Good Morning and Goodbye! (1967)

Posted on August 17, 2013 at 9:34 am by Jeff Kuykendall

This is what a Russ Meyer fable looks like. Good Morning and Goodbye! (1967) makes its point clear with the subtlety of a jackhammer (you will note all the quarry imagery in the film). This is a film about being a man and pleasing your woman, ’cause if you don’t, she’s liable to cause trouble all over town. It’s a pre-Viagra tale of midlife impotence, and the only reason Meyer doesn’t use that word is because he’s too busy waxing poetic in his trademark long monologues, which read like parodies of TV commercials, but played over montages of skinny dipping and brassieres strained to bursting. “Burt, the Husband. He has everything. Bread, health, stability, and respect. Everything except manhood. Always staggering before the summit of sexual communion.” Burt Boland (Stuart Lancaster, the Old Man of Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!) is the insufficient patriarch of the troubled Boland clan. His unsatisfied spouse, played by Alaina Capri (Common Law Cabin), is “Angel, the Wife, a lush cushion of evil perched on the throne of immorality,” of course. “Let’s face, it Burt,” she says in her husky Mae West voice, “you’re the worst in town. Thank God I know someone in the country!” That would be the aptly-named Stone (Patrick Wright, who would go on to William Castle’s 1968 flop Project X and some notable exploitation films such as The Cheerleaders and Meyer’s Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens). Stone works at the quarry and services not just Angel but seemingly every bored housewife in the neighborhood – including the shrewish wife (Megan Timothy) of his best friend Herb (Tom Howland). The Bowlands’ hot-and-bothered daughter, Lana (Karen Ciral, The Undertaker and His Pals), spends her time dancing in the sun with her groovy boyfriend Ray, “a hip, long-haired, good-looking kid who can make out with most of the chicks the first time around.” (He’s played by one Don Johnson, who never worked long enough to make that other Don Johnson choose a different name.) Lana is desperate for Ray to deflower her, to which he can only respond, “Why can’t you just let things be? Let things happen. If it happens, fine, without all that jive dialogue.” This kind of talk threatens to drive Lana into the arms of the potent and always-available Stone.

Alaina Capri as Russ Meyer preferred to see her.

Luckily, help is on the way in the form of “The Sorceress,” played by the incomparable Haji, returning to Meyer’s filmography after a two-picture absence. Like a mute Greek chorus, she watches these players from a remove (or, to be more accurate, from the middle of a lake, before sprinting nude through the woods). She is “a woman who in the 17th century would have been burned at the stake, a child of gypsies…yet make no mistake, for she is a woman, this one. Blood runs fast and hot in her veins. 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.” Haji alternately wears a cavegirl bikini and a more skimpy outfit assembled mainly of rose petals. After drawing Burt into the woods, she captures him in a snare that suspends him by his ankles, kissing him while he screams. Then she enacts a magical ritual, makes love to him, and sends him on his way. He’s no longer impotent. Like a superhero, he can now set right all that has gone wrong around him. As he strips before his wife, he declares, “All right, so you married me as an investment and didn’t draw the interest you deserved, so you’ve been moving your account all over the valley… There’s only one way to communicate with you, and it’s proving time right now!” Is this more inspiring than watching baby boomers play in a garage band over an announcer’s disclaimer about erections lasting longer than four hours? I don’t know, but I prefer it.

The Sorceress (Haji) restores manhood to the broken Burt (Stuart Lancaster).

Good Morning and Goodbye, whose opening credits are painted on the sides of colorful mailboxes while a red convertible zips by, is perhaps the purest (and crudest) depiction of the world as Russ Meyer saw it. The army vet, who liked to boast that he lost his virginity during WWII with the help of Ernest Hemingway, a Paris whorehouse, and a top-heavy woman named Babette, populated his pictures with three types: powerful women, tough guys who can please them, and measly wimps who can’t. His screenwriters helped him comically exaggerate his Popeye worldview (admitting that Olive Oyl would never pass the Meyer test). Here, he was aided by Faster Pussycat scribe Jack Moran, who also wrote this film’s equally ridiculous companion piece, Common Law Cabin (1967), originally titled How Much Loving Does a Normal Couple Need? Meyer might answer: “A lot!” To deliver his condemnation of men who aren’t manly enough, he applies his muse-of-the-moment, Alaina Capri, with her towering black hair, smug scowl, and overflowing cleavage. This would be his last film with Capri, who felt betrayed by just how much of her heaping flesh Meyer edited into the final product (after flirting with the mainstream, Meyer was drifting back toward skin flicks, finding his way toward the 1968 breakthrough hit Vixen!). Still, the nudity feels shoehorned in, largely confined to some naked sprinting through the countryside that bookends the film, and some disconnected shots in Meyer’s token opening montage (why there is a shot of playing cards scattering over a woman’s naked chest, I have no idea). As usual, it’s Meyer’s enthusiasm that wins you over. The message of this film is no deeper than those Charles Atlas ads found on the backs of comic books (“The Insult That Made a Man Out of Mac”), but while you’re locked in Meyer’s true believer stare, it’s easy to indulge in its self-described exploration of “the deep complexities of contemporary life as applied to love and marriage in these United States. All of the characters are identifiable, perhaps even familiar, and perchance you may view the mirror of your own soul!”

