Reflections on ... Honky Tonk Nights (1978)

 

Recently watched: no-budget shitkicker exploitation flick Honky Tonk Nights (1978). Tagline: “Drinkin' ... Lovin' ... Fightin' ... and Cussin'. Those were the nights. Those Honky Tonk Nights.” Synopsis via The Grindhouse Cinema Database: “Dreaming of Nashville while singing at a rowdy tavern, a stripper-turned-songstress fends off male patrons while the owner battles shady businessmen.” 

Truthfully, Honky Tonk Nights is virtually unwatchable by any objective standards, but as an accurate time capsule of 1970s drive-in or grindhouse fare, it’s exemplary. Set in the low-end of country music dive bars, it offers 71-minutes of barroom brawls and fistfights (if you like seeing chairs smashed over peoples’ heads, THIS is the movie for you), car chases and car crashes (and motorcycle chases and motorcycle crashes), a wall-to-wall soundtrack of Country & Western music of wildly varying quality that quickly grows numbing, softcore sex scenes and copious female nudity (women routinely start undressing mid-conversation with  no apparent reason). Honky Tonk Nights' pungent ambiance of sleaze and murky 1970s porn vibe is perhaps inevitable - director Charles Webb mainly specialized in X-rated films (and the cast includes noted golden age of porn performers like Georgina Spelvin and Serena. For verisimilitude, esteemed American folk singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliott also crops up). 

San Francisco’s iconic topless go-go dancer Carol Doda (1937 - 2015) stars as heroine Belle Barnette. “Winner of the 1979 Dolly Parton lookalike contest!” the poster promises. Doda certainly shares Parton’s physical attributes and penchant for cotton candy wigs, but regrettably not her on-screen charisma (at least as evidenced here) or musical ability. And anyway, Doda vanishes from the action for long stretches. (For such a short movie, Honky Tonk Nights is overburdened with subplots and supporting characters). In conclusion: if you want an exposé into the realm of country music, stick with Robert Altman’s Nashville (1975). Honky Tonks Nights is free to watch on Amazon Prime and YouTube.

Mamie Van Doren's Christmas Pictorial in Escapade Magazine (1966)

 

In the countdown to Kitschmas ... Mamie Van Doren's festive pictorial for Escapade magazine, 1966.

I posted this set on my Facebook and Instagram accounts earlier. Instagram instantly went haywire flashing warnings that my post violates their terms and they are deleting it. I scrambled to delete it from Facebook as well - I can't risk going to Facebook or Instagram jail or losing my accounts!

These pics are 57 years old but still freaking out the prudes! Anyway, posting them here for your delectation.

Happy 60th Anniversary to Promises ... Promises! (1963)

 “The movie is a bedroom farce about a writer (Tommy Noonan) and his wife (Jayne) who are on a cruise with their friends, a famous actor (Mickey Hargitay) and his wife (Marie “The Body” McDonald). Tommy and Jayne want to have a baby, and Jayne takes various concoctions cooked up by the ship’s doctor. Tommy, who believes he is sterile, also drinks potency potions. There is a bedroom mix-up, a female impersonator who does Tallulah Bankhead imitations and two short sequences of Jayne thrashing about in bed bra-less, having disturbing dreams. It was because of these sequences that the movie was only shown in “art” theatres. Jet Fore, who was publicist for the movie, had erotic posters of Jayne printed up with a lot of words about the first time ever au naturel for a major star. Each sequence lasts about thirty seconds and bears no relation to the rest of the film which is as clean as a troop of Girl Scouts … In Promises … Promises! Jayne, wearing wedgies and skin-tight pedal pushers, straddles an open door and rubs her calf suggestively up and down against it. One expects the door to moan. It was theatre of sex at its most laughable.”

/ From Jayne Mansfield and the American Fifties by Martha Saxton, 1975 /

“It was at this point that Jayne made the most inexplicable, self-destructive move of her career, one that tipped her over from fading star to unemployable dirty joke. Actually, it was two moves: she agreed to star in the cheesy softcore porn film Promises … Promises! and to pose topless for Playboy … Why did Jayne agree to do nude scenes and in such a cheap film? She was not stupid or naïve when it came to show business – she had to have known no major studio would star her after this, and that family-friendly TV would be off-limits. But she had to work, even if she was a big nude fish in a small scummy pond.”

