Well, kids, today I have a movie review for you. Not just a single movie review, no sir. A double movie review of a true double feature, the kind you might have found in sleazy drive-ins in the 1970s. The kind of movies you just had to go out of your way to see, before there were video stores or even Cinemax. These are the films of the great Chesty Morgan, the Israeli-born sleaze queen who made a sizeable impression on the U.S. movie market in Deadly Weapons and Double Agent 73.
The two films were both made in the early 1970s by Doris Wishman, a maverick female director who had previously made the thought-provoking sci-fi classic Nude On The Moon and the groundbreaking penis-grafting fantasy The Amazing Transplant. Director Wishman keeps her vision faithful to the sleazy, amateurish quality of her previous work. Both are badly edited and almost impossible to follow in any logical fashion. But then again, they're about breasts, right?
Deadly Weapons has Chesty as a good woman in love with a sleazy gangster-type. But when he's murdered by Deep Throat star Harry Reems and some other ruffians, she takes it on herself to settle the score. This means she has to track them down one at a time, and seduce them before getting revenge. Not being handy with guns, Chesty uses the most powerful weapons she has, her 73-inch breasts, to suffocate the killers. It's padded with early-'70s stock shots of Las Vegas, even if it becomes painfully obvious that the movie wasn't really shot there. That being said, this is the better of the two films.
In the next film, Double Agent 73, she's a secret agent. And no ordinary secret agent, either. In the days before sophisticated digital espionage, she has a camera implanted in one of her massive breasts, and uses it to photograph secret documents. Of course, this means there are endless scenes of her removing her bra and squeezing a giant breast at the camera. There comes a point in every movie review where the reader realizes he's not reading a review of Citizen Kane. That is, unless he is reading a review of Citizen Kane.
But on the other hand, these movies are ultimately kooky and harmless. They're very tame in comparison to anything released today, and the focus is really on nudity as opposed to sex. They have a goofball "anything goes" quality that only so-called "drive-in" movies of the 60s and 70s had. Don't get me wrong, they're bad movies. But they're better than the bad movies you get today. The most significant thing about it is that Chesty Morgan was real. Not just her breasts, which appear to be natural (I have no data on this), but she looked like a normal person. Above the neck, she was plain, even average-looking. This made her more accessible to ordinary-looking guys, the bulk of her fan base. This was a woman you could have, if it was at only after buying her drinks all night and she couldn't see straight anymore. That's why she's so fondly remembered over thirty years later.
These movies had no pretensions. They knew what they were, and they wallowed in it and exploited it. There's an almost zen-like, liberating quality about that, and I wish they still made movies this way.
1 comment:
To the best of my knowledge, "Chesty's" breasts were natural. And a wonderfully impressive pair they were, too. I own both of her Wishman movies on DVD.
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