It's hard to do justice to the Wishman style in words. She began making movies without previous production experience, formal training, or apparently even a grasp of conventional notions of film technique. Her camerawork is haphazard, her editing is eccentric and full of non-sequiturs, and her stories are often wildly improbable and fantastic, with bizarre premises, weird tangents or odd endings, a sort of Ed-Wood-goes-nouvelle vague, with moments that seem to be edging sideways into avant-garde experimentalism.
In front of us are three films from the mid-to-late sixties, Wishman's period of black-and-white roughies. Bad Girls Go To Hell (1965) is a great title and evocative of Wishman's pulpy inspiration. A young married woman (Gigi Darlene) accidentally kills her building superintendent when he attempts to assault her and has to leave home and husband for New York, where she hopes to lose herself in the crowd. Alone and without money, she is taken in and then has to leave a succession of creeps and deviants. She crashes on the couch of a kind and respectful guy (Sam Stewart) who turns out to be a closet abusive alky; she goes on to stay with a woman named Della (Darlene Bennett) who in spite of her kindness and relative stability is a lesbian, and the husband of a married couple with a room to rent tries to have his way with her. Finally she finds a sweet old lady who needs a live-in assistant, but the killing she is trying to escape still threatens to catch up with her. Preposterous but also brilliant in its context, the twist ending makes me expect SCTV's Count Floyd to appear on screen and try to save the situation with his trademark "Woo-ooo-ooo!" The moral to the story seems to be that if you must do housework wearing only a black lace nightie, put on a housecoat before you try to take out the trash.
In a lot of ways, My Brother's Wife (1966) is one of the better showcases of Wishman's parallel-universe approach to making movies. The story itself is a standard pulp-novel tale of a shady character named Frankie (Sam Stewart again), who shows up at the door of his older brother Bob (Bob Oran) and his new bride Mary (June Roberts). Sexually unfulfilled with her new hubby, Mary yearns for the caresses of virile but slimy Frankie, not knowing that he has also looked up old flame Zena (Darlene Bennett), with whom he is cooking up a scheme for rooking Bob and Mary out of their savings and blowing town. A standard B-movie plot really, but the big interest of My Brother's Wife is its spotlight on Wishman's weird approach to editing and camerawork: its tendency, for instance, to show people listening to dialogue spoken off-camera and then cutting to the first speaker, who listens to the other's reply, and then back again. Or there is her predilection for cutaways of random objects as though they had some sort of significance in the story, only they don't: a wastebasket, a shotglass of liquor, a Buddha statuette. This brings up another one of Wishman's visual quirks: her tendency to shoot in really tackily decorated locations, and during this period, in apartments full of pseudo-Oriental decor. There's also an interesting tangent in the story which has only a negligible effect on the plot, the weekend visit of Zena's lesbian cousin, who also happens to be named Della, and who, just to make it even stranger, is played by Darlene's twin sister Dawn in the height of sixties sexploitation-lesbian glory in boots, leather jacket, stirrup pants and a really sticky bouffant.
In concept, the above two movies are in familiar sexploitation territory with their respective roughie and B-movie premises, but 1967's Indecent Desires moves out of that realm into unexplored areas of more improbable and surreal cause and effect. As the film begins, skulking, reclusive pack-rat Zeb (Michael Alaimo, here billed as Michael Lawrence), who spends his time scavenging for interesting cast-offs on the street, finds a child's doll and crackerjack-box ring, and discovers that if he wears the ring and touches the doll, he can magically caress the flesh of attractive blonde Ann (Sharon Kent), a secretary he has been admiring from afar. But when he does, poor Ann can't understand why she feels invisible hands running over her body, and thinks she's losing her mind. Sometimes Zeb is solicitous in his long-distance relationship through the doll (as when an utterly distraught Ann goes down to the harbor with thoughts of jumping in and teeters over the edge, only to be held back by an unseen force, which is Zeb catching the doll from falling from the table it's standing on), but he's also jealous of Ann's blandly handsome boyfriend Tom and doesn't hesitate to take his rage out on the doll, with predictably unsettling results on the other end. The film feels at times like a parable about objectification or a treatment of the "stalker" phenomenon decades before the term was coined, which is interesting from a director who, notwithstanding her status as a woman in a male-dominated field, steadfastly maintained that she was not a feminist.Doris Wishman would go on to work in color in the seventies, and her vision got weirder and wilder with such titles as The Amazing Transplant, The Love Toy, and especially with the pair of films she made starring Chesty Morgan (whose main attraction as an actress can be readily inferred from her name), Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73. The premises became more bizarre, the acting more underplayed, and the art direction -- if one can call it that -- tackier. Those films and others are out there too, but my affection remains with the earlier black-and-white films, in part because black-and-white is so appropriate for sordid, sleazy atmosphere and because of the abundance of familiar faces from the world of east coast skin flicks in the films, Darlene Bennett and June Roberts being foremost among them. These two, along with Sharon Kent, Gigi Darlene and Jackie Richards (the mature brunette with the world-weary aspect who plays Kent's friend and co-worker in Indecent Desires) share the common characteristic of having racked up impressive filmographies for east-coast skin auteurs such as Wishman, Joe Mawra, Barry Mahon, Joe Sarno, and Michael Findlay in the same roughly six or seven-year period before disappearing from films for good in the late sixties. Michael Alaimo appeared as Michael Lawrence in a goodly number of exploitation films during this time, but went on to a fairly busy if not illustrious career in television, mostly in one-off character roles.
Bad Girls Go To Hell, My Brother's Wife and Indecent Desires have all been released on DVD by Something Weird Video, but I saw the first of these on a 5-disc compilation, Girls Gone Bad: The Delinquent Dames Collection from Passport Video.
