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Lust and Flesh

1965

You can think of 1965 and 1966 as the Golden Age of grindhouse, with a couple dozen exploitation movies flying out of studios in New York and the West Coast every week. 

Lust and Flesh (1965) hit all the notes to make it the ideal sonata of the era.  You got your voice-over instead of dialogue, your hard-bitten lesbian, your sexual libertine and your party that had to be staged by someone who never been to a party in his entire life.  And you got your actresses from the vault of obscurity, plus - and this is the reason I grabbed it in the first place - you got Gigi Darlene and Darlene Bennett (at the party, natch).

Two one-shot wonders occupy most of the screen time; they are Georgetta Giles and Maureen Conway.  Georgetta plays the over-sexed wife of the narrator, while Maureen plays one of his several love-interests.  Maureen’s character is supposed to be a fashion model, yessiree despite all the evidence to the contrary. 

Georgetta Giles shows up nekkid here, there and everywhere in the movie - a trio of scenes in the bedroom, on the beach and in the bath - as you expect from someone of her libido.

Maureen Conway’s performance, on the other hand, has some interesting pacing to it.  For most of the movie’s run she is reserved and clothed but then, as her character opens up, she appears suitably undressed in a pair of scenes.  The second of them goes on for several minutes, as the audience benefits from her new-found sexuality.  Good job, Mr. Director.

Grindhouse veteran Marlene Eck also has a trio of scenes, the last two of which have her in the attic with the narrator guy.

 

And then we have the party,

in which Darlene Bennett sits around,



Gigi Darlene does minor league gymnastics,



Marlene Eck dances



and Georgetta Giles leads some sort of Conga line, all of them topless. 

Movie ends with a tragic death because, well, you live with any sort of sexual freedom, you just have to pay the piper, or so the makers of mid-60’s exploitation movies would have us believe.  I figure this was the movie-makers’ way of consoling the audience of grind houses, because sure as shootin’ they were not getting any at home and it must have pissed them off how much everyone in these films was enjoying himself.  So let’s kill someone.  That, at least, is one explanation for a dominant trope in the genre.