All caps, clips, collages and comments by Brainscan

East Coast Grindhouse: Part 6

My Brother’s Wife

(1966, 1080hd)

June Roberts was second only to Darlene Bennett as the go-to actress in East Coast grindhouse.  My Brother’s Wife is, in some respects then, the quintessential Doris Wishman movie because it stars June Roberts

and Darlene Bennett…

... and a mirror.  And both women are nekkid for quite some time, shot from several camera angles.  Forget 2001: A Space Odyssey – this is cinematography at its finest.   June plays the titular wife, ignored by her husband and pursued by her brother-in-law.  Drama follows.  Can’t remember what was Darlene’s role but she never looked better. 

Okay, this next one is going to take some ‘splaining.  Imagine, if you will, a movie called Sin in the City that stars Darlene Bennett,

June Roberts,

 a vastly under-rated Rita Bennett (covered farther below)

the blond bombshell Uta Erickson

AND – here is the kicker – Gigi Darlene as a stripper.

Imagine June Roberts also gets up and strips and then goes to a party and gets nekkid.  Same party has Darlene and Rita and Uta get out of their clothes. Imagine all that.  You would conclude this is the movie to buy, to watch, to cherish. Story of the movie has three Catholic schoolgirls come to the big city to do all the things that Catholic schoolboys imagine schoolgirls do when they are off campus.  Those schoolboys would be no more than 10 years old because all they can imagine is the tamest shit.  But okay.  June, Darlene, Uta and Gigi topless?  I’ll settle for that.

 But what no one counted on was a level of ineptitude in camera work for this movie.  Take the first scene in which the schoolgirls walk into a topless bar, first to watch Gigi strip and then to do the honors, themselves.  Let’s imagine the conversation between director and cameraman.  Director tells the cameraman to set up the camera across the street because he doesn’t want anyone to see Gigi or June or the other two all that well.  And he tells the cameraman to set up things so that a big old flag takes up half the screen.  Don’t bother moving the camera closer to get a second, better shot, that would require too much time in editing.  Just put the damn camera back there as far away as you can get it and just leave it.  One shot and done.  In fact, tear down the back wall and set up the camera in the parking lot because who in the world wants to see Gigi’s or June’s mighty-fines?  Not him.  

And then there is a scene at the party in which two women – one played by Rita Bennett and the other I am pretty sure is Darlene Bennett – flex their pectoral muscles in front of an amused, topless, cute but unknown gal (below).

Same director.  Same cameraman.  Director says, point the camera at the cute gal, don’t move it an inch, a centimeter, a micron, so that in the end the audience can see nothing more than a frame of two or Rita’s face and none at all of Darlene’s– just put it on the cute gal and leave it there.  Boom. Done.  That’s a wrap.

And the thing is, Sin in the City is the one movie I know of that shows off Rita Bennett in a natural state, for soon after she had some work done on what was already a beautiful form. 

Tuna captured her in Confessions of a Psycho Cat, if you want to see how she looked post-enhancement.

Anyway, the movie has several uncredited, unknown actresses who play the other two schoolgirls (the ones who accompany June Roberts on her adventures in the big city)

 School Girl 1

 School Girl 2, with the beehive hairdo, is a cutie who looks familiar but I cannot place her.

Other nekkid party-goers.

Last movie to look at in today's wild ride through the grindhouse is called Raw Weekend.  In the thinnest of plots, a cheap-o movie crew goes out to the wild to shoot a love scene, but has their hard work interrupted by a topless brunette, whose name turns out to be Dolores.

The crew follows Dolores farther into the wild and discovers a topless blond goddess sunning herself, a vision of loveliness unparalleled in the history of cinema, a marvel of a woman who somehow combines softness in all the right places with a body that defies gravity.  It is Gigi Darlene, in a performance for the ages. 

 

Gigi and the gal named Dolores are nudists.  Friendly ones who often appear together.

They invite the film crew back to their place for lunch, and at some point, the guys in the crew leave and the actress, whose name is Tammy, sticks around for the weekend.  Okee fine.  The only drama – if you can call it that – involves the liberation of the gal named Tammy (will she go nudist, too? Or remain a stuck-up prude for the rest of life?  You guess)

... and her grudging return to the clothed world at the end of the weekend.  Otherwise, the runtime of the whole thing has nothing, absolutely nothing, but Gigi and Dolores and Tammy without clothes.  That’s it, the entire thing, the whole movie.  It is a masterpiece.

Gigi spends a good 14 minutes all by her little lonesome, topless or nekkid – I have split up and recombined her scenes into two clips, one of which has Gigi and the camera in the same place and the other of which has her wandering around in upstate New York with the camera in downstate Georgia.  And Gigi spends another 11 minutes with Dolores to prepare lunch or go for a boat ride, lie in the sun or chop wood (I am not making that up). Let’s do the math: that’s a total of 25 minutes of her royal nekkidness, Gigi Darlene, in the buff.  Told you: it’s a masterpiece.

The woman playing Dolores is uncredited and nothing on IMDb helps because it lists several women as working in this film even though only three appear.  Do not know how or where they came up with the others. Anyway, Dolores ought to be famous because – and I know this will sound like sacrilege – her form is superior to Gigi’s.  Take a look.  I promise you will be impressed.

And I do not know who plays the character, Tammy, although the credits list an actress with the first name of Tammy.  Could be her but I cannot be sure.

One last note about Raw Weekend. You saw above that Gigi and Dolores share the screen on occasion.  A few times in those scenes, Gigi is not so careful to keep her nether regions covered.  I grabbed the images and stuck a few frames together ...

... even though the shots are distant and fuzzy.  I did it because these are the only images I’ve seen of Gigi Darlene in full-frontal glory.  And y’all probably know by now, I have spent some time looking.   

A few thoughts:

This whole adventure in East Coast grindhouse made clear how often the women who lose their clothes in these films play nude models, strippers or nudists.  Or victims.  The nudist part is easy to understand because it was the one legal means in the early to mid-60s for a movie to show off the topless female form.  That is a practical decision.  And let’s face it, even today the go-to method of throwing some nekkid women into a crime drama is shoot a scene in a topless bar.  Must be a thousand women who have played strippers in some movie or TV show – several are A-list actresses and a few have made a career out it.  And the nude model thing has historical roots, since many women in 60’s grindhouse made a day-job out of nude modeling.  Gigi Darlene did and so it is no surprise that it is a role producers asked her to play.  All of those make sense, but the victim thing is kinda icky, as though naked equals fallen.  I much prefer the West Coast grindhouse approach of showing liberated women in charge of their own sexual lives.  That sort of thing is much more widely accepted, right?  Lots of folks are okay with it.  And it leads me to think that had Gigi Darlene lived in LA or San Francisco and played those sorts of roles, she would have been a star.