Thursday, December 27, 2018

Babes of Yesteryear – Uschi Digard, Part II: 1970, Part I

Babes of Yesteryear, a wasted life's irregular and PI cis-gender feature, takes a look at the filmography of the underappreciated actresses cum sex bombs of low-culture cinema of the past. Some may still be alive, others not. Our choice of whom we look at is idiosyncratic and entirely our own — but the actors are/were babes, one and all. (Being who we are, we might also take a look at some actor cum beefcake, if we feel like it.)
As the image above and blog-entry title above reveal, we're currently looking at the films of one of the ultimate cult babes ever, a woman who needs no introduction to any and all red-blooded American hetero male whose hormonal memory goes further back than the start of the 80s: the great Uschi Digard (aka Astrid | Debbie Bowman | Brigette | Briget | Britt | Marie Brown | Clarissa | Uschi Dansk | Debbie | Ushi Devon | Julia Digaid | Uschi Digaid | Ushi Digant | Ursula Digard | Ushie Digard | Ushi Digard | Alicia Digart | Uschi Digart | Ushi Digart | Ushi Digert | Uschi Digger | Beatrice Dunn | Fiona | Francine Franklin | Gina | Glenda | Sheila Gramer | Ilsa | Jobi | Cynthia Jones | Karin | Astrid Lillimor | Astrid Lillimore | Lola | Marie Marceau | Marni | Sally Martin | Mindy | Olga | Ves Pray | Barbara Que | Ronnie Roundheels | Sherrie | H. Sohl | Heide Sohl | Heidi Sohler | U. Heidi Sohler | Sonja | Susie | Euji Swenson | Pat Tarqui | Joanie Ulrich | Ursula | Uschi | Ushi | Mishka Valkaro | Elke Vann | Elke Von | Jobi Winston | Ingred Young… and probably more).
As many of her films are given different release dates by different sites, we in no way claim 100% validity of the dates we supply.
As The Oak Drive-In puts it: "With her long hair, Amazonian build & beautiful natural looks (usually devoid of make-up), nobody seems to personify that 60's & early 70's sex appeal 'look' better than [Uschi Digard]. She had a presence that truly was bigger than life — a mind-bending combination of hippie Earth Mother looks and a sexual wildcat. […] She always seemed to have a smile on her face and almost seemed to be winking at the camera and saying 'Hey, it's all in fun.' Although she skirted around the edges at times, she never preformed hardcore…"
 Today, Uschi Digard is still alive, happily married (for over 50 years), and retired in Palm Springs, CA. To learn everything you ever wanted to know about her, we would suggest listening to the great interview she gave The Rialto Report in 2013.
Herewith we give a nudity warning: naked babes and beefcake are highly likely to be found in our Babes of Yesteryear entries. This one in particular features a lot of boobage. If such sights offend thee, well, either go to another blog or pluck thy eyes from thee... 

Go here for Uschi Digard, Part I: 1968-69

  
Affair in the Air
(1970, dir. Phineas T. Kum-Quat)
Not to be mistaken with the 1970 PBS documentary likewise entitled Affair in the Air and featuring the pilot Robert Lyjak (1 Oct 1929 – 4 Feb 2015) which, unlike this movie, seems to be a lost documentary by now. This movie here is directed by Phineas T. Kum-Quat — is one surprised to find out that the director has no other film credit to his name? But whereas the real names of the various actresses are known — "Vicky Labbs" = Bambi Allen, "Phoebie Vag" = Sandy Carey, and "Ves Pray" = Uschi — the real name of the director is not. (By the way: that's Sandy below kissing her way over Uschi's talents.)
 
The iafd says, "Uschi plays a stewardess on an airplane with quite relaxed rules on nudity and screwing aboard! The Swedish champion of the sexploitation age is back in some of her rarest material! Hot, stacked, and always ready, watch Uschi's perfect T&A wiggle their way through this action-packed feature!"
"Action-packed"? Way back in 2010, at the imdb, the movie led Hans-56 to write that the experience of watching Affair in the Air "makes you wonder why this movie was ever made".
Of this one-day wonder's male "stars", "Mike Hunt" (aka Norman Fields [8 Nov 1924 – 14 Nov 1996]) is supposedly one of the asshole honkies found somewhere in the Blaxploitation classic Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971 / trailer below), while "Dickie Toole" (aka Richard Smedley) is seen somewhere in Al Adamson's Psycho à Go-Go (1967 / trailer) and his Brain of Blood (1971 / trailer) — films one and all that are far more entertaining than this baby. Affair in the Air can be found all over the web, including here at X-Hamster.
Trailer to
Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971):


Fuzz
(1970, dir. Unknown)

