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The Grindhouse Era, Part 1
All clips, collages and comments by Brainscan
The Immoral Mr. Teas
1959
Grindhouse movie houses sprung up
spontaneously in many cities at the same time and the
movies they showed were very cheap local
productions. No one can say for sure which was the
first place or the first movie. But for my money,
the first important exploitation movie in what would
become the grindhouse genre was Russ Meyer’s The Immoral
Mr. Teas, made in 1959.
Mr. Teas had many of the features that would dominate
grindhouse for several years, including voice over
instead of dialogue, a story that made precious little
sense and exposure that was pretty damn limited
until….
It is the until that matters here, because Meyer knew
from a SCOTUS ruling in the mid-1950’s that the courts
would side with him if censors attempted to ban or cut a
movie about nudism or a movie that had educational
value. So, for about 45 minutes of its run time,
Mr. Teas gives us not so much to sink our teeth into
except Danielle
Dawn posing topless for a photographer,
then frolicking topless in the ocean
and finally sunning topless on a pier.
The key word here is topless, but Ms. Dawn manages to
keep her vitals hidden most of the time.
The only other significant exposure was a two-second
clip of the topless torso of June
Wilkinson.
The following scan from a magazine called Showboat shows
what Ms. Wilkinson looked like when a shot included her
head.
Okay, fine, for the longest time
in the movie, Mr. Teas goes from place to place and
encounters attractive women at his dentist’s office,
and an office and a coffee shop. They are
played by
Ann Peters (the waitress),
Marilyn Wesley (the dental hygienist)
and Michele Roberts (the secretary),
and in every case the women display acres of cleavage,
not much more. Well, that is not strictly true because
we get to see Ms. Wesley’s naked rumpus and Ms. Peter’s
ample bosom, as Mr. Teas lets his imagination get the
best of him. Still, if the movie had ended at the 50
minute mark, it would have the same level of exposure as
others in the grindhouse genre at the time.
But then the movie shifts gears. Mr. Teas falls asleep
and imagines the waitress, the secretary and the dental
hygienist are nudists. With that little trick
Meyer could protect the movie from censors. And as
Mr. Teas gazes at the nudists, the voice over gives us a
rich education in the history of exploration and the
biology of reptiles. No kidding. This is
deliberate, to be sure, and it is a sometimes-hilarious
parody of other attempts to get naked bodies past the
censors by throwing in some odd bits of educational
material. So we have the nudists and we have the
education - who could possibly justify cutting out any
of it?
In Mr. Teas’ dream,
the three women loll around and play around naked in a
variety of scenes that I broke into 3 clips for an
aggregate of 13 minutes.
All three women get significant time in the buff, but
true to the form he would display for more a decade, Mr.
Meyer spends an inordinate amount of time with the
camera on the bustiest, blondest of them - that would be
Ms. Ann
Peters. It turned out to be her only
exposure on film but she made the most of the time and
the talent given to her.
You have to watch the three clips because Mr. Teas, in a
bright red shirt and a Panama hat, skulks around in
bushes and through tall grass and up trees, but at no
point do the three women see him. You have to
conclude Meyer’s got the title wrong - the protagonist
is not the Immoral Mr. Teas but the Invisible Mr.
Teas.
Last scene of the movie has his psychiatrist, played by
Mikki
France, appear nude.
And during the early bits of the movie there are two
uncredited actresses who play a stripper
and a
random gal who undresses in tall grass immediately
behind Mr. Teas as he fishes.
Like I said, the dude is invisible to naked women, which
I am going to say is a super power worth having if you
get a choice in these matters.
One online source says Althea Currier plays the
stripper. And Mr. Skin has Monica Liljistrand playing
the psychiatrist, instead of Mikki France. As luck would
have it, Ms. Currier and Ms. Liljistrand appear together
in a movie entitled Heavenly Bodies! Take a look
and see what you think.
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