Nude Wave

During one week in Detroit recently, such Hollywood spectaculars as The Sand Pebbles, Grand Prix and The Bible rang up grosses of $12,000, $15,000 and $20,000 respectively. Yet the film that outstripped all its box-office competition, with receipts of $28,000, was an unknown sexpotboiler called The Aroused. It is one of the 50 or so low-budget "nudies" that are cranked out each year for the "goon market." Capitalizing on the decline of censorship, these "exploitation films," as their producers refer to them, are now bigger and bawdier than ever.

With their lurid titles--My Bare Lady, Caught in the Act, Thigh Spy, and Love Is a Four-Letter Word--nudies are featured at more than 400 theaters in the U.S. Dallas has five such houses, Boston four, Detroit eleven, Los Angeles twelve and Manhattan 16. The growth of the nudie drive-ins has created a new menace on the highways: near Dallas, one drive-in owner was ordered to build a view-obstructing wall after three passing motorists careened off the road while gawking at the girlies. Estimates of the yearly haul from these ventures in the skin trade run as high as $60 million. One classic nudie, The Immoral Mr. Teas, which cost a mere $24,000 to make, earned over $1,000,000.

The nude wave is almost unbelievably shabby-- abominable acting, inane dialogue, scratchy sound tracks, color that looks as if it were developed in peroxide. Plot is so incidental that old seduction scenes are freely spliced into new films. In many instances, the footage is a third-rate melodrama bought cheaply in Europe and then fleshed out with a few shots of naked girls romping in the grass.

Though the marquees scream about a VOLCANO OF SMOLDERING PASSION!, the view inside is little more than a Playboy peep show, less glossy but just as sexless. Lust is a popeyed man ogling a barmaid's cleavage, virginity a lacquered ex-stripper trying to look like a wide-eyed schoolgirl caught up in the evil ways of the big city. Usually, there are only random glimpses of breasts and bottoms, although lately the nudies have been edging closer to the limits of pornography with a rash of "sadie-massies" that drag in homosexuality, flagellation, voyeurism, lesbianism and assorted orgies. Among some aficionados of the nudies, the subcategories are known as "roughies" (breasts and violence), "ghoulies" (breasts and monsters), "kinkies" (breasts and whips) and, inspired by the 1963 documentary Mondo Cane, "mondos" (breasts around the world).

While the flesh flicks have served as a training ground for a few serious young directors unable to crack the big studios,* they are primarily a haven for the fast-talk, fast-buck artists. One Hollywood nudie producer, Ted Paramore, prides himself on dreaming up such come-on titles as The Girl with Hungry Eyes and Not Tonight, Henry. "Titles are very important in this business," he explains, "because frankly the pictures aren't that different." He even welcomes the censorship attempts of some newspapers when they change the ads for Days of Sin and Nights of Nymphomania to something like Days of Naughtiness and Nights of ?, because "it makes things seem even dirtier in the reader's imagination."

*Most notable nudie graduate is Francis Ford Coppola, who wrote and directed an engaging feature, You're a Big Boy Now, and is currently shooting the $6,000,000 Warner Bros.-Seven Arts production of Finian's Rainbow starring Petula Clark and Fred Astaire.

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