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Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)

Posted on August 16, 2013 at 9:05 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

There’s a scene early in Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965) which deserves to stand alongside the diner scene from Five Easy Pieces in iconic stature. A bumpkin working the pump at a gas station is making innocuous small talk with Varla (Tura Satana), a raven-haired, giant-breasted femme fatale with a conspicuously unconscious teenage girl in the passenger seat. He finishes his puttering soliloquy on traveling the American highway with: “Yessir, the thrill of the open road. New places, new people, new sites of interest. You know, that’s what I believe in, seein’ America first.” As he’s scrubbing the windshield, his eyes linger on Varla’s Grand Canyon cleavage. She barks at him, “You won’t find it down there, Columbus!” This is Russ Meyer poetry, and it’s all I need in life. Specifically, it springs from the pen of Jack Moran, who also wrote Meyer’s cartoonish burlesque Wild Gals of the Naked West (1962) and would craft equally rich-as-fudge dialogue for Common Law Cabin (1967) and Good Morning…and Goodbye! (1967). Many would argue that Meyer and Moran were the perfect marriage, even better than Meyer’s later partnership with Roger Ebert (Beyond the Valley of the Dolls), whose dialogue pushed the parody into overt Pop Art satire. (As for Meyer’s actual marriage, to his producer and former pin-up Eve Meyer, star of 1961’s Eve and the Handyman – well, that was on the rocks.) Moran marched Meyer’s love of big-breasted women and frenetic, euphoric editing straight into the realm of camp, but with its head held high. His punchy, hilarious script elevated the schlock to Shakespeare (with karate chops). But Meyer couldn’t have produced his first masterpiece without his “pussycats,” the lethal go-go dancers embodied by Tura Satana, Lori Williams, and Haji, who died this past week at age 67. They seduce, they scream their dialogue, they race cars, they kill – and often Meyer, in outright worship, shoots them from a low angle so that they tower, Village of the Giants-style, as powerful idols.

"The Old Man" (Stuart Lancaster), accompanied by his son "The Vegetable" (Dennis Busch), meets pussycats Haji and Tura Satana.

The opening scene depicts the quivering black waves of the soundtrack while the unseen narrator gushes a soliloquy on the film’s two main themes: violence and women. You’d be forgiven to think you’re watching a stranger interlude in Fantasia (1940), or perhaps The Girl Can’t Help It (1956). Then we’re off to the races, specifically the go-go club called The Pink Pussycat, where Satana, Haji, and Williams shake their stuff and crazed men scream, “Go baby, go! Faster, faster!” – as if they have money on this contest. At the orgasmic height we cut to Satana in her car tearing up the Mojave Desert, laughing wildly, and the opening titles with its theme, “Faster Pussycat,” sung by some group called The Bostweeds. One thing is clear: this isn’t just exploitation. This is insanity. Still, no time to take a breath, we move on – to a spontaneous nude swim in a watering hole by the blonde-haired Billie (Williams), which for some reason infuriates Rosie (Haji), who shouts, in an accent not distant from Chico Marx, “Go ahead, sponge, soak it up! I’m-a gonna love squeezin’ you out!” (As Billie dresses, Rosie doesn’t let up: “All right, you washed – now I’m-a gonna spin-dry you!”) All this good-natured go-go-dancer psychosis is interrupted by two young ones driving into the Mojave for some car-racing time trials. Rather quickly, the three pussycats bully the two – Tommy (Ray Barlow) and his bikini-clad girl Linda (Susan Bernard) – which Varla escalates to violence, karate-chopping Tommy to a bloody pulp and then snapping his spine. Taking Linda hostage, the pussycats travel deeper into the Mojave until they encounter a ranch owned by a crazed miser (Stuart Lancaster, Mudhoney), whom they plan to rob, having learned that he’s won a fortune in a settlement following a train accident. But “The Old Man” is as crafty and perverse as Varla’s gang, and plots to capture all four women, assisted by his two sons, a thick-skulled bodybuilder called “The Vegetable” (Dennis Busch, “a piece of mutton, a blob of flesh!”), and the morally conflicted Kirk (Paul Trinka).