/ From Jayne Mansfield: The Girl Couldn’t Help It by Eve Golden, 2021 /

Today in smut history: the notorious Jayne Mansfield "nudie" movie Promises … Promises! was released sixty years ago (15 August 1963). It definitively ended the "reputable" part of her career.

Reflections on ... David Hurles of Old Reliable (12 September 1944 – 12 April 2023)

“David Hurles, the photographer and filmmaker whose models were plucked from the obscurity of the seedy streets and onto rolls of film shot for his small company Old Reliable, has died today, April 12. Hurles’ longtime friend, author and editor Dian Hanson announced his passing to The Bob Mizer Foundation this afternoon. Hurles acted as the sole employee of Old Reliable, a pornographic media company that he founded in the 1970s in San Francisco. Prior to its founding, Hurles shot his first professional model in 1968. As a photographer, Hurles focused his lens on the unsavory dregs of society – notably, tattooed, shaggy-haired, and sneering drug addicts and convicts – a far cry from the cleaner-cut models who had appeared throughout the magazine pages and film loops until that time ...” 

/ From the latest Bob Mizer Foundation e-newsletter dated 14 April 2023 / 

“Danger is a turn-on for Mr. Hurles. Marines aren’t butch enough or scary enough. No, David likes psychos. Nude ones. Money-hungry drug addicts with big dicks. Rage-filled robbers without rubbers. And of course convicts – his ultimate Prince Charmings. In the last three decades David Hurles has picked up rough trade off the streets of California, out in front of Doggie Diner and Flagg Brothers shoes in San Francisco and the Oki-Dog in Hollywood. Bars like the Old Crow and the Spotlight were his own personal Schwab’s Pharmacy. Only David wasn’t looking for an unknown Lana Turner in a tight sweater to turn into a star; he was looking for handsome criminals … Hurles took these outlaw studs, who may have never even realized they could be sexy, to his home like a fool-saint, paid them money and photographed them for your sick, self-loathing enjoyment. Old Reliable models snarled at the camera nude. They gave you the finger, bent over with their assholes showing, looking through their legs. And in what became Mr. Hurles’ signature photo pose, they smoked a big steaming cigar, nude, with an angry leer … All glaring into the camera looking like they wanted to rough you up … Without these pioneering Old Reliable photographs, homoeroticism in the art world couldn’t have existed. Robert Mapplethorpe was a pussy. Mr. Hurles is the real thing.” 

/ From the book Role Models (2010) by John Waters / 

Adieu to maverick “outsider pornographer” David Hurles (12 September 1944 – 12 April 2023). The gentle-faced model above is not typical of Hurles’ oeuvre, but it’s the only image I could find safe for social media! To really explore Hurles' work, this lovingly maintained blog is an essential starting point. 

Reflections on ... Mae West: Dirty Blonde (2020)

 

/ Mae West in 1928 when she was appearing in her play Diamond Lil (which she later adapted for the screen as She Done Him Wrong (1933)) / 

Recently watched: the 2020 documentary Mae West: Dirty Blonde, a breezy, stylish and concise (only 52-minutes) valentine to cinema’s high empress of sex. Among the hipper than usual talking heads:  Dita Von Teese, Lady Bunny, Natasha Lyonne, Candace Bergen, gossip columnist Rona Barrett, Sex and the City’s Mario Cantone and the late Andre Leon Talley (who disappoints by lamely suggesting West foreshadowed “women who dare to be sexy” like Cher, Madonna, Rhianna and Beyonce. Let’s be grateful he didn’t include a Kardashian), plus film historians Jeanine Basinger and Molly Haskell. (And Bette Midler is an executive producer). 

