Blonde Babe of Yesteryear Gigi Darlene (4 Mar 1943 – 1 Jan 2002) was one the multitude of attractive, intriguing actresses of New York's low budget exploitation film scene of the sixties. We would hazard to say, at the risk of offending many, that her thespian skills were definitely less impressive than her knockout figure and alluring presence.* That said, her vacuous sexiness is a perfect fit to the classic, surreal roughie to which she perhaps owes her lasting appeal: Doris Wishman's Bad Girls Go to Hell (1965).
* To
present an opposing view, the Rialto Report is of the opinion: "Occasionally an actress was noted for her
looks. Less frequently she was notable for her acting ability. Gigi Darlene had
both. She was a star. She was blonde, beautiful, and expressive. A pouting,
petulant kitten. She combined an unexpected innocence with a knowing and sultry
confidence. The monochrome screen lit up with her feline presence. Her talents
were in demand and she made regular appearances in New York sexploitation
films."
A
ubiquitous presence in NYC sleaze films from around 1962 to 67, she seemingly
disappeared overnight. Something that the sexploitation film-makers of the time
noticed enough that amidst the opening credits of Michael
Findlay's 1968 roughie The Curse of Her Flesh (trailer), which are presented in the form of graffiti scrawled on a
filthy restroom wall, and between all the other crude comments, a simple
question is scrawled: "Whatever happened to Gigi Darlene?" It was a
question that became a cult question, but also long remained a rhetorical one.
The latter, at least, until 11 May 2014, when the fantastic sleuths of at the Rialto Report finally answered the question, Whatever
Happened to Gigi Darlene?
Music not from the film –
John Barry's Swinging City
with images from The Curse of Her Flesh:
The
bio at imdb is based entirely on their research: "Gigi Darlene was born
Heli Leonore Weinreich on March 4, 1943 in Berlin, Germany. [...] After
threatening to run away from home at age sixteen, Gigi in 1959 was allowed by
her mother to immigrate to Flushing,
Queens, New York City, where she lived with
a couple of family friends. [...] Darlene eventually moved to Manhattan; she
lived on West 43rd Street and began posing for photo shoots for various men's
magazines. Gigi branched out as an exotic dancer making the rounds at clubs in
New York, New Jersey, and Long Island. While dancing at clubs Darlene met and
befriended future soft-core movie actress Darlene Bennett.* [...] Darlene started acting in assorted low-budget sexploitation
features that were made throughout the early to mid 1960's. [...] She often
co-starred with Darlene Bennett in these films. [Heli's acting / dancing
/modeling pseudonym, Gigi Darlene, was inspired as much by the 1958 film Gigi (trailer) as by her good friend Darlene
Bennett.) Gigi was working as a featured
dancer at a club in New Jersey when she first met her future husband Edwin
Greal, who did a stage show as a hypnotist using the pseudonym Charles
Lamont. Darlene and Greal got married on
August 29, 1966. Gigi moved to Fort
Lee, New Jersey after marrying Greal and
agreed to stop acting in movies. Greal and Darlene eventually formed a stage
act together and went on the road. [...] They resided in Vegas for five years [as
of 1975] and continued to do stage shows before eventually moving to South
Florida in 1980. Alas, shortly after moving to South Florida Greal died at age
56 on December 18, 1980. [...] Gigi in 1981 went on to obtain a Real Estate
license in Fort Lauderdale and sold time-share apartments on and off for twenty
years. Moreover, Darlene was a member of the Screen Actors Guild and worked as
an extra in movies** that were shot
in South Florida. Gigi died from stomach cancer at a hospice in Fort
Lauderdale, Florida on New Year's Day in 2002. She was 58 years old. Her body
was cremated and her ashes were scattered off the pier in Deerfield Beach,
Florida into the Atlantic Ocean."
* On 11 April 2021, the fantastic sleuths of at the Rialto Report also managed another scoop with their online article Black
and White Dreams of Darlene: Looking for the Bennett Sisters.
**
None of which are listed on any filmography of hers that we could find.
Go here for:
Gigi Darlene, Part I: 1961-63
Artist Studio Secrets
(1964, dir. J.M. Kimbrough)
Despite
its dated innocence, Artist Studio
Secrets is easily found online at any number of virus-prone porn sites. This
movie seems to be the only directorial project of the unknown J.M. Kimbrough, a
name which reappears on the credits list for the faces that appear in Diane
Keaton's odd but enjoyable directorial debut, Heaven (1987). J.M. Kimbrough also plays the lead male of Artist Studio
Secrets, the artist Percy Green.