Not to be mistaken with the Burt Reynolds (11 Feb 1936 – 6 Sept 2018) / Raquel Welch vehicle of the same name released two years later (trailer), although Uschi also makes an appearance of sorts in that movie, too. (Go to 1972 for the explanation.) The 60-minute hardcore version of this Fuzz film can be found here at Tube Porn Classic. 
Fuzz is a one-day wonder, director unknown — Phineas T. Kum-Quat, maybe? — once "lost" until rediscovered and released, among other places, by Alpha Blue as one of The Lost Films of Uschi Digard. A typical hyperbolic online description: "For the first time, the 1970 classic Fuzz has been transferred digitally for your viewing pleasure! In this erotic masterpiece, John Holmes has a poolside orgy, and the ever-beautiful Swedish magazine model, Uschi Digard, has a lesbian bedroom romp. You won't want to miss this vintage release!"
Not from the film, but from 1970 —
Roy Ayes plays The Fuzz:
If the imdb is to be trusted, the "plot" is as follows: "Vice Cops go under covers to try to destroy a house of sin. However when they become entangled with the local honeys they just might let crimes go unnoticed." Sounds like it was taken from a DVD box...
The un-credited flesh includes numerous unsung regulars of the California exploitation scene of the day and age, including Maria Arnold (Angel Above, The Devil Below [1974 / trailer audio] & the horrendously dull Meatcleaver Massacre [1977 / trailer]), Neola Graef (seen with Uschi in the picture above), Marland Proctor (9 Sept 1939 — 8 Oct 1988, of Curse of the Headless Horseman [1972 / trailer], Garden of the Dead [1972 / full film, the uncredited inspiration to Route 666 (2001) and possibly the first zombie film to feature running zombies], Henning Schellerup's The Black Bunch [1973 / trailer below], Black Starlet [1974 / clip], Wheeler aka Psycho from Texas [1975 / trailer] and so much more), and William Howard (Terror at Orgy Castle [1972 / full film] and The Hand of Pleasure [1971 / full film]).
Trailer to Henning Schellerup's
The Black Bunch:


The Pimp Primer
(1970, dir. "Nick Phillips")
Another one-day wonder directed by the sorely underappreciated and unjustly unknown Z-film filmmaker Nick Millard, otherwise aka "Nick Phillips" (and Jan Anders, Max Boll, Joe Davis, Hans Dedow, Hans Delow, Jamie Delvos, Pet Elephant, Bruno Geller, Alan Lindus, Allan Lundus, John Meyer, Philip Miller, Nicholas Milor, Clem Moser, Alfredo Nicola, Don Rolos, Helmud Schuyler, Otto Wilmer, and surely more).
The plot as given by numerous online porn sites: "Carl (Tommy Toole), a low-end hustler and pimp, uses his girlfriend (Colleen Murphy, aka Sheri Jackson, of Alice in Acidland [1969 / opening] and The Babysitter [1969 / trailer]) to start his own prostitution ring. Trouble begins when Carl recruits Sherrie (Diane Clark), a local waitress who likes sex. A cheesy narrator narrates this morality tale. Features early cameos by adult super-stars John Holmes and Uschi Digart ['Party Guest in Dress']!!"

Impromptu interview with
Nick Millard, the filmmaker:
About Pimp Primer, DVD Drive-In says that this "incredibly obscure sexploitation relic", which features "Uschi Digart in a hideous red wig", "is pretty generic": "Frankly, there's very little going on here, with threadbare production values and a clothesline plot nudging shoulders with abundant sex (thank heaven for the fast-forward button), but this oddity has an MVP in the form of Colleen Murphy [aka Sheri Jackson]. Colleen wasn't a top-tier sexploitation starlet, but she's certainly one of the toughest, no-nonsense broads you'll see in films of this type! With a full-figured physique, a whiskey-and-cigarettes voice, and a pouty baby face, Colleen is also a fine actress, ripe for rediscovery and deserving of a cult all her own. […] With plenty of beaver and pickle shots, this is a great example of the type of storefront-theater film popping up on the cusp between softcore and hardcore. It also feels like a 'white coater', with a moralistic narrator explaining the importance of the story [...]. He also makes sure to discuss exactly what a pimp is ('Pimps range from the businessman type to the casual type, who do nothing more than live off the earnings of his girls'), for those of us who are clueless in that department. With a library music score that would sound more at home in a Greer Garson melodrama, cheap sets, and hard-boiled dialogue and characters, Pimp Primer is a decent weekend wonder worth 60 minutes of your time if only to see Colleen Murphy in one of her few surviving films."
Trailer to the DVD Grindhouse Trash,
with scenes from The Pimp Primer:


Dead Eye Dick
(1970, dir. Unknown)

Supposedly aka Dead I Dick and Dick's Dead Eye, this 59-minute movie is yet another obscure one-day wonder, directed by "[One-Shot] Unknown", which can be found all over the web should you care to watch it.
Over at imdb, two people have watched it, including that omnipresent purveyor of porn, lor, who says, "What we get from anonymous filmmakers is clumsy stagings, full-frontal nudity, a split-beaver close-up, simulated sex and dry humping. In time-honored tradition our hero keeps his black sox on during sex. […] Big-bust Malta (aka Neola Graef) is diverting as a client called 'The Princess', and fan favorite Uschi Digard brings out even bigger breasts as [the] secretary for [William] Howard, the Dick. When Uschi flubs her lines, it's full speed ahead — bloopers left in the print. […] Helping kill time here is the beautiful Kathy Hilton and the ubiquitous husband & wife team of Pete Dawson and Jan Davis. Overall, the movie plays like an extended vaudeville routine." 


The Midnight Graduate
(1970, dir. Don Brown)
Don Brown, one might remember, also directed The Madam (1969), in which Uschi also played a lead role. (See Part I.) Here, she is even featured on the poster. In his book Contemporary Erotic Cinema (Ballantine Books, 1973), William Rotsler, hardly a man known for quality filmmaking, spleens exactly one line on the movie: "Stars Uschi Digart, one of the Big Stars of the simulation films and really the only reason this rip-off title is listed." The rip-off, of course, being two-fold: Midnight Cowboy (1969 / trailer) plus The Graduate (1967 / trailer).

