This is the one question we wanted to ask Russ Meyer: Why is the violence in some of your movies handled either morally (Mudhoney) or relatively amusingly (Up!) but in others (Lorna) rather revoltingly? How could the man who made the brilliantly subversive Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! turn around and make Supervixons, one of the most depressingly violent movies of the era?
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Meyer is referring to the infamous bathroom-murder set piece, one of two extended scenes of carnage that bookend Supervixens. (The other involves the bathroom murderer torturing the reincarnation of his original victim with a stick of dynamite between her legs.) But expecting the 70-year-old Meyer–producer, director, editor, and cinematographer of two-dozen movies about studs, dolts, wimps, and amazingly large-breasted women–to say anything else is unrealistic. Along with Hugh Hefner, Meyer is the most prominent purveyor of the big-busted postwar porn that helped keep the sexual psyche of the late-20th-century American male safely adolescent, and 30 years on, his fortune is made and his lines are polished. (“You know what made Lorna successful, don’t you? Two reasons. Miss Maitland’s bosom. Got that? Two reasons: her bosom.”) He remains an accomplished raconteur, and will share stories in a personal appearance Sunday night at Facets in conjunction with the theater’s week-long retrospective of his films.
Similar themes worked out in color (Common Law Cabin, Finders Keepers, Lovers Weepers) don’t hold much interest 25 years later, but in the late 1960s Meyer got back on track by concentrating on sex for sex’s sake and sacrificing narrative for the sheen of nonsensical camp. In Vixen, for example, a rural housewife neglected by her bush-pilot husband gets it on with everyone within reach–be it man, woman, even her own brother. (Vixen shows Monday at 7 PM, on a double bill with Cherry, Harry and Raquel.) He eventually found his prime latter-day groove: The grotesque Supervixens (tonight at 7 and 9) is from this period, but better films–Up! and most notably Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens–combine oodles of sex (much of it nontraditional) and lots of violence (most of it cartoony) in a blithe and dopey way that somehow affirms life rather than denies it. (Up! plays Tuesday at 7 and 8:30 PM, Ultravixens Saturday at 7 and 9.)
Is that a professional or personal interest?
