The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill (1966)

The two main centers of American sexploitation film production in the sixties and seventies were New York and Los Angeles, and the films from each city had such distinctive character that I often find it convenient to refer to East Coast and West Coast styles or "schools" of sexploitation. East Coast sexploitation had a gritty, crude, "underground" feel, while the West Coast pictures were usually slicker, more entertainment-oriented and more obviously influenced by Hollywood film. One of the exemplars of the West Coast style was producer David F. Friedman, who came to LA in the mid-sixties after a period of partnership with Herschell Gordon Lewis. He and Lewis came early to nudie movies, making such light and fluffy "nudie-cuties" as The Adventures of Lucky Pierre and Goldilocks and the Three Bares, while also making the first "gore" films that were to define Lewis's career, Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs, as well as a prototype of what would be called the roughie, Scum of the Earth. After they agreed to go their separate ways, Friedman settled in LA where he went into business with Dan Sonney, whose involvement in exploitation movies went back at least to the forties and fifties.

Friedman's first LA film was The Defilers (1965), a slick, competently-made film directed by R. Lee Frost that further defined the roughie genre, which became one of the mainstays of sexploitation film after the initial wave of nudie movies wore out its novelty with audiences. Roughies spiced up the nudity with violence, action, and lurid stories and mature themes like crime, vice and deviance, as well as a stark black-and-white style. The film did well and was praised by his colleagues on both coasts. But Friedman was imaginative and not married to the roughie genre, and for his next film planned a nudie costume picture to be shot in 35mm color.

The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill (1966) had the light-hearted, humorous touch which defined many if not most of Friedman's productions, and was an early example of Friedman's interest in cross-genre hybrids. The costume picture had a long history as an old Hollywood standby and was defined not so much by period authenticity as by a conventional staginess and escapism, and most Americans had grown up on these pictures just as they had grown up on Westerns and other genres, so it was not surprising that someone would hit on the idea of giving the nudies some period flavor.

When Friedman got to work on the picture, the first legitimate American edition of John Cleland's 1749 novel Fanny Hill; or the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure had recently been published by G. P. Putnam's Sons. Today the novel can be read both as the first full-length work of erotic fiction in English, and as an example, alongside the works of Fielding, Richardson and Smollett, of the early English novel. In the novel the eponymous heroine arrives in London a penniless orphan and makes her way as a prostitute and as a kept woman before retiring on a bequest from one of her protectors and reuniting with the man who took her first flower and to whom she has remained emotionally, if not physically, faithful. It's a charming book and surprisingly tame by today's standards, lacking crude language and with a protagonist whose attitude to sexuality is neither prudish nor reckless. It's also a book that isn't actually referred to much by the script: instead it's about the "daughter" of Fanny Hill (no offspring is mentioned in the book) and only took some period inspiration and possibly the idea for one of the sequences from the book, the rest of the script being a figment of Friedman's, writer Jim Markham's and director Peter Perry's imagination: so that the film richly deserved the description in the trailer (also written by Friedman): "After two centuries of suppression: a story that was never told, a manuscript that was never read, a book that was never published became the motion picture that could not be shown."

In the film, "Kissey" Hill (Stacy Walker), Fanny's putative daughter, spends a day entertaining aristocratic clients, seducing her gardener, and engaging in some light-hearted erotic games with a group of young blades before a surprisingly downbeat ending in which she gets her comeuppance from the jealous wife of one of the aristos. Friedman came from a carny and burlesque background and was a great believer in the value of the tease: so there is very little skin shown and the sex scenes consist of series of closeups of hands, feet, flying clothes, and faces, edited with an upbeat sense of pacing.

Director Peter Perry was, according to Friedman, a former acting student from Chicago, and his first credits in exploitation film date from 1956 as writer and associate producer on The Flesh Merchant. His Internet Movie Database listings show a baker's dozen of directorial credits, mostly in nudie-cuties or sexploitation titles, signed with pseudonyms such as A. P. Stootsberry, A. J. Gaylord, and Seymour Tokus, and with a predilection for stagey, fanciful costume pieces. In My Tale is Hot (1964) a nudie-cutie piece starring diminutive burlesque comic "Little" Jack Little as a faithful husband in spite of all the temptations the Devil, in a horned cowl, cape and trident and a lot of makeup, puts in his way, and in which is a fanciful set of Hell, where the Devil is henpecked by a shrill but sexy wife. Three films he did for Friedman's rival, Harry Novak, and his company Boxoffice International, feature a bawdy presentation of a Shakespeare play (The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet, 1969), another devil fantasy set in Biblical times (The Joys of Jezebel, 1970) and the historical burlesque The Notorious Cleopatra (1970), all with fanciful built sets and costuming, with lots of humor and a lively sense of parody (not listed at the IMDB are films for Novak signed by Bethel Buckalew, but according to Novak, actually directed by Perry: films like The Pigkeeper's Daughter and The Dirty Mind of Young Sally). The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill, Perry's first costume adult film, lacks the comedy and entertaining ensemble acting of his later films, and the reviews of this film cited by the IMDB are nearly unanimous in slamming the film. Most of them are a little too snarky for this writer, who clearly sees the wafer-thin plot and the dug-out-of-a-trunk look of the art direction for what they are, but still can enjoy the film, in part because of the excellent work of cameraman Lazslo Kovacs, who would become one of Hollywood's most respected cinematographers, and for the appearance of sexploitation's mystery woman, Stacy Walker.

So the story goes, Walker (nee Barbara Jean Moore) dropped out of college in Texas to go, on a whim, to Los Angeles and was sleeping on a beach at Santa Monica Pier when she was found by Friedman, who had not settled on an actress for the part of Kissey, and who decided to hire her on the spot. A blue-eyed blonde with a strongly sexual presence and a hint of cruelty, she was intensely photogenic and had the potential to be a prolific actress in sexploitation, and might possibly have had a shot at a legitimate film career: Friedman had arranged a meeting for Walker with an executive at Paramount and discovered that Walker had vacated her furnished flat to go back to Texas. Her filmography consisted of just three films, including a short, But Charlie, I Never Played Volleyball, and a black-and-white roughie, A Smell Of Honey, A Swallow Of Brine.

The cast also included Linda Cochrane, a brunette who first worked for Friedman and Lewis in 2000 Maniacs, and then for Friedman in The Defilers. The film also featured James Brand and William Rotsler, who would appear in Perry's The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet. A science fiction writer by trade, Rotsler also directed pictures for Harry Novak, including The Agony of Love, The Girl With Hungry Eyes and A Street of a Thousand Pleasures.

The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill is available on Something Weird Video's 2001 DVD double-feature package with another Friedman-produced costume piece, The Head Mistress, inspired by the tales of Boccaccio and featuring the directorial talents of another member of Friedman's stable, Byron Mabe. This is one of many SWV releases with audio commentary by Friedman, whose gifts as a raconteur and memories of the old days are even worth hearing on the first viewing of the films. The trailer gallery features spots for other period-oriented films such as Barry Mahon's own series of Fanny Hill films (Fanny Hill Meets Lady Chatterley, Fanny Hill Meets Dr. Erotico, and Fanny Hill Meets The Red Baron). Viewers who are disappointed by The Notorious Daughter of Fanny Hill and want to see Perry at his tacky, light-hearted best are directed to another double-feature DVD released in 2002 by Something Weird, The Secret Sex Lives of Romeo and Juliet, which manages to juggle a sexed-up version of Shakespeare's plot with rapid-fire humor and lots-o-girls, like an adult cross of Fractured Fairy Tales and Laugh-In, along with The Notorious Cleopatra.