (and) wrath’. The Superwomen of Faster are monstrous, the product of the director’s sexual tastes and embarrassment, the manifestation of one man’s very gendered fears. As the plot plays out it is important to note they break down misogynist authority structures and in doing so reveal the male libido to be insufficient. The film’s male characters are each representative of a different side of Meyer’s conception of hetero-masculine eroticism. There’s an earnest yet tempted do-gooder, a doltish but physically flawless stud, a straight-laced preppy and a sexually dysfunctional perverted pensioner. Almost all are easily squashed by the Pussycats with their own bare hands. They are the embodiments of a crisis in masculinity and the corrupting privileged position of men. Meyer undoubtedly revelled in the elevated position he enjoyed on an account of his gender, however by cinematically unleashing his sexual fantasies he has them tear apart the fabric of domestic patriarchal power structures, the oppressive institutions of the family and marriage.
As cultural commodities fashioned from the mind of one of a sexist society’s most sexist filmmakers, the Pussycats can hardly be seen as inspiring liberators for those opposed to misogyny. Their worth lies in their illustration of key concepts of feminist film theory. And yet when watching these monstrous murderers, the only appropriate reaction is to cheer them on, to support their ritualistic slaughter of masculinity and oppression. Fifty years on they remain there to tempt you to go-go along for the ride but remember to beware, the sweetest kittens have the sharpest claws.
Anyone who knows me personally or reads this blog will know one of two things; that I absolutely love Russ Meyer and that Death Proof is my favourite Tarantino film so far. So you can imagine my excitement when I saw that the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton were screening a Grindhouse double bill of Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!and Death Proof as part of the Scala Forever Film Season.
It’s not surprising that Tarantino references and emulates Faster, Pussycat! in Death Proof as it’s well known that the director loves his films, especially B-movies and exploitation fare. What may interest some people is just how much he uses elements from Meyer’s 1965 masterpiece, from the obvious – a Faster, Pussycat! t-shirt used in costume, to the slightly less obvious (depending on how big a fan you might be), such as plot and characterisation points.
In celebration of this year’s MEYER MONTH, I’m revisiting one of my favourite Meyer films, which also happens to include one of my favourite Meyer women!
What do you get if you mix a father obsessing over his daughter, a buxom French burlesque dancer, a rich kid on the run, a wise-cracking curvaceousbrunette and an angryGinger Cop on the run? The answercould only be Russ Meyer’s 1967release ‘Common Law Cabin’ aka ‘Howmuch loving does a normal couple need?’. One of his sexploitation films made before his certificate-challenging 1968 picture Vixen!, the film isn’t as sex and nudity heavyas some of Meyer’s other films but still bearsall the hallmarks of your typical Meyer sex film fare.
Common Law Cabin opens with views of the idyllic Colorado River and an over the topmonologue that tells the audience all about the changing faces of nature itself. However, this is a Meyer film and like previous films of hiswith the same device (The Immoral Mr. Teas, Vixen!, Mondo Topless) this monologue is full of double entendre, describing…
Miss Meyer 