Tura Satana as Varla: "You won't find it down there, Columbus!"

As the day wears on, hanky-panky, suggestive corn-on-the-cob-eating, and murders (by switchblade and charging vehicles) ensue. There’s also a bit of dementia: the Old Man’s near-death encounter with a train has left him with a hatred of women (it was a woman that nearly cost him his life on the tracks, you see) – and the Vegetable with a homicidal migraine akin to John Cleese’s in the “Dirty Fork” sketch. “It’s only a choo-choo,” Billie complains when her make-out session is interrupted. “Don’t lose the beat, hon!” The film gets plenty of traction from Meyer and Moran’s crisp portrayal of every character as a particular kind of crazed mess. Varla is described as a beast: “She’s a cold one all right, more stallion than man – more than one man can handle,” the Old Man says. And his oldest son laments – mostly to her chest – “You’re a beautiful animal, and I’m weak, and I want you!” Rosie is apparently in lust with Varla too – or so we gather when we see her weeping as she catches Varla and Kirk in a lover’s clinch (Haji later confessed she didn’t figure it out until Meyer told her, so it hardly informs her performance). Despite her tough demeanor, she gains the most sympathy when she can’t quite bring herself to pull a knife out of the body of one of her fallen friends, fear leading her to ask the Vegetable to do it instead. As for the carefree Billie: “Sometimes I see [Varla] try to figure me. I can’t even figure myself!”

Rosie (Haji) tries to convince The Vegetable to return her knife.

Meyer’s irresistible cocktail of drive-in joy was shot as quickly and efficiently as all his other projects – on the cheap, in the desert, tearing up the pages as he filmed them. He believed strongly that all energy be devoted to the filming, to the extent of prohibiting the cast and crew from indulging in sex until production had wrapped. (Tura Satana ignored that last rule, and got her kicks, much to Meyer’s frustration. No one tells Varla what to do.) Teenage model Sue Bernard (daughter of famed photographer Bruno Bernard, aka“Bernard of Hollywood”), was accompanied everywhere by her stage actress mother, who complained, made demands, and rubbed everyone the wrong way, in particular Meyer and the pussycats. All that resentment found its way on screen, in Varla’s manhandling of Linda, and in her contemptuous sneer. Just as convincing are the pussycats’ relationship to each other and their chemistry as a go-go gang. Exotic dancers Satana and Haji were good friends, with Williams bonding with them for the first time, a dynamic evident onscreen. As with Motorpsycho (1965), also starring Haji, this black-and-white exploitation film featured no nudity, just bare backs and shoulders – unusual for a man who made his name with “nudie cuties” and his photography for early Playboy Magazine. But it was a savvy commercial move, reaching a wider audience – and in retrospect it is his most accessible picture, the obvious entry-point into his lusty filmography, and championed by the likes of John Waters, who declared it one of his favorite films, and Rob Zombie, who screened it on Turner Classic Movies. As with many other Meyer films, any objectification of women becomes irrelevant under his abject worship of these powerful figures – to the extent that the three kick-ass pussycats have become feminist icons, of a kind. Two are gone now, and cinema will miss them, but their legacy lives on in every kick-ass action heroine in the multiplex. R.I.P. Tura Satana (1938-2011). R.I.P. Haji (1946-2013). You were beautiful, and we were weak, and wanted you.

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The Telephone Book (1971)

Posted on August 10, 2013 at 9:23 am by Jeff Kuykendall

The tagline says it all: “The story of a girl who falls in love with the world’s greatest obscene phone call.” That didn’t sell many tickets – despite the fact that the film was produced by Merwin “Merv” Bloch, New Yorker and ad man whose lengthy resumé in advertising includes working on the poster campaign for 2001; and despite the fact that one of the film’s stars – the obscene caller himself – is the legendary, dulcet-toned Norman Rose, whose nickname was “The Voice of God,” and here appears in a pig mask while describing his life story from between a girl’s open legs. The Telephone Book (1971), intended as a low-budget R-rated film that went over-budget and X-rated, didn’t do anyone any favors. Rose reportedly lost some of his big contracts due to his association with the film. Bloch hoped that Hugh Hefner, who loved the film and screened it at the Playboy Mansion alongside Gimme Shelter (1970), would release it as the flagship title for Playboy Productions, but Hefner instead reached for a higher brow: Roman Polanski’s grim and bloody Macbeth (1971). Nelson Lyon, the film’s writer-director and a veteran of Andy Warhol’s Factory, hoped the film would launch a career, but despite Warhol’s fleeting involvement with The Telephone Book (he appeared in a brief “intermission” scene which was cut, and loaned out some of his starlets for cameo appearances), the film received little attention and mostly poor reviews. Lyon (who passed away in 2012) found himself a writing job at Saturday Night Live; and his later career was overshadowed by his involvement in the final days of John Belushi’s life (Lyon was given the same speedball that killed his friend). The Telephone Book was largely forgotten, until revival screenings in recent years which culminated, finally, with a new Blu-Ray/DVD release from Vinegar Syndrome, the fledgling label that’s also released the excellent documentary A Labor of Love (1976).

