Once again Brainscan takes a deep dive into a forgotten chapter in the history of film nudity: the grindhouse era. Brainscan alone created all the commentary and collages, as well as the myriad of film clips that accompany this article in the members’ version of the Fun House.
The Grindhouse Years, part 1: 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.
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 ie 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.
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 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.
Marilyn Wesley
Michele Roberts
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.
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.
Currier
Liljistrand
To be continued!
If you enjoy Brainscan’s work, here are the other series that can be found on Other Crap:
The Films of Harry Novak
Part 1, The Sixties, can be found here.
Part 2, Hicksploitation, is here.
Part 3, The Seventies, is here.
Part 4, The Models in Print (and in his films), is here
The Early Years of Film Nudity
Part 1: 1932. Peak Pre-Code Talkies.
Part 2: 1929-1934. The Other Pre-Code Talkies.
Part 3: 1927. The Swan Song of the Silents.
Part 4: 1900-1926. The Silent Era.
Part 5: 1935-1951. The Dry Years.
Part 6: 1952-1959. Europe to the Rescue
The same articles, with the added bonus of all of Brainscan’s film clips, can be found in the members’s version of the Fun House, along with the many thousands of other collages, clips and commentaries that Brainscan has created in the past two decades. (And his contributions represent only a tiny fraction of the content in the back issues, since the Fun House has been updated every day, seven days a week, without exception, for the past 24 years.)