Diane Keaton's
Heaven (1987):
Artist Studio Secrets was, at one point or another, distributed by the infamous Harry H.
Novak (12 Jan 1928 – 26 Mar 2014), which is why, way back in 2014, we took a
look at it in R.I.P.: Harry H. Novak, Part II – 1956
to 1964, where among
other things we mentioned that:
"Movies Unlimited has the plot: 'Poor Percy Green (J.M. Kimbrough). He's an artist
who only gets turned on when his female models are clothed, so his wife makes
sure the lovelies parading before his palette all show up undressed in this
masterpiece of campy Sixties softcore.' The
Psychotronic Guide notes that 'one of the two models is cross-eyed', while lor of New York City calls the movie an 'entertaining, extremely
minor silent nudie', explaining 'adult movie audiences were seriously starved
for shots of skin in the early '60s. Artist
Studio Secrets provides more than enough T&A to qualify as a diversion,
and it has nostalgia value today. [The] film has some silly narration, but is
mainly a repository of models doffing and putting back on their clothing for
over an hour, mixed in with some pleasant historical shots of Greenwich
Village. The director/star portraying the "artist" hams it up for the
duration, but his presence is not all that distracting from the pulchritude.
[...] Film is more suggestive than its nudist-camp style ancestors in the
genre, as evidenced by the two lead models exchanging massages — most of the
nudies of this era were "hands off" mode to avoid censorship. One of
the most popular of the NY stable, Gigi Darlene, makes an uncredited appearance* and steals the show with a very sexy
dance.'"
* Since
then we here at a
wasted life have come to
realize that she uses an alias and is credited as "Leonore Rheine".
That's her shapely behind above.
To
add to what we wrote way back then, Something Weird has written: "Greenwich Village artist Percy Green has a
problem: 'I find it hard working with models who are completely nude. A nude
body just doesn't excite me. I have... well, a clothes fetish, so to speak. Only
a girl clad in panties and bra excites me, and even a girl in that situation
doesn't excite me unless I'm the same way.' So says Percy within the first few
minutes of Artist Studio Secrets, when blonde Billie stops by Percy's
Greenwich Village studio, gets nekkid, and causes Percy to make comical faces.
Percy [...] loves, loves, loves making comical faces. [...] Artist Studio
Secrets looks and feels like it was made up on the spot, which probably
isn't a bad thing since the emphasis is always on the girls getting naked, no
matter the reason why. Artist Studio Secrets is also the first film
produced by Lou Campa, whose epics include Mini-Skirt Love (1967 / full film), Cool It Baby (1967 / trailer
below), and Venus in Furs (1967 / trailer below). Mr. Campa also
plays either Sam or Mike or Bob under the moniker 'Lou Champion'."
Trailers to Lou Campa's
Venus in Furs and Cool
It Baby:
Also
in the cast: forgotten Southern Californian beat folk singer Julie Meredith —
"born in Haiti but raised in California, Meredith was a folk singer who
specialized in old English and traditional world music; she also acted in the
1964 film Artist Studio Secrets".
Her
forgotten LP Songs of Vice and Virtue
can still sometimes be found at thrift stores near you! Listen to a song medley
of hers here, at Unearthed in the Atomic Attic.
Somewhere
along the way the movie was screened in Akron at the long-gone Astor
Theatre, where it was screened with Some Like It Cool (1962) — we assume
not the psychotronic 1977 Tony Curtis vehicle a.k.a. Casanova & Co. (trailer) but, rather, the early and now-lost Michael Winner (30 Oct 1935
– 21 Jan 2013) nudist film starring torch-singer Julie Wilson (21 Oct 1924 – 5
April 2015).
Julie Wilson sings
You Don't Know What Love Is:
Also found revealing skin in Artist Studio Secrets is another regular of the New York
sexploitation film scene of the time with a "German" name, Marlene
Eck (a.k.a. Lisa Vohn), who disappeared from sexploitation not long after Gigi
but, unlike Gigi and some other female sexploitation regulars of the day, never
achieved "cult" appreciation. In fact, we mention her only to have an
excuse to present the hilarious trailer to a later project she took part in, Joseph
P. Mawra's 1965 "documentary" about lesbians, Chained Girls. As mentioned on the One
Sheet,
"Because of the tenuous theme of Chained Girls all cast names
[including Eck's] have been withheld by the producer!"