For that, One Sheet Index has the original plot description: "Midnight Graduate is the foremost study of the confusion surrounding the bisexual female. Our beautiful and buxom leading lady, Jackie (Uschi Digard), is exposed to the secret world of the lesbian, and to her surprise, finds herself enjoying every minute. She meets and loves and is loved in return by the various types exemplifying the female homosexual. However, her heterosexual feelings, while being submerged for this period of time, finally re-surface as she discovers herself and her true feelings in a most unusual and shocking climax. Filmed in gorgeous color at some of the most interesting interiors and exteriors around Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley, and containing beautifully explicit sex scenes, Midnight Graduate is a big audience pleaser."
Whether film is a "rip-off" or a "big audience pleaser" can only be left to conjecture, as it is presently still a lost film — so check your attic. A lone voice out there, Jeffrey Hartmann, claims the film was released somewhere along the line as Wild Mix.
In what was surely an odd pairing, Midnight Graduate was shown at the since-demolished North Carolinian Center Drive-In Theatre ("now a Golden Corral Steak House") with The Executioner, which we assume is the 1970 Sam Wanamaker (14 June 1919 – 18 Dec 1993) movie...
Trailer to Sam Wanamaker's
The Executioner (1970):
The most interesting name involved in Midnight Graduate — aside from Uschi, that is — is perhaps the guy behind the movie's soundtrack, Jaime Mendoza-Nava (31 Dec 1925 - 31 May 2005), a "serious" musician who was a former mainstay of no-budget movies.
A Jaime Mendoza-Nava Composition:


Sandra, the Making of a Woman
(1970, dir. "Robert McCallum")

"Robert McCallum", aka Gary Graver (20 July 1938 — 16 Nov 2006); this film is a.k.a. Half a Wife and I Am Sandra. We took a look at this film in 2014, in R.I.P.: Harry H. Novak, Part VII: 1970, if only because the online magazine called Funhouse said Novak had produced it (something we still doubt).

Director Gary (aka Robert McCulum, Robert McCallun, Robert Mc Callum, Robert Mccullam, Robert Mccullum, June Moon and more) "had a long and illustrious career as a cinematographer and director and writer and actor and producer and worked for people ranging from Novak to Roger Corman to Orson Welles to Ron Howard to Al Adamson (he was 'director of photography' on the unforgettable Dracula Vs Frankenstein [1971]) to Spielberg. It is estimated that aside from his 'respectable' (or semi-respectable) projects, he may have worked on more than 135 adult movies, which naturally explains why he was eventually inducted into the AVN Hall of Fame for his life work. (Critical Condition has a nice profile of the man's work here.)"
 
Scene from
Sandra, the Making of a Woman:
We went on: "Over at imdb, weinerm of Boston says that 'Basically this movie is an excuse to see Monica Gayle in various stages of undress', but at Steven Puchalski of the great and forever entertaining Shock Cinema Magazine sees a bit more in this 'surprisingly-energetic, coming-of-age sexploitation' movie: 'Although loaded with the requisite sexcapades, you get the feeling that director/editor/photographer Graver was also striving for a modicum of cut-rate reality, while his high-octane cinematic savvy graces the most generic horseshit with radical energy and imagination. Best of all, this sexplosion has Monica Gayle baring it all in the title role, several years before popping up as 'Patch' in Jack Hill's seminal Switchblade Sisters (1975 / trailer). For this early gig, she [...] plays a 19-year-old rural babe who gets fed-up with her emotional wreck of a Dad who slaps her around and guzzles cheap hooch by the glassful. Tossing her virginity away to some local pinhead (who instantly wants to marry her), she then hitches her way to San Francisco, with the aid of a fetishistic lingerie salesman. On her own for the first time, a biker feels her up in a movie theatre, she's hit on by her lesbian landlord, and she gets a job as a horny psychiatrist's receptionist. Of course, since Sandra craves sex as badly as they do, it all works out fine... It's usually a waste of time to mention acting when it comes to early sex-pics, but in this instance, Gayle is actually good as the down-trodden country gal, who dumps her repressed home town in order to 'find herself' in the Big City. Don't confuse this with some type of feminist tract though, because most of the time Sandra is flat on her back, with some nameless dick inside of her. [...] The script also gets points for not viewing Sandra as a slutty nympho. Instead, she's just an average girl learning to enjoy life and love (while all the local guys queue up around her bed). But its Graver's style-to-burn which makes this film a treat. [...] This is a prime example of a talented filmmaker doing his damnedest to turn a sow's ear into a slightly more artistic sow's ear. Happily, he succeeded.'"
The newspaper clip above comes from ...the scene of screen 13..., which writes: "11-2-76, Corpus Christi — The address used to be the Grande Theater and a part of Braslau Furniture Store before turning into this Mid-Late 70’s incarnation. In 2012, the block was torn down, and I have a feeling that the Bail Bond office was where the theater once stood. I will not be surprised if 'Sandra' was the respected Sandra: The Making of a Woman." Here at a wasted life, we assume Necromania is the 1971 Edward D. Wood Jr. movie Necromania: A Tale of Weird Love (full NSFW film).
Further east, in Schenectady NY, as the advert above (from Chateau Vulgaria) shows, Sandra was placed on a double bill at the porn-purveying Colony Art Theatre, a good place to have your first homosexual experience, with an obscure three-year-older B&W flick entitled Peddlers of Sin (1967). Sin's production company, the Californian firm Mitam, registered to Wesley E. Depue (who retired to Palm Desert and died 25 May 2003), produced an untold number of now rare — if not mostly lost — cheap sleazy sex flicks and roughies in the late sixties with such wonderful titles as Tortured Females (1965 / embedded below), Male Service (1966), Wayward Wives (1968), Housewives and Bartenders (1968), Ruined (1968) and Loves of a Psychiatrist (1968).
Full film —
Tortured Females (1965):
Lead actress Monica Gayle, seen below with Ushi, retired from making movies in 1979 and has since become a cult fav, with many fans lamenting her "disappearance". But she didn't exactly disappear, she simply turned her back to her past: she got married and took her husband's last name, moved to the a section of the valley once owned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and had kids.

