The Grindhouse Era, Part 3: The Nudie Cuties of 1963

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.

1963 had two other nudie cutie movies. Bare Hunt was shot in black and white, and She Should Have Stayed in Bed was shot in color.

I had my doubts about the format of the She Should Have Stayed in Bed, so washed out was the color, until I got hold of the trailer.  This was one of Gigi Darlene’s first movies, which makes the miserable condition of the DVD border on the tragic. I used the DVD for the first two collages,

but then in the third collage you see The Goddess of All Things Grindhouse in
vivid color.  She was to die for as a blonde but as a redhead Gigi was off-scale.

She Should Have purports to show the viewpoint of a cameraman as he follows women around from one apartment to another, with a running gag about a wedding cake and a repeating performance of Audrey Campbell brushing her hair.

Through it all is the voice of he who is supposed to be the director, speaking lines written by the wife of the real-life director; they are amusing in the same sense that Tiger King’s comments at his husband’s funeral were.

A few other women revealed in their natural habitats are:

Bare Hunt also uses voice over for most of its length, as a detective follows a trail of dead women who had been naked only moments before they met their maker. Not so much a whodunnit as a who gives a shit about it, the movie manages to reveal:

Someone manages to slip a noose around Ms. Moore’s neck without her noticing anything amiss until the noose tightens, such is the magic of hemp.

The detective hangs out a pool with Marge London in a verrrryyy long photo shoot.

It all ends when he confronts Marilyn Savage, his secretary and serial murderess.

The scene with Ms. Savage is the only one shot with dialogue, and by the sound of it, the director set up a microphone in the kitchen but shot the scene in the living room.  Ms. Savage is a hoot to watch as she goes from enticing – y’all wouldn’t shoot little ol’ me because I am too sexy for my shirt – to seriously pissed off in less than a second.  She then runs out the door.  Roll credits.

This is what grind houses had to offer their customers in 1963, desperately awful movies for desperately horny men.  And the producers could get away with it because in the early 1960’s they had no competition.  All of that would change in the space of 5 years and when it did, grindhouse would become much more  interesting.

Part 1 of this series, The Immoral Mr. Teas, can be found here

Part 2, Nudie Cuties and More, 1963-1965, can be found here.

To be continued …

 

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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.)

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