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All notes, clips and collages by Brainscan.
All links lead to film clips.
Harry Novak
Part 1, the sixties
If we say grind house movie houses had a golden age, it
would have to be the 1960’s and early 1970's, after the
demise of the Hays Code but before the dominance of
legal hardcore movies.
A major producer during that time - the poster boy of
exploitation movies - was Harry Novak. He shot two
of his earlier productions, Agony of Love (1966) and The
Girl With The Hungry Eyes (1967) in black and white, but
his first movie was Kiss Me Quick (1964) and he shot it
in living color.
Those first three films had a couple of features that
would show up in his later productions. One was a
narrative that at least made sense; the writers he chose
were never in danger of winning an Oscar for best
original screenplay, but a viewer could follow the story
line without resorting to hallucinogens. And the
other was his choice of actresses. Harry would
find the best endowed and least bashful women in the
business and he would hire them in as many movies as he
or they could stand.
Pat Barrington was the first of his starlets (?), with
appearances in both Agony
and Girl
(If you think the scenes look identical in still frames,
you are not mistaken. Pat walks in, looks straight
at the camera and takes off her clothes - now, that is
acting).
Also naked in Agony of Love: Joy
Lowe
Also naked in Kiss Me Quick: Althea Currier
What followed for a couple of years was a movie or two,
but Harry began to own the exploitation genre with two
costume comedies in 1968 (The Notorious Cleopatra) and
1969 (The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet).
Cleopatra
introduces Dixie Donovan to the world, in what was
the first of a half-dozen movies she made in a couple of
years, before she disappeared. Dixie had several
talents, all of them real and all of them
spectacular. She plays Cleo’s favorite servant.
That
honor of portraying the last of Ptolemy pharaohs
herself went to Loray White, the first of Sammy
Davis, Jr.’s wives. The story there is lurid and
irrelevant because Ms. White could not act a lick, but
in her late 30’s, when this movie was made, she still
looked wonderful.
I’ve mentioned this a while back, but the movie really
gets up my nose for its portrayal of Julius
Caesar. He was not the first emperor of Rome - his
adopted son, Octavian (Caesar Augustus) was - and he was
not an obese libertine, but a consummate, disciplined
soldier. He was killed by a group of senators not
because they objected to his sexual habits, because he
was a prude; they killed him for his ambition. And
whereas he bedded Cleo - she bore him son who, for a
week, was technically pharaoh - all of that was years
before his assassination, not the day before. And
whereas Ms Loray is an ebony goddess, Cleopatra was not
black. She was not even Egyptian. The inbred
Ptolemy pharaohs were Greek. Not sure why the
screenwriter/director had to do such violence to the
historical truth, but hey, he wrote a story that got a
bunch of attractive women in the kind of clothing we
like - which is to say, none - and kept the camera on
them, so did his job.
The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet takes on a work
of fiction and shows it no respect.
That’s a good thing, too, because Juliet was supposed to
be 13 and no one wants a 13 year-old acting the way Ms.
Lockwood does in this movie.
a role meant for a woman in her 60’s, but again we
should be thankful the 20-year-old Ms. Wallace was cast,
instead.
Ms
Wallace also did a scene with Dee Lockwood
And there is this long orgy scene with Ms.
Jines, Ms. Wallace and a bunch of other women thrown
in for your viewing pleasure.
I also added in a
clip of the credits for reasons that will be real
obvious if you watch it.
Tomorrow: more Novak. Onward to the
70s.
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