Uschi Digard (picture above with Monica Gayle) shows up briefly to play "Miss Lynn", a door-to-door make-up saleslady with whom Gayle ("Sandra") eats fish taco. Co-scripter Robert Aiken, who started his career as "Ford Dunhill" playing Rock Hudson's younger brother in This Earth Is Mine (1959 / scene), also has speaking parts in Russ Meyer's Vixen! (1968 / trailer) and Cherry, Harry & Raquel! (1970), as well as in Lee Frost's anti-classic, Love Camp 7 (1969 / trailer below); in the last, he's credited as "Robert Baker".
Trailer to Lee Frost's anti-classic
Love Camp 7 (1969):


Cherry, Harry & Raquel!
(1970, dir. Russ Meyers)

Aka Megavixens & Three Ways to Love. Depending on the version you believe, this movie is either a Russ Meyer classic of surreally episodic narrative, or a movie cobbled together from a project crippled by accidents. In any event, Cherry, Harry & Raquel! features the premiere appearance of two Russ Meyer's favs actors: Uschi Digard and Charles Napier (12 April 1936 — 5 Oct 2011). The movie also featured the first full frontal of a nude male in a Meyer's movie, courtesy of Charles Napier's romping through the desert with Larissa Ely.
 
Trailer to
Cherry, Harry & Raquel!
We took a look at the movie in our R.I.P.: Charles Napier career review, where we wrote that Cherry, Harry & Raquel! "[…] is enjoyable in a disjointed way. Napier plays Harry, a corrupt sheriff smuggling drugs out to get an Apache who has gone into the business for himself. Harry is shacked up with Cherry (Linda Ashton), a nurse, and bonks Raquel (Larissa Ely), a hooker writer. They guys all die violently and the gals smoke pot and get it on.... in between, Uschi Digard romps around the desert naked.
There are three stories to why she does so: Russ Meyer supposedly needed to fill the running time after 1) one of the lead actresses quit the film early, 2) a photo-lab fuckup resulted in the loss of much of the original footage, or 3) it was an intentional artistic decision on Meyer's part. (Meyer always claimed the last after he gained critical respectability.) Napier once said that the scene of him wearing nothing but a cowboy hat and boots as he romps across the desert with Ely was the most embarrassing thing he ever had to film."
That scene of him flopping in the wind is possibly also the last male nude scene in a Meyer's film to feature a "real" wiener instead of the lengthy (and rubber) male appendages found in Meyer's subsequent skin flicks.
Uschi, billed as "Astrid Lillimorr", appears here and there throughout the movie as "Soul", wearing nothing or not much more than an Indian headdress. Oddly enough for a Meyer movie, the two female leads, Linda Ashton and Larissa Ely aka Larissa Cartier, though typically pneumatic for a Meyer's project, are oddly lacking in presence, which might explain why neither ever made another movie.
From the Movie —
Toys of Our Time,
performed by The Jacks and Balls!
Oh, yeah: "Tom Wolfe", the credited co-scriptwriter, is actually Tom McGowan, a man best known as one of the co-directors of the infamous disasterpiece Night Train to Terror (1985). His segment in that movie, "The Case of Claire Hansen", was cobbled together from his 1980 movie, Cataclysm aka The Nightmare Never Ends ("trailer").