Trailer to
Chained Girls (1965):
Remember, guys: "Wherever girls and young
women are to be found in any number, it is quite possible that lesbians can be
found."
Crazy Wild and Crazy
(1964, dir. Barry Mahon)
(Available
for free at the Internet Archives.)
This movie was, at one point or another, distributed by the infamous Harry H.
Novak (12 Jan 1928 – 26 Mar 2014), which is why, way back in 2014, we took a
look at it in R.I.P.: Harry H. Novak, Part III –
1965 to 1966, where we failed
to mention Gigi.
Trailer to
Crazy Wild and
Crazy:
What
we wrote there: "Novak distributes another Barry Mahon movie. The plot,
according to TCM: 'Bob Meyer (Tony Bogart) buys himself some movie equipment,
hires 20 models, and enthusiastically sets out to make nude movies. When his
first film is completed, he is startled at the results. He has produced a wild
comedy: a volleyball game is ridiculously speeded up, while swimming and diving
scenes have been caught in slow motion. Four images of the same woman suddenly
appear together, and then seem to turn upside-down.' Crazy Wild and Crazy is one of those films that have aged so badly
that they make excellent moving wall deco for parties.
"Crazy Wild and Crazy premièred in Los
Angeles on 4 March 1966 and was, at one point, banned in Maryland. Among the
on-screen pulchritude: both of the non-identical Bennett Twins (Darlene &
Dawn), two long-forgotten lasses active in exploitation in the mid-sixties,
often in the same film, like this one here or Doris Wishman's Another Day Another Man (1966 / trailer). We here at a
wasted life wonder where
they are now..."*
* The
last sentence, the bit about "wonder where they are now", has been
answered this year by the great Rialto
Report, which, with the
diligence of a true detective, found them and spoke with them. Go here to: Black & White Dreams: Looking for
the Bennett Sisters. The
photo of the Darlene & Dawn above, BTW, also comes from a Doris Wishman
movie, in this case My Brother's Wife
(1966 / trailer), poster below, in which the two share some onscreen tenderness —
if one ever speak of "tenderness" is a Wishman movie.
Over
at Something Weird, which, as to be expected, sells the movie, Handsome Harry Archer explains what makes Crazy Wild and Crazy so different, so
special, so wild and crazy: "After making a handful of
nudie-cuties, director Herschell
Gordon Lewis and producer David
F. Friedman summed things up
eloquently with their autobiographical take on the skinflick business, Boin-n-g
(1963/ see R.I.P. H.G. Lewis Part II).
Director-producer Barry Mahon does something similar with Crazy Wild and
Crazy, which the opening credits
inform us will feature 'the unusual camera work of Bob Meyer.' (Who?) Sure
enough, the guy who dates a mannequin head and strangles women in Mahon's The
Sex Killer (1965 / trailer) says that he's Bob Meyer and wants to show us his new film. His
new film, however, is... well, odd. It starts off like a typical Mahon boobfest:
naked models lounging around anonymous New York apartments and Florida nudist
camps. Hey look! There's Delores Carlos smiling happily in the buff. And hey! GIGI DARLENE and Darlene
Bennett try to open a coconut in the nude [...]. And over
there, Blood Feast's (1963
/ trailer) Sandy Sinclair plays volleyball with he-man Roy Savage.... But
then everything starts to go wrong. Very wrong. Shots start to rotate upside down....
Nudists play softball in fast motion.... There are multiple exposures of the same
naked girl in the same naked shot.... Darlene Bennett and friends bounce up and
down in slow motion.... Oops! Now they're bouncing around in fast motion.... And so
on and so forth for about an hour.... Scored with funny music and comical sound
effects, it's also interspersed with Mr. Meyer looking sheepishly embarrassed:
'I don't seem to have done anything right!' Why, it's a veritable laugh riot.
[...] Watching this — which, like most nudie-cuties, can get dangerously
mesmerizing — one almost wonders if this is what a skinflick would look like on
acid. Or, perhaps, like the title says, is this what would happen if a nudie
film was capable of getting mentally ill. [...] Mahon was a genius. An absolute
genius."
Of
a few names who took part in Crazy Wild and Crazy, some trivia:
Assuming
they are one and the same person — possible but doubtful — Roy Savage was
around 13 years old when he made his first movie, the Gibraltar-set kiddie
adventure flick The Clue of the Missing
Ape (1953 / six minutes), waiting ten years to return to the screen, now nude and
suntanned and usually in Florida, for a
few nudie-cuties before disappearing again.
