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 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.
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")
Impromptu interview with
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 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.'"
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.
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):
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.
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"
"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".
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.)
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.
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."