Norma
(1970, dir. Ted Roter)
Aka Norma Isn't Quite Normal. Supposedly based on a book of the same name written by "Norma Stevens", but we were unable to locate any such novel or biography online (although there is a Norma Steven out there who authored the surely gripping book, Homemaking, An Invitation to Greatness).
More than one online source points out the obvious similarities of this film with the indefinitely superior but unbelievably flawed Hitchcock flick Marnie (1964 / trailer). As Leslie Y. Rabkin states in her book The Celluloid Couch: An Annotated International Filmography of the Mental Health Professional in the Movies and Television, from the Beginning to 1990, Norma is "another remnant of the era when porn (soft-core, to be sure) had to be framed as a tale 'told to my shrink'." Uschi is hardly there in Norma at all: you find her and her assets in the orgy scene.
Actor and director Ted Roter (8 Mar 1930 – 29 Oct 2000) — aka Tovia Israel, Tovia Borodyn, Erica Fox, Peter Balachoff, Pierre Balakoff, and Peter Balakoff — moved between TV and sleaze and porn, and was known to show his own sausage. He also appears in this movie, but we don't know what he shows.
Among his movies as director are Prison Babies (1973, / poster above), Hollywood She-Wolves (1976 / film), The Psychiatrist aka All the Devil's Angels (1978), and the Golden Age porn classic Little Girls Lost... (1983); as an actor, non-porn, he's found in, among others, The Hang Up (1969, which we looked at briefly in R.I.P. Harry Novak Part IV), Sinthia: The Devil's Doll (1970 / poster & trailer below), and The Devil Made Me Do It (1974 / poster further below).
Trailer to
Sinthia: The Devil's Doll:
Special note: Norma could possibly also be the big screen debut of long-deceased cult fave character actor George 'Buck' Flower (28 Oct 1937 – 18 June 2004), playing "Mother". A further cult name found in Norma: Valda Hansen (3 Nov 1932 – 21 July 1993) of Ed Wood's anti-classic, Night of the Ghouls (1959 / full film). Lead actress Mady Maguire went on to study law and went into family estate and conflict settlement; she currently seems to live in... a southern state that doesn't rhyme with Kansas.
TCM has the plot: "Norma Stevens (Mady Maguire), who at the age of 13 watched in horror as an assailant killed a boyfriend with whom she was about to make love, has become, at 23, a guilt-ridden nymphomaniac. She goes to Dr. Bradley (Chris Warfield [29 Mar 1927 – 1 May 1996] of Diary of a Madman [1964 / trailer], aka as the porn director Billy Thornberg), a psychiatrist, and tells him of her recent, disturbing sex experiences. Her lovemaking with a delivery man (Art Metrano) is interrupted by the appearance of a strange man at the window. Later, she has sex with the manager (Ted Roter) of a sex exploitation movie theater, and the figure again appears. Dr. Bradley dismisses Norma's fears as fantasy. Norma has a disappointing experience with a lesbian and is raped by a sadistic motorcyclist (Harv Selsby). She is taken on a date to a sex party, and the mysterious intruder again appears as she is making love with two men in an upstairs room. Dr. Bradley hypnotizes the distraught Norma, and she remembers the identity of the man who killed her boyfriend and realizes that he is the same man who has been stalking her."
At Raleigh, North Carolina's now-defunct Center Drive-In Theater ("now a Golden Corral Steak House"), Norma was once upon a time on a double feature with the undoubtedly superior Therese and Isabelle (1968 / trailer below), a "sapphic US/German production, with Essy Persson and Anna Gaël" directed by Radley Metzger (21 Jan 1929 – 31 March 2017).
Trailer to
Therese and Isabelle:


The Politicians
(1970, writ & dir. "Derek Ashburne", aka Bob Augustus)


"Politics make strange bedfellows"

Aka Naked Are The Cheaters. Uschi Digrad, credited as "Heidi Sohler", shows up as briefly (as normal) to play Lisa, the masseuse. By 2003, director Bob Augustus, a Texan whose real full name is Robert Augustus Burge, was in charge of the major porn video distribution firm VCX, which he left two years later to found TVX Home Video. TVX ended up being on the wrong side of the Lara Jade Coton Case, which "has become one of the defining copyright cases for small content creators."
The plot of The Politicians, according to TCM: "Larry Channing (Robert Warner) is a Washington, D. C., procurer whose social secretary, Sandra Dixon (Angela Carnon of The Black Alley Cats [1973 / trailer below, which we looked at briefly in R.I.P. Harry H. Novak Part X: 1973] and Policewomen [1974 / trailer]), an ex-manicurist, keeps him and a number of prominent politicians sexually satisfied. Larry matches two of his girls, Laurie (Neola Graef) and Susan (Dixie Donovan of HG Lewis's Miss Nymphet's Zap-In [1970]), to an Arab sheik, and Karen (Vicki Carbe, aka "Victoria Valentino", Playboy's Playmate of the Month for September 1963, seen above) to Bud Chandler (Vincent Mongol), a prominent politician who is being groomed for a cabinet post. They are shown having sexual intercourse with their clients. Bud falls in love with Karen; and Susan becomes pregnant. When Susan goes to have an abortion, however, she is raped by the abortionists. In addition, Sandra is involved in a lesbian encounter. Sandra leaves town to visit her mentally retarded brother, Dwight (Robert Copple of Criminally Insane [1975 / trailer]), in North Carolina and assists him in masturbating, to make his birthday that much happier."
Trailer to
The Black Alley Cats:
In Great Britain, oddly enough, this movie was often paired with the Doris Wishman anti-classic Double Agent 73 (1974 / trailer), a movie otherwise known, in non-metric system countries, as Deadly Weapons. Harry Reems shows up in that Wishman movie to get smothered.
London's Time Out was moved to write that Naked Are the Cheaters is an "absolutely dire, farcically amateurish non-film about a Washington wheeler-dealer who runs a callgirl service on the side. Possibly stripped at some point of most of whatever rudimentary sex footage it contained; at any rate, tricked out with some incomprehensible flash-cutting, the perfunctoriness of the proceedings is impossible to describe."
If we are to believe Jenny Henderson's book The North Carolina Filmography: Over 2000 Film and Television Works Made in the State, 1905 through 2000 (ISBN 9780786412945), the flick was made in the state where heterosexual children seem to have to worry more about transgender sexual assaults in bathrooms than getting shot at schools or changing weather patterns due to global warming.