Rita
Bennett (born 26 Jan 1941), no relation to Darlene and Dawn Bennett, knew Gigi
from the strip clubs and once said: "The dancing money was pretty good,
and the work was easy. But the real rewards came from the men who frequented the
clubs. In between acts, you needed to get them to spend money on champagne, so
you had to be flirty with them. They'd invite you out for meals or to shows,
and buy you gifts like jewelry and furs. Sometimes they'd offer to pay your
rent. (Heli [Gigi]) was one of the most popular girls I saw; she always had a
string of men after her. [Rialto Report]" A life-long alcoholic, Rita died in 2017 and, as no one
claimed her body, was buried in a potter's field. For more on her life, read
the Rialto Report's The Sexploitation Film Made on a
Desert Island in New York City.
Sandy
Sinclair, famously enough, had her eye stabbed while in the bathtub before
having her legs removed in the first scene of in H.G. Lewis's Blood Feast (1963), the movie that is
perhaps her greatest claim to fame (R.I.P. H.G. Lewis Part II).
Like
Sandy, Floridian Maria
Stinger posed often for Bunny Yeager (13
March 1929 – 25 May 2014) — unlike Sandy, she even did some bondage shots for
Irving Klaw (9 Nov 1910 – 3 Sept 1966). Of unstable mental health, her second
suicide attempt in 1967 (her first was in 1964) was a success.
That fabulous fountain of information,
The
Rialto Report, once spoke with the "exploitation movie
jack of all trades" Charles Davis Smith (18 June 1930 – 20 Sept 2017), who
explained how Crazy Wild and Crazy got its style: "[Barry Mahon]
handed the negatives over to me, saying that the footage was, 'crazy, wild and
crazy.' It was nudie-type footage, and it featured all the usual suspects: Gigi
Darlene, the Bennett sisters — Darlene and Dawn, another actress
named Rita Bennett, and others. But I soon realized that half the footage
was missing, so I gave it back to Barry saying I couldn't do anything with it. To
my surprise, he said it didn't matter, and that I should just assemble it as
best as I could. He gave me one instruction: I just needed to make sure that
there were 'plenty of nude girls' in it. So I edited it together using the plot
device of a photographer who's giving advice on how to photograph women. And we
called it, Crazy, Wild and Crazy! That
was typical Barry Mahon..."
The advert directly above (from Screen 13) shows an odd pairing indeed: while Crazy, Wild and Crazy is a happy-go-lucky nudie cutie, Anton
Holden's directorial debut Aroused (1966 / full
film / German poster below) is famous for
its sleaze factor. While seldom acknowledged, William Lustig took a lot from Aroused when he made his infamous
slasher, Maniac (1980 / trailer)... or did he take a lot from Barry Mahon's The Sex Killer (1965 / trailer)?
(1964, dir. Irwin Meyer)
If
you happen to have a copy of the June '67 issue of Playboy lying about, it has some topless-babe shots from the
latter, lost version. (Playboy mentions that "Orgy of the Golden Nudes merely used the nudist camp
setting as background for a horror story".)
Other
a.k.a. titles, though of which version we know not, include The Deadly Circle, The Golden Nymphs, and Frolic of the Golden Girls.
Michael
Weldon's terse description in the first edition of The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film is as follows:
"Threatening phone calls and queer accidents plague sculptor Emile Duvre's
new bride Lilli. It seems that each of Emile's friends has a reason to want her
dead. The linkup with a series of statuettes seems to have been lifted from Screaming Mimi (1958 / trailer). Robert Parsons and Abbey Heller star
as Emile and Lilli. Filmed in Miami and Coconut Grove, Florida. An adults-only
feature."
Trailer to
Honeymoon of Horror:
"Filmed
entirely in Florida" — but for the later inserts. Emile Duvre's brother in
the movie, Max Duvre, is played by the movie's scriptwriter, Alexander Panas. Parts of the movie were shot at the home of
Hungarian-born Baron Joseph De
B. Dobronyi (20 April 1922 –
29 May 2010), the same
location used for Deep Throat (1972 / soundtrack).
As seen by the advert found at Chateau
Vulgaria, at least at Fabian's Mohawk Drive-In, Orgy of the Golden Nudes was screened
as part of a triple feature with Graeme
Ferguson's "confusing,
contrived, and hopelessly complicated mystery drama" The Seducers (1962) and
the fabulously terrible German movie Isle of Sin (1960).