/ Portrait of  Mae West by George Hoyningen-Huene, 1933 /

As Dirty Blonde underlines, West was already 40 years old when she made her film debut in Night After Night (1932). By the time she arrived in Hollywood the Brooklyn-born daughter of a bare-knuckle prizefighter and corset model turned vaudeville performer turned censor-baiting playwright (one review of West’s scandalous 1926 play Sex wails that it’s “a monstrosity plucked from garbage can, destined for sewer!”) had already amassed over three decades of show biz experience. This gave West the confidence to demand creative autonomy from Paramount, and her first starring vehicle She Done Him Wrong (1933) was such a smash it saved the studio from the brink of bankruptcy.

/ Mae West when she appeared on The Red Skelton Show on 1 March 1960 /

You can’t help but get the impression directors Sally Rosenthal and Julia Marchesi (understandably) yearn to hail the tough, independent West as a protofeminist, but she resists that interpretation. (They include audio of West explaining to an interviewer she’s always preferred male company and finds other women hard to relate to).

/ West with young male starlet Tom Selleck in 1970 when they both appeared in the film Myra Breckenridge /

Highlights: Dirty Blonde nicely scrutinizes the complicated depiction of Black maids in West’s 1930s films. While Talley notes that they are kindred spirits and co-conspirators who joke with West and have romantic lives of their own, someone else argues these characters speak in a “Hollywood version of Black vernacular” and Mel Watkins asserts there’s nothing to indicate West supported the civil rights movement in the sixties. But then West fought to have Duke Ellington cast in Belle of the Nineties (1934) and – although not mentioned – it’s widely understood West enjoyed interracial sex relationships long before they were deemed acceptable. And the doc also makes you reappraise West’s reviled later films Myra Breckenridge (1970) and Sextette (1978), asking the viewer why we are so horrified by West still flaunting her sexual appetites into old age. As Basinger claims, “There’s a wonderful courage and defiance” to West’s sheer stubbornness in taking what she had in the 1930s and trying to make it work in the 1970s.  Finally, Dirty Blonde frames West’s long-term relationship with bodybuilder Paul Novak as the great love of her life. (Novak met West when he was one of the oiled muscle men in her Las Vegas revue in the early 1950s and stayed loyal right up to her death in 1980). I watched Dirty Blonde on the streaming platform NOW TV. 

/ Mae West and Paul Novak in the early 1950s / 

World Book Day 2023!

“Liz Renay is a most unusual woman with a most unusual past. A prominent author recently said, “I looked into her eyes, and they held me, and they haunt me now for in them I saw two thousand years of living!” 

She began as a smalltown girl in Mesa, Arizona as a sibling in a family of religious zealots. Then World War II came and she became a “V-girl”, attracting servicemen with her beautiful face and large breasts.

Thus began the “two thousand years of living” that took her into the world of high fashion models and 52^nd Street strippers. The quaint pranks of fate led her into the underworld, and she became known as a Mafia moll, trusted and respected. 

To escape from the world of crime, she went to Hollywood, where she became known as “Mickey Cohen’s girl.” 

She had already won a Marilyn Monroe lookalike contest. Cecil B DeMille was enthralled with her. Opportunities were opening up everywhere. 

Meanwhile, her paintings were selling for as much as $5,000 each. Her poetry was recorded and broadcast. 

And then came 13 Grand Jury appearances and screaming front page headlines. (On one day, nothing but her face and a headline about her filled the front pages of two daily newspapers in New York City on the same day). 

True to the people who trusted and protected her, she refused to cooperate with the efforts to put a gangster behind bars. She was tried and found guilty of perjury. 

Three years in a woman’s prison. Six marriages. More narrow escapes than Hairbreath Harry. And more love relationships than any six swingers of our time can boast of combined. 

And this is only part of the Liz Renay story. Told in her own words and with a candor and honesty unusual in autobiography. (But this still glamorous beauty is an unusual person!). 

My Face for the World to See is her story in her words – without the benefit of ghostwriters and professionals. It is compelling to read and memorable to have read!” 

To commemorate World Book Day (2 March 2023): the blurb from Liz Renay’s 1971 memoirs My Face for the World to See, which I’m currently reading. Her writing style can best be summarized as “chatty.” It really does read like a tipsy, garrulous woman at a cocktail lounge decided to sit next to you and start regaling you with her life story!