Getting into Heaven
(1970, writ. & dir. Edward L. Montoro)

Uschi, credited as "Marie Marceau", in a rare title role. We took a look at it in the 1970 entry of our R.I.P. Harry Novak, Part VII, where we wrote:
"Dunno to what extent Novak had anything to do with this flick when it came out in 1970, but it was on a two-film 'Harry Novak Presents' DVD released by Something Weird (complementing Angels [1976], which is proven to have been Novak production) — and it stars Uschi Digard (as the titular Heaven), so how could we not take a closer look at it?
NSFW Trailer to
Getting into Heaven:
"As far as we can tell, this is one of only two movies that Edward L. Montoro ever directed (the other being The Loser aka Platinum Pussycat aka The Pink Pussycat [1968 / trailer]). But as a film producer and distributor of eurotrash and independent productions via his firm Film Ventures International (FVI), Montoro stood in the shadows for many a classic, remembered and forgotten, including: William Girdler's Grizzly (1976 / German trailer) and Day of the Animals (1977 / trailer — with Leslie Nielson), Stridulum (1979 / trailer), Juan Piquer Simón's Pieces (1982 / trailer) and Los nuevos extraterrestres (1983 / theme), Beyond the Door (1974 / trailer), Don't Go in the House (1979 / trailer), Anthropophagus (1980 / trailer), The Dark (1979 / trailer) and more, more, more.
"Montoro's luck as a successful distributor and producer began to go sour in 1981 when he picked the Italo Jaws (1975 / trailer) rip-off The Last Jaws (1981 / trailer) and eventually lost a court case against Universal; this was followed by a few less than successful releases like Mortuary (1983 / trailer), The House on Sorority Row (1983 / trailer) and the unjustly ignored Night Shadows / Mutant (1984). Finally, following a messy divorce with his wife Joan and illness and a long stay at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, Edward L. Montoro emptied Film Ventures International's accounts of a couple of million dollars and, much like DB Cooper, was never seen again. (A loss, perhaps for the world of B & C & D films, but surely an improvement of his life.)
Trailer to
Night Shadows / Mutant (1984):
"But to get to Getting into Heaven, Trash Film Guru gushes: 'Ah, Uschi. [...] Admittedly, a good number of the flicks she appeared in were pretty dismal, but she could liven up even the most listless celluloid atrocity by just showing up on screen and taking her clothes off. Okay, her Swedish accent, when left un-doctored, was so thick as to be impenetrable, but who really cares? [...] And let's be honest — it's not like every film she was in was terrible. [...] Case in point: old-hand nudie director Edward L. Montoro's 1970 steamy low-budgeter Getting into Heaven. I'm not here to tell you it's some lost classic or anything of the sort, but it is a fun, never-dull slice of skinema that stands apart from other productions of its ilk for, at the very least, being a consistently engaging production that all the principals involved in at least appear to be trying to make as good as it could possibly be. [...] Beyond that there's not a great deal more one needs to know by way of specifics, apart from the fact that every woman in this movie is darn easy on the eyes and more than willing to disrobe at the drop of the hat and stay that way for a good few minutes. [...] The "humor" is all groaningly obvious and more than a touch misogynistic, but [...] there's nothing blatantly anti-female enough going on to rise to the level where it would genuinely bother your conscience.'
"Lastly, One Sheet Index has the plot: 'Heaven (Uschi Digard), Sin (Jennie Lynn) and Karen (Phyllis Stengel) are three wild Hollywood models who want to break into the movies more than anything. Their only hope is a dirty old man, Mr. Salacity (Miles White), producer of films. Salacity has no interest in using the girls except for his own private pleasure. The trio tries every trick in their bag in attempt after attempt to convince Salacity that they are talented ... at everything! A picnic in a secluded grove gives Heaven and Sin their best chance to "persuade" Salacity to hire them. But as much as he enjoys himself, their efforts to become starlets are in vain. Along the way, Heaven gets turned on to Sin with sensual, then hilarious results. As Heaven's boyfriend, Bernie (Scott Cameron), has just about convinced her to marry him and forget the movies, she gets one last wild idea that she feels Salacity cannot resist. In a last final attack the three girls attempt to exhaust Salacity, who has been kidnapped and held prisoner in their bedroom, into submission and a job. However, this marathon "love-in" has just the opposite effect on Salacity and long after all three girls are totally drained he is still ready and willing. Just as Heaven is agreeing to marry Bernie, Salacity has a brainstorm and decides to hire all three girls to star in his new film.'"
Uschi GIF from cinegif.tumblr.com.


Private Arrangement
(1970, dir. Wes Ransome)