Some
people at Letterboxd have seen
the movie. There, James, who didn't dislike the movie, says: "It's a cheap low
budget horror movie but the acting is pretty decent, the story is pretty good
and the characters are fairly interesting. It kind of ends up being A
Bucket of Blood (1959 / trailer / see: R.I.P. Dick Miller Part I) without the humor."
On
the other hand, Michael Elliot, also writing at Letterboxd,
definitely didn't like what he saw: "Honeymoon of Horror
has a terrific poster, [...] but sadly the end result is a rather boring and
lifeless affair that never takes off. [...] There are all sorts of problems with
this film but there's no question that the screenplay is the biggest. The film
is built up as a mystery yet we never really care what is going on, whether or
not the wife is crazy or whether the husband is trying to kill her. These are
all important things to the 'mystery' and the fact that the viewer never cares
about that just shows how lousy this movie is. [...] Heller and Parsons were
decent enough in their roles and there are a couple bloody murders but these
things just aren't enough to save this picture, its lackluster directing and
its overall slow vibe."
"Befitting
its later alternate title of Orgy of the
Golden Nudes, the Florida-lensed indie is more interested in asses of
lasses than knots of plot, despite the utilization of Monroe Myers (of Mission Mars [1967 / trailer]) as, more or less, Exposition Cop. [...] One could draw a direct
line between this film and Blood Feast,
and I don't just mean on a map of the Sunshine State. The former traffics in the
garish gore that Herschell
Gordon Lewis pioneered one
year prior, but with less panache (yes, panache) and considerably less in
delivering what's promised on its bill of goods. [...] Still, it's not a vacuum
of entertainment. Where else — in today's society, especially — will one
hear a woman speak the line 'Yes, but he's just a minor sex maniac' as a point
of justification? [Rod Lott @ Flick Attack]"
At
the Sunset
Drive-in in Columbia, South Carolina, Honeymoon of Horror was paired with
William Castle's The Night Walker
(1964 / trailer), Barbara Stanwyck's final feature film credit.
At
the Oaks in Pasadena, CA., it got paired with The Nudie Cuties — a non-title if there ever was one. ("The
Nudie Cuties", however, are credited as part of the cast of the 1962 nudie
"drama", The Wild and the Naked...
"Filmed in Latin America", in a land called Texas.)
The
babe on the horse below is Christy Foushee, who plays Tutti-Frutti Johnson in Orgy of the Golden Nudes; the photo is
by Bunny Yeager and not from the movie. Reuben Guberman (21 Aug 1926 – 19 Match
2000), who plays Baron von Turko in Honeymoon
of Horror, wrote the screenplay to the hixploitation classic, Shanty Tramp (1967 / credits).
The
waitress that gets killed along the way is played by Yanka Mann, who's also
found in two psychotronic anti-classics, Veronica Lake's final film Flesh Feast (1970 / trailer) and the anti-gay oddity that is Sometimes Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things (1971 / scene).
Trailer to
Sometimes
Aunt Martha Does Dreadful Things:
Raw Weekend
(1964, dir. Sidney
Niehoff)
At
MSN, Sandra Brennan of Rovi is of the opinion that Raw Weekend is 'an example of the
rather tame nudie films (featuring lots of bare bosoms but no sex) that
predated their hard-core cousins.'"
An
obscure non-movie that surely would never have been missed, but somewhere along
the way Something Weird unearthed it. At S.W., Lisa Petrucci writes: "Raw Weekend
— A Robust Rosy Romp! Filmed in Ogle-Scope! [...] Part nudist flick / part
nudie-cutie, Raw Weekend displays a
surprising amount of flesh (with the incidental flash of full frontal!) for
1963."
Interestingly
enough, more than one source — e.g., The
Motion Picture Guide Annual 1990, ed. By Jay Robert Nash & Stanley R. Ross — claims that this little flick is one of the earliest film credits
of future Andy Warhol Superstar Ondine (a.k.a. Robert
Olivo [16 June 1937 – 28 Aug 1989]). As for
the director Sidney Niehoff, he fell of the face of the earth after this, his
directorial debut... as did almost everyone involved in this feast for real-boobs
lovers
Nudes Inc.