Reflections on ... Tempest Storm (29 February 1928 - 20 April 2021)

Farewell to doyenne of burlesque, Rita Hayworth lookalike and undisputed Queen of Exotic Dancers Miss Tempest Storm (née Annie Blanche Banks, 29 February 1928 - 20 April 2021).

The death of “the torrid tornado from out West” aged 93 conclusively ends a chapter in striptease history (Storm outlived all her contemporaries including Russ Meyer, Bettie Page and Blaze Starr).

What a life! At her peak Storm earned $100,000 a year, making her the highest-paid striptease performer in history. Her last performance was in 2010. And she had a fling with young Elvis!

I used to love catching glimpses of bouffant-haired eternal showgirl Storm at the annual Viva Las Vegas Rockabilly Weekenders over the years, consistently looking immaculately groomed and fiercely glamorous. This shot of Storm and I was taken at Viva Las Vegas 2017 at the car show. I call this "touched by a goddess" because when we posed together Storm placed her hand on my lower back! Tempest Storm was a woman and a half!

For my social media tribute posts to Storm today, I really wanted to post these glamour shots taken by sexploitation maestro Russ Meyer in 1952 - but I was afraid they were too "boob-tastic" and would instantly send me to Facebook (or Instagram) jail!

Read the New York Times obituary for Tempest Storm here.

Reflections on ... Passport to Shame (1958)

Recently watched: Passport to Shame (1958), a tense, irresistibly trashy black-and-white British b-movie that aims to expose the scourge of prostitution rings in London. Tagline: “EXPOSED! The Shame of London Vice!” Alternate American title: Room 43. I was already enticed just by the RadioTimes description (“a cheap, tawdry and utterly fascinating piece of vintage sexploitation”) – and it didn’t disappoint!

You know Passport is going to be good when it commences with an unintentionally hilarious “what you’re about to see” public service announcement, with lawman Fabian of the Yard earnestly addressing the camera to warn us about this “blight” on society. (He employs the now rarely-heard word “seamy” – let’s bring that back!). The putative lead actress is Odile Versois as protagonist Malou, the naïve French girl unwittingly lured into white slavery. But Malou is a wan and tiresome one-dimensional victim (and saddled with a terrible ponytail wiglet).

Instead, Passport is comprehensively stolen by 26-year old Diana Dors - British cinema’s reigning bad girl - at her pouting sex goddess zenith in a secondary role as fellow prostitute Vicki. Dors is given a fabulous introduction on a busy street at night. The camera lovingly pans up from her stiletto heels, to her skin-tight white pencil skirt before settling on her platinum blonde mane. A male passerby grabs Vicki by the elbow to stop her from stepping off the curb into a puddle. “You almost wound up in the gutter!” he exclaims, and Dors gives him a knowing smirk before swiveling away. (An interesting visual shorthand: virtuous Malou typically wears full skirts with crinolines, while Dors and the other "working girls" hobble around in painted-on pencil skirts).

 

I’d assumed the action would occur in the vicinity of Soho, but in fact Passport’s locale is mainly situated around Bayswater. Anyway, Passport is swathed in moody film noir-style lighting and boasts some exceptional performances. Craggy-faced tough guy Eddie Considine is the Canadian cabdriver with a heart of gold determined to save Malou’s virtue. Brenda de Banzie as Aggie the brothel madam suggests a malevolent, fro frou and British-accented version of Ethel Mertz from I Love Lucy, and Herbert Lom exudes menace as sleazeball pimp Nick. (Boy, does he not appreciate being reminded of his humble origins in the East End!). Passport reaches a crazed climax when – in a moment worthy of Reefer Madness – an unsuspecting Malou smokes marijuana (she assumes it’s a regular cigarette) and proceeds to have a berserk German Expressionist nightmare.

/ Below: bonus cheesecake shot of Dors. In the film itself, we only get a fleeting glimpse of Vicki wearing this sexy lingerie but Passport to Shame's publicity material seemed to focus on it! / 

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)