In John S. Schuchman's Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Film Entertainment Industry (ISBN-13: 978-0252068508), Private Arrangement is pointed out as an example "of deaf characters in sex-oriented films". (Who is deaf, we dunno.) Director Wes Ransom (aka as Wes Ransome) seems to have made only one other film, 1969's Do Me! Do Me! Do Me! (poster below). Scriptwriter Abner Shaw was a one-shot wonder. Uschi, billed "Euji Swenson" shows up to play "Linda".
The plot, as supplied by the often unreliable Prince Pervo at Something Weird: "The Playpen cruise, which can only be booked by Private Arrangement, offers '70s-style weekend kicks to lonely secretaries Gloria (Lynne Lori), Emily (Sheri Jackson), and Bev (Vanessa Nelson). But this ogiastic yacht party becomes a real bummer when one of them turns up dead. Cracking the case is none too difficult, inasmuch as there's a slavering idiot hunchback Peeping Tom (Gus Bianca) aboard who looks like Mel Brooks mugging in a stocking cap and who's caught red-handed with the naked corpse. Meanwhile, enjoy the cruise... The party kicks off with Sapphic traffic in the grand salon between Gloria and Emily, who appear to be having great fun with their noses in each other's twats. Then Linda […] and Bob (Marland Proctor) screw heartily in the stateroom, affording many classic angles on the ripest melons in the sexploitation field. Bev shows us that she's no slouch at dicktation, and Gloria, her engine revving from her pussy play with Emily, socks it to the Skipper's (Ray Sebastian) yardarm in the cockpit (or whatever you call that part of a yacht where the steering wheel is). And to round out the weekend, there's nude sunbathing on deck, skinny-dipping over the side, an orgy, and, of course, that idiot hunchback who chokes Emily to death. Made by Mitam Productions, a small, sleazy production company who, in a world of small, sleazy production companies, was among the smallest and sleaziest. (They also made that other hunchback-and-hooters classic, the Sexy Shocker Tortured Females [1965 / poster below].)"
The only other person to date (04.12.18) who seems to have felt that Private Arrangement is worth writing about is the great purveyor of porn lor_ who, on 23 November 2010, uploaded the following at the imdb: "The sex scenes are shot MOS, but the audience has to sit through endlessly tedious and talky wraparound footage […]. Lynn Lori stars as Gloria, reading her turgid dialog off of cue cards as Lt. Boris Burke (porn stalwart Roger Gentry) grills her endlessly about a murder case. He wears dark glasses, making it easier for him to look downward and read his own cue cards. […] It's tame, repetitive softcore sex, with the guys getting naked for sunbathing scenes above deck, but keeping covered for the humping. I suspect 1970 audiences expected stronger stuff. […] To create a modicum of plot, Gus Bianca appears as a hunchback with cheap makeup and a creepy do-rag type of head covering. He gets sent to a mental institution at film's end, probably to join erstwhile filmmaker Wes Ransome there. […] In typical SWV fashion, the final frames of the print are shredded. Had this entire surviving print been shredded instead, there would be no loss."


All the Lovin' Kinfolk
(1970, writ & dir John Hayes)

Aka Kin Folk and The Closest of Kin. Uschi shows up twice for a few blinks of the eye in an un-credited appearance, first for "an out-of-nowhere soft-core sex scene in a chicken coop" and then at the end as the one of the gals working at the house of fun.

Director John Hayes had already worked with Uschi in his film The Cut-Throats (1969), which we looked at in Part I: 1968-69. The film's true lead actress, Mady Maguire, as mentioned before, left the sleaze-film biz to earn money in law.
Scene from
All the Lovin' Kinfolk:
The plot, as found at TCM: "Upon graduating from Glen Holler High School in 1933, Cindy (Mady Maguire) decides to leave behind the dingy mountain hamlet and go to live with her married sister Sue (Donna Young of the surreal porn flick The Devil's Garden [1973] & Stephen C. Apostolof's Five Loose Women [1974 / trailer]), whose circumstances she believes to be more comfortable than her own. Cindy's distant cousin Zeb (Jay Scott of Garden of the Dead [1972 / full film]) has decided to go to work at a gas station on the main highway, and they leave Glen time and, to seek new horizons. That afternoon Cindy meets her salesman boyfriend, and they make love in a field, leaving Zeb to stand watch over the salesman's car. After a night at a roadhouse where the cousins make their first contact with the outside world, they reach Cindy's destination. Cindy bids Zeb a cold farewell, but her expectations are shattered when she discovers that Sue lives in a run-down house and serves as little more than a slave to her husband Luke (William Guhl of Kiss of the Tarantula [1976 / trailer] and Grave of the Vampire [1972 / trailer]) and his gang of moonshiners. After fending off Luke's determined advances, Cindy is driven out of the town by the mountain folk, who have been told that she made improper advances toward her sister's husband. Determined to rescue her sister, Cindy goes to work as a prostitute in Madam Rose's (Lynn York) house. Meanwhile, Zeb has also met with disappointment. After arriving at the gas station, he found that his boss had died, leaving Zeb to look after his widow and daughter, Tricia (Ann Ryan). Zeb and Tricia are mutually attracted, but she refuses to have sex with him unless he wears a prophylactic. She describes the device to the ignorant Zeb, but he arrives at the drug store at closing time and, disappointed, visits Rose's house. There he is recognized by Cindy, who becomes jealous when she hears of his attraction to Tricia, and she seduces him. Zeb agrees to help Cindy, on the assumption that she will then leave Rose's house; and the following day they rescue Sue, narrowly escaping their pursuers. Cindy rents an apartment for the three of them, but Zeb, realizing that Cindy plans to continue in her chosen profession, leaves to rejoin Tricia."
At Letterboxd, Matt Lynch says "If you want to see a gross sweaty farmer tease at a young girl's pubic hair with his teeth, have I got the movie for you!" At the imdb, however, Hermit C-27 concentrates on the essentials: "[...] This story of hillbillies makin' hay as indiscriminately as the farm animals is of course almost by definition junk. But this movie does have a redeeming feature —an appearance by the fabulous Uschi Digard. [...] Now, if you know anything about Ms. Digard, you know that even though she's an accomplished linguist, fluent in several languages, her Swedish accent precludes her playing an Appalachian native. So she's seen here as a city lady (of the evening) whom one of the country cousins is lucky enough to have some commerce with. Her scene is brief but it will be the most vivid memory you have of this movie — provided that one sees it."
The advert above for a screening at Cinema 2000 was found at Cinema Treasures; it comes from the 24 November 1972 issue of The Toronto Star.