Alice (Sarah Kennedy) takes a call during an orgy hosted by Barry Morse.

The Telephone Book concerns Alice’s pursuit of a white rabbit who turns out to be a man in a pig mask. Living an empty life in a New York apartment wallpapered with dirty pictures, Alice (Sarah Kennedy, recruited from TV commercials and perfect in the role) receives a spiritual awakening when she receives a call from a man who calls himself “John Smith.” When she asks to meet him face-to-face, he invites her to look him up in the phone book, which leads her to strange encounters with impostors eager to take advantage of her sexual openness. Her final, extended, and completely surreal encounter with the real John Smith contains no physical contact and quite a lot of talking. The movie could only have been made in its particular era: floating in the wake of New York’s underground film scene (with its more groundbreaking pictures, including Warhol’s), but preceding the X-rating as a flag for pornography (there’s nothing hardcore here). Nonetheless, it’s clear to see why the film failed to connect with those few who would want to go see a film about a woman who falls in love with an obscene phone call. It’s neither this nor that: an oddity that was destined to escape down the cracks. The film is a satire with an irreverent, profane tone similar to Robert Downey’s Putney Swope (1969); it’s surreal and dream-like, established with its Alice in Wonderland structure; but it’s more sex-obsessed than the average art house film, with abundant nudity and an orgasmic ending featuring animation that’s both abstract and explicit. But the film has a rather European sense of ennui. What sex the film contains is Mad Magazine-broad, including an orgy sequence featuring a number of naked women stacked uncomfortably on top of The Fugitive‘s Barry Morse, playing a man who wants to become the Orson Welles of stag movies (when Alice is invited to participate, she can find little to do except awkwardly remove Morse’s fuzzy black sock).

The smitten Alice meets her obscene caller (Norman Rose), who refuses to touch her.

The black-and-white photography by Leon Perera is often lovely to behold; to indicate the transcendence of one final obscene phone call, the final sequence, initiated by animator Leonard Glasser’s dirty little cartoon, switches suddenly to color, providing a nice visual jolt. Avant-garde experimentation enlivens the proceedings – again, nothing groundbreaking, but constantly subverting any expectations that this is a blue movie. Some of Rose’s seductive dialogue is rendered in subtitles rather than through sound (by necessity, apparently: Rose wasn’t around to loop his lines), and the film is frequently interrupted by confessionals to the camera by everyday people, expressing why they decided to become obscene callers. One self-described “steady guy” says, “Now I don’t feel the need to make obscene phone calls anymore. You see, I know that the world is going to come to an end in a year because of the violent emergence of Atlantis and the coming of little green men with the scorching white light of Mu, and this secret knowledge has given me the peace I need to develop a regular sex life.” Rose’s final monologue, in which he describes a psychological breakthrough during a weightlessness test at Cape Canaveral, is appropriately cosmic and deranged; Lyon films his pig-masked face against various female body parts during the long speech, until his face spins into the cosmos and melts into a starfield.

Alice, satisfied at last.

Though it’s no lost masterpiece, what sticks with me is the strange conviction and commitment of the cast. Lines are spoken rapidly, declaratively, with clenched jaws and glazed eyes. (An argument could be made that the whole film is like a dirty soliloquy made by veterans of advertising about advertising. Advertising, obscene calls – same difference.) What lingers is Morse, piled under those women, stating that his new stag film will be “a bold modern statement of the condition of man,” while breasts dangle above his stern face. (And Alice’s hilarious line delivery of “What’s the plot?!” – which makes the whole film worth seeing once.) What lingers is Roger C. Carmel (Star Trek‘s Harry Mudd) lasciviously working his change-maker belt to pay for every second of Alice’s awkward tale of a man with priapism (familiar character actor William Hickey, humorously bored as he tells his tale of woe to the camera). What lingers is that final image of Alice in the phone booth, the sun having risen, sexually satisfied and now asleep at the phone, an ending both sweet and melancholy. Perhaps The Telephone Book was prescient; it speaks to our current, disconnected era of virtual sex. It has an authentic loneliness. It’s telling that when Alice ventures out of her apartment, seeking an actual one-on-one connection with another human, she scares off the flasher she encounters when she tries to reciprocate. It’s one thing to lust. Real connection is scary.

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