(1964, dir. Barry Mahon)
"Possibly
aka Broadway Pin-up Honeys, Pin-Up Camera and The Pin-up Factory [and The
Story of 8 Models]. Yet again, we here at a
wasted life have our doubts
about to what extent Harry H. Novak had anything to do with this movie, but not
only does the on-line magazine Funhouse believe Novak had his fingers in the pie, Rotten Tomatoes goes so far as the call this film 'A Harry Novak sexploitation
classic'.
"The
plot, according to The American Film
Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures (Vol. 1, Pt. 1): 'Barbara Jo travels
from her small southern hometown to New York and finds it difficult to find
employment. Eventually she becomes desperate enough to call Nudes, Inc., the
largest studio in the world producing pinup photographs. Barbara Jo (Monica
Davis of The Dead One [1961 / trailer]) is at first reluctant to pose in the nude, but Mr. Lewis, the
managing director, gives her a tour of the studio and convinces her of the
studio's legitimacy. Mr. Lewis points out that the models are also employed
elsewhere as school teachers, airline stewardesses, housewives and professional
models. Barbara is reassured, and after lunch she begins work.'"
Nudes Inc. was directed by Barry Mahon
(and written by his wife Clelle Mahon); Mahon (5 Feb 1921 – 4 Dec 1999), one of
the original prisoners at Stalag Luft III whose stories served for the film The Great Escape (1963 / trailer) — Mahon allegedly loosely inspired the character played by Steve
McQueen — had a long career in fringe filmmaking made everything from
nudie-cuties like this to roughies to documentaries like Musical Mutiny (1970 / trailer) to decidedly odd kiddy films like The Wonderful Land of Oz (1969)." The last, BTW, is usually
called "the worst Oz film ever made".
Barry Mahon's
The Wonderful Land of Oz (1969):
In John Szpunar's book Blood Sucking Freak: The Life and Films of
the Incredible Joel M. Reed, the teller of tall tales himself, Mr. Reed (29 Dec 1933 – 13 Apr 2020), had the following to say about
director Mahon and this very film: "Well, those were the softcore days.
Some people like Doris Wishman did a whole lot of work. This was about the time
Barry Mahon was the king. He was a great anti-Semite. He'd say, 'We have to
work for those fucking Jews! They put their hands on everything!' But I don't
see how he made another movie after Nudes
Inc. That was pretty awful. They had a girl who would come in on an
interview to be a model. She'd take her top off, you'd get a quick shot, and
they'd bring another girl. That was the whole movie." BTW, for those of
you who don't know, Joel M. Reed
directed what might well be called one of the first forays into torture porn,
the anti-classic slab of exploitation Bloodsucking
Freaks (1976 / trailer below).
Trailer to
Bloodsucking Freaks:
Over at imdb, good ol' lor mentions,
"[...] Mahon made the same movie again a year
later as Confessions of a Bad Girl
(1965) but with significant improvements. In the 1965 version Judy Adler stars,
it's a talkie (Nudes Inc. was shot
MOS with narration added) and is a more honest presentation of the material.
The b.s. level in Nudes Inc. is very
high, as our helpful narrator tells us at least a dozen times how legitimate
this company is [...], how hard it is for women in New York to make a living, and
the wonderfulness of earning $50 to $300 a day disrobing for the camera 'with
no strings attached'. So patrons of adult theaters of the day were essentially
subjected to an hour of self-serving propaganda justifying the pornographer's
role in our society. [...] The upside of this exercise is the chance to see
beautiful breasts and nipples [...], and Mahon doesn't stint. Especially delivering
the goods is lovely Gigi Darlene, whose orbs shot in low angle are still
stimulating 50 years later. She is identified as Gigi by the narrator, and his
reciting of her back story as a German refugee to America is surprisingly true."
White Slaves of Chinatown
(1964, writ.
& dir. Joseph P. Mawra)
* The Rialto Report,
as possibly to be expected, has an extremely interesting (and sadly tragic)
article about the breathtakingly breasted star of that movie, Lorna Maitland,
aptly enough entitled Whatever Happened to Lorna Maitland?
Her Beauty, Tragedy and Mystery.
Opening scene to
Lorna:
The
main character of White Slaves of
Chinatown, Olga, went on to appear in four more movies; of the five-film
"series", the first three (including this one) featured Audrey
Campbell (5 Aug 1929 – 8 June 2006) sashaying across the screen with her whips,
chains and other torture accruements as Olga.