Dirty Pool
(1970, writ & dir "Ed Stevens")
 
Possibly produced by the productive Ed Wood of porn, Carlos Tobalina (5 Apr 1925 31 March 1989). Could one-shot wonder "Ed Stevens" merely be a pseudonym? Speaking against the rumor that Tobalina was the man behind the flick is the fact that the movie was distributed by those famous East Coast distributers of seventies smut, Distribpix — the poster above was even found at their website. Nevertheless, the film is obviously from the West Coast, and Tobalina used clips from the movie in his 1972 "documentary" Pornography in Hollywood. Uschi's the main babe of the thinly plotted movie, but the equally curvatured Neola Graef (seen below and credited as "Joyce Adams") shows up as well. It can be found online, for example at Tube Porn Classic...
Letterboxd has the "plot": "A husband (Marland Proctor) is being driven crazy by his insatiable wife. It seems that all the time she spends sunbathing has made her a nymphomaniac. A doctor sends over a pair of swingers to 'counsel' the couple." (Uschi, as "Pat Tarqui", plays the insatiable wife cum sun goddess.)
TCM's version of the "plot" differs slightly: "In sunny California, a couple takes a Sunday drive in the country and finds a shady spot in the woods to make love. At the same time, a wealthy married couple sunning themselves by their pool makes love beside the pool and under the water. The first couple sees them, waits until the husband leaves, and then forces the wife into depraved sexual acts. The husband returns, is shocked, and, attracted to the strange woman, takes her into the house and makes love with her. The others soon follow, and the foursome joins in an orgy that leads to a brutal climax of the film." (The description is a pared-down one of the plot as described at One-Sheet Index.)
DVD Drive-In intones: "It's great to see this forgotten Distribpix rarity, but it's definitely one of their lesser catalog titles, probably because it was shot in California. Uschi of course looks amazing in a leopard-skin bikini, almost bursting from the seams, and is photographed lusciously floating nude in the pool! But this is one of those really cheap-looking softcore films filled with not-so-hot sex scenes that eventually become monotonous and draining (no pun intended). There is some interesting, amateurish underwater photography, but this is a standard soft s-and-f film."
Movies Made Me finds the narrative technique of interest: "The story is told through voice-overs by the people we're currently watching... for example, we'll watch Uschi and her husband have sex, and we'll hear what each of them is thinking while they go at it. These voice-overs are accompanied by some beatnik / psychedelic music that seems oddly appropriate for this title, and we even get the occasional poem read by the various people that deal with the scene at hand. It's definitely an interesting way to tell the story, to say the least."
The deliciously attractive Neola Graef, aka Malta, who herself is worthy of a Babes of the Past career review, stopped making films with Female Fever (also featuring Uschi), which was released in 1977 but filmed a good six years earlier. Neola returned to her maiden name, even keeping it after getting married. She's still alive, and is now single, but that's all we're going to say. (Amazing what you can learn on the internet. And odd that she still doesn't have a page at Boobpedia.)


Dr. Christina of Sweden
(1970, dir. "Nick Phillips")

"Watch out, you may be queer and not know it."
Dr. Christina (Linda York)

Like many of Nick Millard's porn films, Dr Christina was filmed without sound and had the voiceover added later, so the tale is told by means of narrated images.
Jason S. Martinko offers a succinct plot description in his book, The XXX Filmography, 1968-1988: "Dr. Christina (Linda York) writes a sex column for a Swedish tabloid. She's sent to Paris, France, to interview young French people about their views on sex. A young couple is happy to show Christina that 'actions speak louder than words'."
Dr. Christina… thinking:
The dude who does Scorethefilm's Movie Blog says, "I know what to expect going into these kinds of pictures — boring sex scenes, lame dialogue and groovy music. Dr. Christina is the only voice you hear and she's essentially narrating her sexy trip to Paris. Most of it is silly but it's sometimes fun. Within 61 minutes, this picture delivers three hardcore sex scenes. The first is between a guy and a girl and the other two are a pair of lesbians (each with a different couple). They consist of the usual excess of kissing and caressing but stopping short of delivering the goods. The final scene features my hot girlfriend, Uschi Digard. I only sat through this to get to her scenes. There's an awful lot of shots of Dr. Christina walking around Paris, talking to herself. Those are actually kind of neat if seeing 43-year-old footage of Paris does anything for you. I dug it [...]."

"I must have been turning into a faggy, lesbian bull dyke."
Dr. Christina (Linda York)

At one point, Dr Christina takes a longer gander at a poster to Alain Robbe-Grillet's arty L'éden et après aka Eden and After (1970), which is reason enough to present a scene from the movie below.
"The Powder of Fear":
In regard to this "foray into more explicit waters" conducted by director Nick Philips aka Nick Millard, Mondo Digital says that the story is "embellished with his typical fetish-oriented touches. Here the protagonist is blonde Swedish journalist 'Dr. Christina' […]. When not busy wandering the boulevards, she watches a male-female couple going at it, then dreams about two women making out, and finally observes a lesbian sex show featuring Uschi Digard. Boots and leather wear figure prominently. Though the first sex scene is unquestionably hardcore, the rest of the film feels like a standard 'almost-but-not-quite' '60s grindhouse film complete with lots of moaning, writhing, and flailing limbs; the uncredited Dr. Christina may be the main character, but she's pretty much obliterated from the screen when Uschi shows up for the big climax, easily the highlight of the film. Though Philips shot this on location, it has a fairly grungy, low-budget veneer all the same — which is probably for the best, given the subject matter."

Follow the link to
Uschi, Part III: 1970, Part II
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