Reflections on ... Good Morning ... and Goodbye! (1967)

Recently watched: Good Morning … and Goodbye! (1967), a juicy, lurid and raunchy family melodrama concerned with the pain of adultery and the serious, genuine psychological condition of nymphomania, directed by visionary maestro of sexploitation and “the rural Fellini”, Russ Meyer. (Tagline: “For those who measure success only in the hours before the morning light!”).

/ This promotional photo is strange: that's Alaina Capri and Haji - but I'm pretty sure the blonde on the right does not appear in Good Morning ... and Goodbye? She certainly isn't the third female lead, Karen Ciral /

As the very chatty narrator (who comments on the action throughout) opines, “All of the characters are identifiable, perhaps even familiar. And perchance you may view the mirror of your own soul!” Cuckolded impotent Burt (Stuart Lancaster, the wheelchair-bound old man in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) is tormented by the rampant, wanton infidelities of his much-younger cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof trophy wife Angel (Alaina Capri). Meanwhile, his sexpot teenage daughter Lana (Karen Ciral) is itching to lose her virginity and casting around for a likely candidate …

As per usual with Meyer, expect an emphasis on eye-popping heaving décolletage, titillating glimpses of near-nudity, outrageously verbose “hepcat” dialogue, spontaneous bursts of frantic go-go dancing, skinny-dipping, fist fights, muscle cars (Angel speeds-around in the most magnificent low-slung matte gold Cadillac DeVille convertible) and male beefcake (for a resolutely hetero and breast-fixated filmmaker, Meyer’s camera was a surprisingly equal opportunity lech. The “well-developed” frequently shirtless male eye candy here - Patrick Wright and Don Johnson - could have stepped straight out of a 1960s homoerotic Athletic Model Guild physique pictorial). In addition, the fabulous Haji (the volcanic Latina go-go dancer Rosie from Faster, Pussycat!) inexplicably pops-up as a mystical forest-dwelling semi-nude … what would you call her? A sorceress? A sprite? A wood nymph? Anyway, she represents “passion and sex exploding a scent of musk and earth that surrounds her body like a mist. She is a honeycomb with no takers, a witch that can fly only one night a year!”

But Good Morning truly belongs to the sin-sational Alaina Capri as hot-pool-of-woman-need Angel, breathlessly described as "a lush cushion of evil perched on the throne of immorality … a monument to unholy carnality, and a cesspool of marital pollution, a shameless, brazen, bulldozing female prepared to humiliate, provoke, and tantalize, savagely seeking the tranquilizer of unrestrained fulfillment". Snarling her acidic dialogue in the flattest, most sullen tones imaginable from beneath a mane of teased bouffant hair and resembling a debauched Barbara Parkins (Anne Welles from Valley of the Dolls), Capri is a trampy bitch goddess extraordinaire. In an ideal world she would be as celebrated as other Meyer leading ladies like Tura Satana or Erica Gavin. Good Morning … and Goodbye! just may be Meyer’s most underrated work.

In conclusion: Good Morning ... and Goodbye! is apparently so obscure and forgotten by 2020 that when I searched online for representative high-resolution images to illustrate this blog post, I came up with almost nothing decent. There are no good pin-ups of Alaina Capri online either. How disappointing!

Further reading:

My reflections on Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

My reflections on Vixen (1968)