After
White Slaves of Chinatown, which got
re-titled in NYC to Olga's White Slaves
due to the backlash of the Chinese community, came Mawra's Olga's Girls (1964 / trailer), Olga's House of Shame
(1964 / full film), the now-lost Mme. Olga's
Massage Parlor (1965 / trailer)* and, some years
later and with the one-shot actress Lucy Eldridge in the titular mail role, Olga's Dance Hall Girls (1969 / trailer). And while Olga disappeared thereafter, never to reappear, she indisputably
laid the lineage for her much more famous follow-up, Ilsa (Dyanne Thorne [14
Oct 1936 – 28 Jan 2020]). All Olga movies were produced by the legendary Z-film
producer George Weiss (9 April 1921 – unknown), the man who also brought us W.
Merle Connell's Test Tube Babies
(1948 / trailer), Phil Tucker's** Dance Hall Racket (1953 / full
movie, written by and starring Lenny Bruce)
and one of a wasted life's favorite movies, Ed Wood's Glen
or Glenda (1953 / trailer). In White Slaves of Chinatown,
Weiss appears briefly as the doctor who bungles an illegal (and off-screen) abortion.
("Chalk up another one for this filthy old butcher!")
* Clips of the movie
can be found in Mawra's faux-mondo documentary, Mondo oscenità (1966 / trailer).
** Name sound familiar?
Of course it does — who hasn't seen his fabulous disasterpiece, Robot Monster (1953 / trailer)?
Some music set to
images from
White Slaves of
Chinatown:
For
a long time, little information existed about the background of the film or the
movies scriptwriter/director, Joseph P. Mawra. The Rialto
Report — who else? — changed
all that back in 2016 when they looked up the formerly recalcitrant director
and interviewed him for their great piece, Whatever Happened to Joseph Mawra? The
Man Who Created Olga, whence
much of the info presented here comes — as well as the advert found below, of a
screening at San Antonio's Prince
Theatre.
According
to them, Mawra's Olga films, "featuring a sadistic criminal, drug-runner,
and brothel madam called Olga [...] were even more outrageous than their titles
suggested – full of bondage, torture, sexual violence, and drug use. They also
stood out for their striking black and white cinematography, disorienting
camera angles, and a chilling lead performance by the striking Audrey Campbell.
[...] The films shocked and thrilled audiences, were busted for obscenity, and
were involved in court cases that dragged through the highest courts. [...] What
kind of fevered mind could have been responsible for these films? Well, as it
turns out, Joseph Mawra was a mild-mannered part-time joke writer who directed
exploitation films in his spare time."
But
to get to Gigi Darlene: billed as "Leonore Rhein", she has relatively
big part in White Slaves of Chinatown
as "the beautiful and buxom" Frenchy — she's in the trailer, should
you ever get to see it — a kidnapped diplomat's daughter whose will Olga
"bends and eventually breaks" and who "is forced to write
letters to her father asking for money when she's not squirming topless in her
squalid cell". Since the movie was shot without dialogue, and all the
narration added post-production, the German accent of Teutonic blonde Gigi
Darlene was not a problem to her character being French.
The
plot: "The time: 1964. The place: New York City, a cold, snowy winter.
Olga Petroff (Audrey Campbell) makes her living picking up wayward women just
out of the women's discipline centers and forcing them to become prostitutes
and drug dealers! If they refuse, there'll be hell to pay! Olga has her own
private torture dungeon, which she frequents brandishing a maniacal smile and
her trusty whip! She employs various torture racks and the old favorite,
spinning women upside-down! For a film that's only 70 minutes long, a lot
happens: [...] Olga falls in love with one of her innocent captives; Olga's
female henchman helps one girl try to escape with dire results. And I didn't
even mention the women shooting up heroin or the back alley abortion [...]! It
may sound like these are filthy misogynistic smut movies, but the camp levels
are through the roof! None of the violence has dated well, and none of the
actresses display fear or pain realistically, so never fear, anything
disturbing about these atrocities has been erased. [...] The film is entirely
narrated, with no post-synch or live dialogue, and the melodramatic narration
by Joel Holt [one of the directors of The
Wild, Wild World of Jayne Mansfield (1968 / trailer)] is a real hoot, especially when he imitates dialogue by the
characters when their mouths don't even open! [DVD Drive-in]"
But
if DVD Drive-in found White Slaves of Chinatown entertaining,
Pop Matters did not: "Get ready to be incredibly disappointed
[...]. Those who have long dreamed of seeing these urban-grit girl fests in the
privacy of their home, hoping they were warped and weird counterpoints to the
non-metropolitan masochism of the later Ilsa series, may want a ribald recount.
