Word: lorna
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...memoir "A Youth in Babylon: Confessions of a Trash-Film King" is a marvel of evocative high-comic writing. And stay tuned for the sequel!) So Meyer, deciding it was "time to bust out of the industrial film format," concocted a black-and-white Bible-bustin' tract called "Lorna...
...says it had been suggested by the 1949 Italian neo-realist near-classic "Bitter Rice" - or, more precisely, by the sultry, skirt-hiking image of Silvana Mangano, who made the movie an international hit. "Lorna" had closer affinities to "Tobacco Road" and "God's Little Acre," Erskine Caldwell's novels of the dirt-poor, lubricious South, where the men are mean and the women are willin', where everyone quotes the Bible and nobody follows its Commandments. There isn't much skin in the movie, just a midnight bath in the old crick, but what's there is cherce; for Meyer...
...movie is, I suppose, an expos? of religious fanaticism - a strange agenda to set before his mostly rural, most Southern audiences. Didn't matter: Meyer always poured so much kinetic Kickapoo Joy Juice into his social parodies that few but the prudish could take offense. "Lorna" was not only big at "the ticket wickets," it pleased the rubes, not to mention the movie exhibitors who made money from them. "What a joy to see on a warm romantic Kansas City night," Bev Winter, a Kansas City film broker, wrote to Meyer - "a full drive-in with all those cars shakin...
...Lorna" launched Meyer into a second, artistically abundant mid-'60s phase: black-and-white backwoods melodramas. The films' plot variations on cupidity and stupidity were nearly as inspired as their titles. "Mudhoney"! (A familiarly lurid tale of the drifter, the town bully and the yearning babe, with a supporting role for Maitland.) "Motorpsycho"! (A low-budget "Wild One" - the motorcycle crazies ride mopeds - with many worthy extras: a nice debut turn by Alex Rocco as a man whose wife the gang raped; a cameo by Meyer as the sexist sheriff who snaps, as regards Rocco's wife, "Nothin' happened...
...Meyer, Phase Three: "Vixen" and his other color comedies "Good Morning...and Goodbye," "Common Law Cabin," "Finder Keepers, Lovers Weepers," "Cherry, Harry & Raquel!" These films took the narrative excess and exuberance of the "Lorna"-period movies and lead-footedly revved up the pace, until they were little frenzies of lust and frustration. The playing of the actresses was even more aggressive, of the actors even more perplexed. The humor was foregrounded; now the world could say, for sure, "Oh - he's kidding," allowing uncomplicated enjoyment of the bustling and the busts. "Vixen," the snazziest of this crowd, was Meyer...