Bereft of even the slightest titillation factor (unless you are deep into
S&M [...]) and poorly shot, filmed, and acted, the Olga movies [...] could best
be described as monotonous in the most completely literal interpretation of
that word."
Body of a Female
(1964, writ. &
dir "J. Ellsworth" & "Julian Marsh")
Other
trivia that must always be mentioned when talking of Michael Findlay: "On
May 16, 1977, Michael Findlay was killed in a helicopter accident on the roof
of the Pan
Am Building in New York
City. The accident occurred shortly after the 5:33 PM arrival of the New York Airways helicopter from John F. Kennedy Airport. It was in the process of taking on 21 passengers for the return
trip when the landing gear failed and the aircraft tipped on its side while the
rotors were still running. Findlay and two other passengers in the process of
boarding were slashed to death as the spinning rotors detached and
disintegrated. Another male passenger died later in hospital. A woman on the
street was killed when hit by falling debris. [Wikipedia]"
"Thanks
to the great work of our friends at the Rialto
Report, from which the [above] is
taken, we can note that the now-lost Body of a Female,
the joint debut of John and Lem Amero and Roberta and Michael Findlay, made its
New Jersey debut at the Little Theater — alongside a sexy Finnish arthouse film and Dorothy's Dilemma,
of which I once again have no earthly notion. [Strublog]"
A still from Dorothy's Dilemma (above) recently went on sale at ebay, but it seems to be an unknown &
forgotten & probably lost movie. Preludes
to Ecstasy (1961 / clip), on the other hand,
is not unknown or forgotten or lost. It's the Finnish Kuu on vaarallinen, a sexed-up remake of the sexed-up 1944 Finnish movie Possession aka Besaettelse (trailer).
Has nothing to do with the movie —
Cy
Coleman's Dorothy's Dilemma:
Elsewhere,
namely in San Antonio at The Prince, Body of a Female got twinned with Roland af
Hällström's (23 Aug 1905 – 21 Feb 1956) satiric horror film version of author Mika Waltari's (19 Sept 1908 – 26 Aug 1979) The Witch, otherwise known under its
Finnish title, Noita palaa
elämään (1952 / trailer). "Along with Linnaisten
vihreä kamari (1945) and The
White Reindeer (1952 / trailer), it was one of the first sound horror films produced in Finland
and was based upon a 1947 play of the same name by Mika Waltari. Larry
Buchanan's The
Naked Witch (1961 / full film) more or less copied this film's plot, as well as its poster art
(having the nude witch shielded behind strategically-placed tree branches). On
home video, there were VHS and DVD releases in Finland, but nowhere else to my
knowledge. [Bloody Pit of Horror]"
But
to return to Body of a Female — the
plot, as found at the AFI Catalog: "Cindy ('Anna Riva'), a Cuban stripper who works in a noisy
lowlife dive near Coney Island, is seen one night by Spencer (Lem Amero), a
jaded New England heir who hires young drifter Bruno ('Robert West') to get the
woman for him. Bruno drugs Cindy and drives her to Spencer's decaying mansion
where she willingly remains, tempted by Spencer's promise of a handsome reward.
She performs a private striptease for Spencer, and he barely manages to
suppress his longing to whip her. Bruno has lingered near the mansion, and he
drives there hoping to see Cindy once more. Spencer is away in town, and his
terrified housekeeper, Mrs. Arnold (Kate Swanson), tells Bruno of the state to
which her employer's obsessive fantasies have reduced him. Bruno runs to the
pond where Cindy is swimming in the nude, but she flees to the house before he
can warn her. Spencer is driven frantic by her near nudity; he lashes her to a
bed and whips her. Bruno intervenes, overcomes Spencer, and takes Cindy away
with him. Bent on vengeance, Spencer hunts them down and confronts them on a
deserted beach. Bruno disarms the desperate madman and drowns him in the
surf."
Where
or how Gigi Darlene shows up, we know not. But we do know that Betty nee Bettie
Page (22 Apr 1923 – 11 Dec 2008) is not in the movie: "Though the cast
credits in the film include a 'Bettie Page', the famous bondage model is not
featured in the film. Her name was added by director Michael Findlay,
reportedly as a homage or a promotional stunt. [imdb]"
Go to
Gigi Darlene, Part III: 1965 (Part I)
